Turntables on Las Ramblas a Generic Bore

NICKODEMUS (Compiler)

Turntables on Las Ramblas

Wonderwheel Recordings

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False advertising! The title of the new compilation from DJ Nickodemus suggests he’s going to show us how the Catalonians party. Instead it’s just a mix tape of stuff he played on a recent trip to Barcelona, only the last of which actually comes from local artists. The opening track, “Palenque Barcelona” is actually from Colombia’s Los Chicos Altos, whose sweaty, bright brass rhythm section is easily the best thing on the album. Track two, a remix from DJ Vadim of “Flyaway/Mariella” is also catchy, but the rest is as generic as no-name paper products. If this is the future of Hip Hop, House, and Dub, label those genres “days of future past.” Even if I were inclined to drop some Ecstasy and crank up the suds-making machine it would be a hard to get excited about this collection. I’m not and was bored to distraction.

–Rob Weir

Richard Ford's Canada a Quiet Masterpiece

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CANADA (2012)

By Richard Ford

Ecco 97800611692048

* * * *

In chaos theory, the “butterfly effect” is a series of nonlinear occurrences set off by an initial action that would be, by most measures, benign and inconsequential, as in the flapping of a butterfly’s wings that begins a chain of events that end with a devastating hurricane. Richard Ford’s latest novel, Canada is such a book. It takes one decision made by one person and looks at the cyclonic and haphazard consequences that occur in three other lives.

Official history holds that the 1950s were an American golden age in which economic opportunities abounded for World War II vets and the families they started. That story is equal parts true and mythic, though Beverly Parsons buys into the PR behind the American Dream hook, line, and sinker. He’s a man’s man, despite his feminine name–an undereducated lad whose wartime fighter pilot heroism was destined to be his only brush with greatness. He’s a likable lout whom everyone likes, though they quickly tire of him once they see there isn’t much lurking beneath the surface. His charm, though, was good enough to woe and wed the birdlike Neeva, a smart, artistic, and sensitive woman. Let’s just call it an unlikely match on all levels, including the fact that she’s under 5 feet and Bev is a hulk, she’s Jewish and he’s not, and Neeva is temperamentally unsuited for motherhood, though she births twins Dell and Berner shortly after Bev is demobilized.

The butterfly effect begins in 1956, when Dell impulsively chucks his Air Force career to prospect for some of that 1950s economic gold. Four years later the Parsons family is eking out a precarious living in Great Falls, Montana, and most of the family income comes from that oldest of Old West activities: cattle rustling. When Bev gets in over his head, he just as impulsively ropes Neeva into a scheme that’s just as bad as his previous ones. What do a pair of barely adolescents do when their parents are in jail? Unleash the butterfly effect. Dell’s sister, Berner, runs away to avoid falling into the clutches of juvenile authorities and we know about the social upheaval looming on the 1960s horizon. Dell, however, stays behind awaiting instructions from a woman his mother told him to trust.

Canada is Dell’s story and he is our 60-year-old omniscient narrator telling his tale from back to front and back again. As the book’s title suggests, Dell makes his way to Canada, but a part so remote that it makes Great Falls seem like New York City. He ends up under the laissez-faire care of Arthur Reminger in the middle of the big sky wheat belt some 500 miles north of Winnipeg. Reminger is also an ex-pat Yank–think a dust-covered Jay Gatsby. Reminger is a dandy who quotes philosophers, but says nothing of himself. He runs a seedy hotel, a whorehouse, and a hunting business; he also harbors a secret or two (or three). Dell’s only constant companion is a Métis man who might or might not be a cross-dresser. That’s unclear, because this and the mystery Dell reveals are related in the non-judgmental voice of the immature boy he was at the time. Dell also takes us forward in time to discuss the varying paths of his and Berner’s lives–all events of which were set in motion by Bev’s decisions. These too are told in a laconic matter-of-fact way.

Ford, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 novel Independence Day, has established himself as a major force in American literature. He has done it through a decidedly old-fashioned way: with language. Things happen in Canada, but it is not a plot-driven book. Dell’s voice is mostly descriptive and detached, dialogue is sparse, and the things Dell dwells upon are often small details rather than cataclysmic events. Dell, in fact, is something of a fatalist–he longs for things to work out well, but he is more of a leaf on the stream than an engineer seeking to reroute the water’s course. Canada and the lives therein are expansive in the same way that the Saskatchewan wheat fields are expansive. There is a surface sameness, but how well the endless fields of grain and those who live among ripen depends on outside forces–sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy. And, like the butterfly effect, it is often the smallest of things that precipitate the most dramatic results. Canada is a poignant story masterfully told with words that whisper across the pages. --Rob Weir

Star Trek Into Darkness: To Shamelessly Go Where Better Writers Have Gone

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Directed by J. J. Abrams

Paramount, 132 minutes, PG-13

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Star Trek Into Darkness is an early candidate for the most overhyped and disappointing film of 2013. I do not make such a statement lightly. Maybe I’m not a get-a-life Trekkie who speaks Klingon, but I’m enough of a junkie that if a future episode sends the Enterprise off in search on intergalactic kale, I’ll probably go. Star Trek Into Darkness has exciting action sequences, Benedict Cumberbatch, and dazzling special effects, so what’s not to like? The script and the direction for starters.

When Abrams, et al. decided to reboot Star Trek in 2009, they turned to the original series (TOS) and recast it with younger Shatner/Nimoy/Kelley/Doohan/Nichols doppelgangers. Abrams also took us back to the characters’ pre-Star Fleet Academy days, though he certainly didn’t take us back to the cheesy TOS sets of 1969. Although the Enterprise is technically older than any of the various TV series versions of the ship, it’s far more sophisticated. Fine; this is science fiction, not history, so we can forgive a few anachronisms. The Enterprise is a toy of beauty. Now the bad news–director J. J. Abrams has also signed aboard to reboot Star Wars, and Into the Darkness suggests he’s already closer in style to George Lucas than TOS creator Gene Roddenberry. Despite its acclaim, Star Wars bored me in that it was all explosions, interstellar dogfights, and optical tricks. Trek has always been special because, like a soap opera, its characters develop in relationship to one another. Not so much in Star Wars, unless you think there’s depth in a beeping tin can or a metal-encased obsequious British butler. In the new Trek, things blow up–a lot! The non-stop action sequences leave less time for relationships, so what does Abrams do? He steals–shamelessly and ham handedly.

I could go on about the Into the Darkness story arc, but if you’ve seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, you’ve already seen the alternative universe version of Into Darkness, including numerous shot-for-shot remakes and verbatim lifted dialogue. The only switch is that Kirk and Spock reverse roles. It’s all there–immanent destruction at the hands of Khan (Cumberbatch this time), the ship saved when an officer sacrifices his life to crawl inside the reactor core (Kirk instead of Spock), and even the “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” speech. There’s even a stowaway­–young Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), whom TOS fans will recognize as Kirk’s future wife and the architect of Project Genesis. There are four “writers” listed for Into Darkness, but Harve Bennett and Gene Roddenberry’s heirs should sue for theft of intellectual property. Simply flipping roles from Wrath of Khan reminds me of a clueless college frosh who thinks plagiarism is avoided simply by changing a few words.

Is there anything new in Into Darkness? Not much. By now we know that Zachary Quinto is an amazing Spock, that Karl Urban and Simon Pegg can inhabit the roles of Bones and Scotty, and that Chris Pine positively channels Kirk-á la Shatner. (He even has limited range, just like Shatner.) I suppose there are a few changes. First of all, Roddenberry never left threads untied, as Abrams does by forgetting to tell us what Scotty sees when he investigates coordinates given by Khan, or revealing how Spock manages to solicit advice from his older self. (Yes, I know that one is also a recycled plot line that insiders will get, but it’s really there so Abrams can toss in a gratuitous Leonard Nimoy cameo.) The biggest departures are that Spock seems to have swallowed the emotion chip Commander Data so desperately wanted in The Next Generation TV series, and that he wants to have sex with Kirk. We see Spock kissing Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and witness Kirk checking out Carol Marcus, but there’s so much homoerotic longing between Spock and Kirk that one expects to see them buggering in a bulkhead.

Into Darkness is all flash, no substance. Ticket receipts suggest Abrams’ thrill-a-moment pacing is popular, but one should never confuse boffo box office with originality. Nor should one confuse art with artifice, the latter of which is the most appropriate term for what Abrams has done with Star Trek. My fervent hope is that he gets so sucked into Lucas World that he passes on the next Trek film. We can label the current effort, “To boldly go repeatedly where better writers have gone before.” –Rob Weir

The Movie 42 More Schmaltzy than Heroic

 

42 (2013)

Directed by Brian Helgeland

Warner Brothers, 128 minutes, PG-13 (racist language)

* *

Jackie Robinson (1919-72) was a true American hero whose reintegration of Major League Baseball (MLB) was a landmark moment in the struggle for African-American civil rights. To put his achievement in context, Robinson defied prevailing segregation patterns in 1947, a full seven years before the Brown v. the Board of Education decision declared segregated public education unconstitutional, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and seventeen years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act dismantled legal Jim Crow systems. In 1997, MLB retired Jackie Robinson’s jersey number 42 and, when Mariano Rivera retires after the 2013 season, no more MLB players will wear it. Does Jackie Robinson deserve a movie? You bet, but he deserves a better one than 42.

42 isn’t horrible–it’s Hollywood. That, of course, is often just a step or two above horrible, and seldom reaches higher than the lowest common denominator. Moreover, with the exception of boxing, few American sports are very convincing on the screen. In some respect, nearly all baseball films are a variant of The Natural, which is to say they are uniformed representations of what the late Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey.” In that cycle, an unlikely person–a black man in this case–receives a call to adventure, tries to refuse, is convinced not to by a mentor (Brooklyn Dodgers’ General Manager Branch Rickey), and then crosses the “threshold” from the “ordinary” to the “special” world. The hero is tested, bribed, and threatened before he undergoes a symbolic rebirth and embraces his special mission. In the end, he re-crosses the threshold and returns to the ordinary realm.

That’s the story arc in 42, though the bulk of the film centers on Robinson’s (Chadwick Boseman) relationship with Rickey (Harrison Ford), and how Jackie slowly wins the respect of skeptical and (in some cases) racist teammates during the 1947 MLB season. Because it’s Hollywood, numerous factual liberties are taken in the script (penned by director Helgeland). Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan recently cataloged some of the film’s inaccuracies. These could be forgiven, if they had made the film more dramatic and enhanced our appreciation for Robinson. Alas, the film has a lightweight “Gee whiz!” feel, as if Robinson’s achievement was little more than a collective national task necessary to enhance American greatness. Nonsense! Robinson didn’t tread a teleological path; he thumbed his nose at convention and spat in the face of racism. We see the enormity of his accomplishment just once in the film–a scene in which Robinson is being brutally hectored by Phillies manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk). There is name calling elsewhere and allusions of danger, but most of the film is so elegiac it could have been a joint project between Ron Howard and Ken Burns. Add Mark Isham’s cloying soundtrack, Nicole Beharie’s syrupy, puppy-dog eyed take on Rachel Robinson, and Dodger teammates undergoing racial conversion like so many Baptists at a river wash-me-down, and watching 42 is frequently like downing a bowl of Trix with extra sugar.

Luckily, a few good performances save 42 from being a total disaster. Boseman is excellent as Robinson and strikes the right balance between gritty determination, smoldering anger, and inner vulnerability. The word “irascible” is often applied to Rickey and Harrison Ford does a credible job at being a gravely voiced, obstinate moralizer, even if he is a tad too folksy at times. Andre Holland does a fine turn as black sportswriter Wendell Phillips, the man who was Jackie’s road partner during his 1947 trial by fire. A lot of the minor characters are decent, though many of them seem to have been chosen because they look vaguely like someone more famous: Christopher Meloni’s Leo Durocher evokes John Sayles, Beharie looks like Meaghan Good, Holland is reminiscent of a younger Spike Lee, and Tudyk looks like a red-headed less beefy version of Curt Schilling.

The movie stops after 1947, another aspect of Helgeland’s pat directorial and storytelling style. Robinson didn’t really integrate MLB; black players competed until 1889. Nor was integration a done deal after 1947; the Boston Red Sox didn’t integrate until 1959, three years after Jackie retired. For the record, don’t think of Jackie Robinson as a consistent champion of civil rights either; he was a conservative Nixon Republican when he died of a heart attack in 1972. None of this diminishes the heroism of Robinson’s deeds as a racial pioneer. It’s a great story-–a much better one than Helgeland gives us. --Rob Weir

Eden Book 1 is Page-Turning Junk Food

EDEN BOOK 1 (2012)

By David Holley

Misery Loves Company Publishing

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I won’t mince words–Eden Book 1 is an awkward, clunky book, even by the relatively low standards of pulp science fiction. First-time novelist David Holley comes from a background in advertising and graffiti art, both of which influence this book. Like advertising, Holley piggybacks on what is hot rather than substantive. He rides current waves of cynicism through his post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting, and gloms onto contemporary trends such as glamorizing soldier-warriors, engaging in disaster-of-the-day reporting, and sticking zombies into every narrative. Like graffiti art, much of Holley’s intent is internal and enigmatic for those living outside his vision. (Did you ever try to decipher a tagged wall?) For all of that, his book is a page-turner—more accurately a screen-flipper as it’s an e-book­–that one zips through. If you’re looking for a trashy, thrill-a-minute bit of beach reading, this one won’t tax your intellect.

The year is 2022 and the United States has been wiped off the map, weakened by wars against Muslim terrorists, and then leveled by volcanic eruptions and tsunamis off the West Coat. Okay—we already have a problem. Holley simply states the devastation without explaining how ocean waters managed to traverse the Coastal Range, the Sierra Nevadas, and the Rockies! If tsunamis also formed on the Atlantic and caused seas to rise, why does Britain still exist? He needs to explain that because the major protagonists of his book are British, former Special Forces officer Noah Lockhart and his medical researcher wife, Evelyn.

The set up is that the Muslim uprising has just been defeated, but it cost Noah most of his unit. He is burnt out, resigns his commission, and decides to reconnect with Evelyn by taking a four-hour space shuttle flight to New Zealand for some much needed detox time. En route, the shuttle is sabotaged by an onboard terrorist and the shuttle breaks into sections and plummets to earth. The Lockharts are part of a small survivor group that manages to board rafts and make their way to some remote, uninhabited part of the South Island of New Zealand. All of Noah’s survival skills will be put to test as he tries to captain his intrepid band across mountains and ravines and through thick bush to civilization. Other major players include 18-year-old twins Max and Mia, and a Japanese couple, Hiroshi and Luna, whose daughter died in the shuttle’s impact. Did I mention that Mia is clairvoyant, or that Noah just happened to grab all manner of equipment, food, and spices (!) before the shuttle crashed? Good thing about the spices—just the sort of thing one needs when one is sautéing grubs. Noah’s backpack is the equivalent of Captain Kangaroo’s pockets—there always seems to be duct tape, a bit of rope, or some sustaining cashews at just the right moment.

Gilligan’s Island this isn’t. In their quest to survive, our crew will encounter obstacles such as another tsunami, a volcano about to explode, several Maori of questionable character, a pandemic, and, of course, some zombies. The book fails on three basic levels: plot, plausibility, and prose. If you think Dan Brown stretches logic, wait until you wend your way through Holley. His book is stuffed with more coincidences than a sophomore explaining why his research paper isn’t finished. It would be fair to say that the only consistent narrative device at work is convenience. There are also gag-me purple passages throughout the book, including (seriously) references to Noah’s “thick manhood.”

I will not deny that Eden Book 1 is a breezy read with entertaining moments, nor that I soared through it. (I had just finished a far weightier book and was looking for just such a diversion.) The book is offered for $3.99 on Amazon. That’s about $3 too high in my view, but as long as you know this book is not The Road and David Holley is no Cormac McCarthy, you can devour it as you might processed snack food. I don’t regret having read it, but neither will I indulge in forthcoming sequels. –Rob Weir

Making a Hobby (Lobby) or Abusing the First Amendment

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Here is the actual First Amendment, not the one the Christian Taliban claims. I’ve bolded the relevant parts, lest there be any confusion.

Amendment I:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The latest sanctimonious tyrant seeking to use religion to hide its agenda is the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby chain. Hobby Lobby calls itself a “profit-making company… but also a ministry.” Hobby Lobby is seeking exemption from the upcoming federal health care law that requires companies to buy insurance that includes birth control coverage. It argues that such coverage, especially things such as the morning-after pill, violates its religious beliefs and is therefore a First Amendment violation. The  Justice Department has challenged that view.

If you are a fan of freedom of choice, you should be rooting for the Feds, no matter which side of the political spectrum you claim as your own. If Hobby Lobby wins, it will be the morality-based equivalent of the Citizens United decision in that it will define a company as a person. Even more dangerously, it will define a collective (the company) as a single individual, thereby opening Pandora’s box to determine whose voice speaks for that one big collective individual–an oxymoron is ever there was one. (Founder? CEO? CFO? Largest stockholder?)

I’m sure there are those who would argue that owners of a company should be able to do what they wish with their firms. I’d agree–on an individual basis. An owner can, if he wishes, shutter the firm or sell it. If the Hobby Lobby CEO wants to buy an insurance policy without birth control coverage for himself, fine; the First Amendment grants that right. But listen to what Justice Department lawyer Alisa Klein says: “If you make an exemption for the employer, it comes at the expense of the employee.” Klein’s statement reveals the absurdity of the lawsuit. Hobby Lobby isn’t some mom-and-pop store selling model airplanes to preadolescent boys; it’s a chain of 500 stores in 41 states with 13,000 employees. 

Klein raises an important point. What about “the people” mentioned in the First Amendment? And what do we mean by a “company?” Is it one or two puffed up evangelists in Oklahoma, or is it also the firm’s “people” in the form of its 13,000 employees, its wholesalers, its investors, and its customers? Hobby Lobby claims to be a “biblically founded business.” Yeah, so what? It does business in the public sphere where it must conform to all manner of public mandates such as labor laws, safety codes, building inspection laws, and utility restrictions. Moreover, because it’s a profit-making firm, it has no grounds to claim religion-based tax exemptions. (Remember–the Supreme Court has already ruled that health care mandates are a form of taxation.) I suspect the ulterior motive is that Hobby Lobby is part of the “Obamacare” Fear Squad seeking to undermine reform so that it can foist cheaper but inferior health insurance plans on employees.   

I could be wrong about that last sentence, but true religious freedom is where the rubber meets the road for me. If you must, let’s take it back to the individual level. Count me among those that are fed up with people using Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, or anyone else to tell me what moral decisions I should make. The First Amendment allows you to make decisions for you, but the moment you tell me what I must believe, there is but one path to compelling me to comply: have Congress pass a law that privileges that viewpoint. If you think my use of the term “Christian Taliban” in the lead is harsh, I would reply that there’s not an iota of moral or substantive difference between a Christian telling Americans what they can do and the Taliban imposing Sharia law in Afghan tribal regions under its control. What’s the moral difference between telling a woman she must play Russian roulette with her body, or telling her she must wear a chador?

To use a line I’ve used before, I’m not against religion, but I wish to reserve the right to be against your religion. I’m also against companies acting tyrannically and hiding behind the First Amendment when they do so. And what else other than tyranny should we call foisting your morality upon 13,000 employees?

If you agree, here’s a useful first step. Contact Hobby Lobby Customer Service and tell them you are an ex-customer until they change their policy. Here’s the link: http://www.hobbylobby.com/customer_service/customer_service.cfm

Renoir a Luminous (though flawed) Triad

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RENOIR (2102)

Directed by Gilles Bourdes

Fidélité Films, 111minutes, Rated R (extensive nudity), in French with subtitles

* * *

Renoir centers on French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, though the movie is really a triad involving him, his final model, Andrée, and his middle son Jean. The year is 1913, and though Renoir is an acknowledged master and the financially secure master of a villa and a private atelier on the Côte d’Azur, his world is slowly crumbling. His wife has just died, his two eldest sons are fighting the Germans, and he has rheumatoid arthritis that’s so bad that he’s chair-bound and must have his fingers bound by strips of linen to keep them straight enough to draw or paint. Even worse, he is uninspired. His narrowing world consists of spectacular sea views, a house full of female servants (most of them former models), and a mischievous twelve-year-old son, Coco, whom he sired when he was 61. It’s hard to tell who is more bored and cranky, the old man or Coco.

Just as things seemed hopeless, young Andrée shows up at the gates, having heard that Renoir needed a model. She would beome the old man’s final great inspiration, whom would repeatedly paint until his death in 1919. Andrée (Christa Theret) is a head-turner whose luminous flesh makes Renoir think deeply of his own wrecked body; she also attracts considerable attention from Jean, when he returns home to convalesce from a war wound that cost him two inches of bone and left him with a lifelong limp. Thus Andrée becomes the object of desire of all the males of the Renoir household–the painter longing for lost youth, Jean who is besot with a combination of bedazzlement and lust, and Coco whose on-the-cusp of adolescent hormones are stirred. What unfolds is, needless to say, a complicated set of relationships.

The film also develops three subthemes: beauty and horror, decay and rebirth, and pride versus wisdom. Andrée’s stunning body and the tranquility of the French coast stand in marked contrast to the horrors of World War I, as seen in disfigured vets along the roadside and embodied in Jean’s bone-exposed wound. We see decay and rebirth in several forms, most notably in how Renoir’s arthritis-deformed body and the passing of impressionism contrast to the sun-bathed youth of Andrée and Jean, and in Jean’s screening of silent films in the family parlor. (In his postwar life he became one of the greatest movie directors of all time. Andrée became his first wife and starred in several films under the name Catherine Hessling.) We also see the struggle between vain pride and wisdom in scenes in which Renoir tries to convince Jean not to return to war because of its utter stupidity and Jean stubbornly defends camaraderie to his father and the war itself to a rapacious war profiteer. (We see it also in some of Andrée’s tantrums and foolish decisions.)

As befits a film with Renoir at its center, director Bourdes bathes the screen with painterly scenes. One, of a paintbrush being dipped into a jar of clear water, is ten seconds of absolute beauty, even though it’s a heavy-handed bit of Freudian symbolism with the stiff brush representing the virility of youth and the semen-like paint swirls the ebbing of Renoir’s own. There is another of soldiers on R & R floating on the blue waters of the Mediterranean, their arms akimbo, and shot and lighted from below–as if they were already the corpses they were destined to become in the trenches. (And check out a scene in which headstrong Coco blows purple paint pigment over Andrée’s sleeping nude body.)

The cinematography and two of the central performances are the strongest part of the film. Michel Bouquet is sublime as Renoir. He not only looks the part, but is also a master at conveying the pain of Renoir’s infirmities, his barely contained rage that he has to cope with them, and his headstrong determination to work and capture beauty, no matter the physical toll it exacts. Christa Theret is–dare I say it–a work of art. At one point Renoir remarks that that Titian would have given anything to paint her breasts. I can’t think of an artist who wouldn’t! But she also shows emotional range to match her physical attributes, playing Andrée as self confident, arrogant, impulsive, and reckless, but also as vulnerable, sympathetic, and naïve. Less successful is Vincent Rottiers as Jean, who is too buttoned down. Other than actually watching movies, we get little sense of the artistic vision one associates with Jean Renoir, and we see no hint of the sort of critical analysis that led him to make Grand Illusion in 1937, considered one of the greatest antiwar films ever made.

Those looking for historical accuracy will also be disappointed with some of the script’s liberties. Andrée, for example, was not a referral from Renoir’s wife before she died; Henri Matisse, who thought her more Renoir’s ideal model than his, sent her. In part, that’s because she was a tad fleshier than the nubile Theret. She was also just 13 when she first doffed her clothes for Renoir; not surprisingly, no modern director wants to touch that! Film historians will also pick up that certain works were out of their time period. Most non-scholars, though, will find the film’s pacing languorous in places. One could justify this as appropriate for the subject and its locale, though if one is going to take liberties with basic facts, why not telescope time a bit as well? Still, Renoir is well worth the time. We can appreciate his artistic vision, and we can certainly appreciate his fixation on youthful beauty. You may feel like a voyeur for a while, but you’ll get over it!

--Rob Weir