Nora Jane Struthers Takes Us Back to Old Country

NORA JANE STRUTHERS & THE PARTY LINE

Country Carnival Pack

Norajanestruthers.com

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Are you sick of Country music that sounds like that slick 1980s pop-rock genre called “New Country?” Are you ready for some Old Country? The kind where pedal steel wails, voices keen, and fiddles fly during the breakouts? Check out the latest EP from the angelic Nora Jane Struthers, who might just have the most gorgeous voice since Lori McKenna broke through. Country Pack is a sampler from her 2013 release Carnival with a few other tracks thrown in; including her killer cover of “Till I Kissed You,” an Everly Brothers classic. It’s typical of Struthers’ approach­--a vintage piece or rockabilly, complete with strong walking bass lines from Brian Duncan and gorgeous close harmony singing with Joe Overton. The latter also plays banjo, as we hear on "Party Line," the song for which the band is named. Overton also hews more to tradition than to innovation. Not that there’s anything wrong with Bela Fleck-like artistic improv, but if you want to induce the feeling of coal dust Appalachia, Overton’s is the better musical frame.

I have read that Ms. Struthers is a fan of vintage clothing as well as retro music. It is, of course, a risk to turn back the clock, but Struthers and her band are not a Country version of Sha Na Na. Quite the opposite. Her Appalachian-style tunes sound stump-water genuine, her bluegrass selections evoke backwoods creeks, and her honky-tonk conjures the smell of stale beer rather than overpriced Chardonnay. On "Carnival" we rekindle the sense of wonderment from a country fair and that whirl of energy we associate with simpler times. This is Country-folk music that’s about love gone wrong, hope, hard times, simple things, the road, and the cabin. "Must Have Been Out of Mind" feels like what you'd get if you crossed heartbreak Country with gospel music.  Each track manages to be complex musically without overwhelming Struthers’ voice or resorting to studio chicanery. Loved it! –Rob Weir

Check this track on YouTube.

Another Conjob Conflab over Con-flag

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I waited to comment on a Washington Post story from August concerning a band of Virginia rednecks causing still another conflab over one of the biggest con jobs of all time: the so-called Confederate flag–though it's actually no such thing. The Virginia Flaggers hoisted a 30' by 22' Confederate battle flag along a busy Virginia highway. They call themselves "activists," though a different word beginning with "a" comes to mind.

Did I wait because I was too angry? Because the issue is too delicate? Because I didn't wanted to offend people from the South? Nope. I waited because this is what journalists call an "evergreen" story–one you can run any old time because it's always ripe. There's never a shortage of racists who wave the Stars and Bars and claim it's about Southern pride and has nothing to do with race. They know damn well they're being provocative, so they hide behind an artificial heritage hedge, and play wounded when anyone calls them out.  

I'll give the Virginia Flaggers grudging credit for riding the Zeitgeist Hogwash Loader. One of their spokesmen, with a Visine-aided tear in his eye, spoke of a broken heart as he considered that unknown, unburied soldiers might be lying on the very site upon which the flag is raised. One might note that's an appropriate fate for traitors, but I'd rather address historical ignorance.  

I sometimes see Con-flag T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: "If this shirt offends you you need a history lesson." Sorry, but if you wear such a shirt, you're the one in need of a history lesson. (You also need a grammar lesson to brush up on comma usage.) The first Confederate flag was a single white star against a field of blue, known in parlance and song as the "Bonnie Blue Flag." The one called the "Stars and Bars" wasn't adopted until May of 1863 and it wasn't the one "heritage" abusers call the "Stars and Bars." The first Confederate States of America bannerol looked like the U.S. flag, albeit with fewer stars and just three broad stripes of red, white, and red. The design today's good old boys love was actually the battle flag of the Army of Tennessee or, in square form, the Army of Northern Virginia. In 1863, it made its way onto the official flag on one of the uglier designs in flag history: an undersized perversion of Scotland's St. Andrew's Cross on a white background. It looked like an envelop stamped on the wrong side.  

Once the Civil War war ended–a struggle to preserve the Union and end slavery, by the way, not malarkey over state's rights, the tariff, or Northern aggression–all the flags were closeted away. Occasionally they came out for Civil War reunions, but they didn't fly over state capitols until later. They came out again when Southerners fought and (eventually) lost another war–the one against civil rights. Defenders can cry "heritage" until the kudzu comes home, but that shameful blue and red rag is indeed  a racist symbol.  

As with most heritage claims, it's important to ask when a symbol becomes "heritage" and who is pushing that agenda. The second part is easy: white groups such as the Sons of the Confederacy and the United Daughters of the Confederacy pedaled a load of ideological hooey known as the Lost Cause during Reconstruction (1866-1876) that sought to transform treason into a noble quest. Alas, they were somewhat successful. Once Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow era began, it was okay to be racist again. In 1894, Mississippi added the battle flag to its state flag because the white folks in the blackest state in the Union didn't want black folks doing radical stuff like voting, holding political office, or thinking they might be first-class citizens. Not to be outdone, Alabama modified its state banner to allude to the battle flag in 1895–just in time for the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 that shamefully gave the stamp of constitutionality to segregation. Florida altered its flag in 1900.

2003 in GA

Lest you think this was just the times, consider what happened when the times they were a changing. Southern Dixiecrats throughout the South dusted off the battle flag during the 1950s for the sole purpose of symbolizing their opposition to civil rights. Georgia put the starry cross on its flag in 1956! Think Brown v. the Board of Education or the rising civil rights movement may have had anything to do with that? When Governor Zell Miller tried to alter the design in 1993, the legislature voted him down. When those white peachy Georgians finally altered their flag in 2003, they sewed the controversy right back into it.

Most egregious of all, South Carolina waited until 1962 to start flying the self-proclaimed Rebel flag from its capitol dome. I'm sure that decision had nothing to do with the sit-down movement or the Freedom Rides, right? Know when it came down? In 2000, and only then because a four-year boycott knocked the wind out of the tourist industry. It still flies beside a monument to the Confederate war dead on the capitol grounds in Columbia. Austin has three monuments to the Confederacy outside its state capitol.

Everywhere the Stars and Bars flies it causes uproar, whether it's in a dorm room at Harvard (1991) or if you color it yellow and wave it a LSU football games every other autumn Saturday. Each time decent people get upset, cowards cry "heritage" because they lack the guts to proclaim their racism. Does this flag offend me? Yes it does. And those who fly it need a life and a history lesson. I'd settle for a one-way ticket to Syria.

Gallagher's Farewell to Comedy?

I Am Who I Pretend to Be

Gallagher

Uproar Entertainment 3937

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Remember Gallagher? The long-haired guy who dressed like a cross between a mime and an audition for "Where's Waldo?" The dude who used to smash watermelons with a sledgehammer? Gallagher was ubiquitous in the 1980s and early 1990s, including on Showtime and Comedy Central. Then his star faded when he his act took turns some deemed racist, homophobic, and nationalistic. For the record, some of his jokes could be viewed as sexist, crude, irreligious, and mean to people with disabilities. Gallagher might be the Southern rightwing-redneck-cracker his critics make him out to be for all I know, but I've never felt that that Political Correctness had any place in comedy. Let's face it, if nobody is insulted–even if a joke is self-deprecating–there is no comedy. If your nose goes easily out of joint, stay out of comedy clubs. Tell me that Richard Pryor wasn't also racist. Did you ever hear the recently departed Joan Rivers light into a person who heckled her for being insensitive?  Comedians are supposed to make us uncomfortable. The real question is whether or not the shtick is funny.  

Funny or not? The jury has always been out on Leo Gallagher, 68, and now we're going to have some time to assess him. I Am Who I Pretend to Be looks like to be Gallagher's swan song. It's a May 2014 live performance recorded at Sacramento's Ice House Comedy Club. He has subsequently suffered his third heart attack and has announced that his health won't allow him to tour any more. His latest (last?) album is a mishmash of new routines, selected classic jokes, musings on life's absurdities, and some poking around in the audience in search of cheap laughs. That is to say, it's similar to what he's been doing for decades. One also suspects that the title is also a backhanded slap at his brother Ron, who appropriated a lot of older brother's act.

Gallagher's shtick can best be described as uneven. Like a lot of comics, he is at his best when he takes logic and stretches it to its social extremes. Why, he ponders, do new socks come with little plastic hangers when no one hangs up their socks? If there is extraterrestrial life, why haven't they contacted us? Gallagher suggests it's because "they can smell stupid" and fly right on by. Don't get him started on sporks, the presence of French in the English language, or people who refuse to look at evidence. Other bits are simply dated. There are gems hiding amidst dross in his observations of the battle of the sexes, the dross mostly being social views about 30m years out of date. He has a routine about using handicapped bathrooms that isn't as offensive as it is sophomoric. Throughout the concert he plays the crank, sometimes with hilarious results and sometimes in the ways that make you want to leave him to wallow in his own irritability.   

Gallagher was reportedly very upset when Comedy Central rated him just the 100^th greatest stand-up comic of all-time. On all such lists there are weird choices. Does anyone find Bobcat Goldthwait (#61) Bernie Mac (#72), or Andrew Dice Clay (#95) funny? But let's be honest– Leo Gallagher was always a second-tier guy, as the recent deaths of Rivers and Robin Williams so poignantly remind us. I don't think it was Gallagher's bad boy antics that pushed him down the ranks so much as the fact that his initial rise was a zeitgeist thing. Smashing things appealed to a generation that used to say, "tear down the walls" and mean it. His anarchic high-octane energy resonated with Baby Boomers when they were still in their 30s and 40s. When Gallagher's energy flagged, the zeitgeist shifted, and running across the stage yielded to stand-up, some people were offended by what they heard and others simply grew tired of same old/same old.

Is Gallagher's swan song worth caring about? I'll give it a gentleman's B-. It has some very sharp and funny moments, but overall it does not sparkle with transcendent wit, cleverness, or brilliance. Alas, it's also more rant than frenetic anarchy.—Rob Weir

The Movie Labor Day Will Make You Want to Go to Work

LABOR DAY (2013)

Directed by Jason Reitman

Paramount, 111 minutes, PG-13

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I'm such a public servant that I waited until after Labor Day to inflict this bologna sandwich of a film upon you. Nobody should ruin a holiday weekend by watching this piece of detritus. In fact, you should avoid it even a slow Tuesday. This is a very bad movie–one that's too pretentious to be camp and too inept to be considered much of anything else.

Its hook–more like a windup right cross you see coming from a mile away–is an unlikely (impossible?) triad between escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin); a psychologically damaged divorcee, Adele (Kate Winslet); and her obedient 13-year-old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) who, like all thirteen-year-olds, just wants his mom to be happy. (Do 13-year-olds even admit that they have parents?) The film is set in 1987, a date apparently pulled from a hat. A chance encounter inside a discount store between Frank and Henry leads to a family napping. (What? Nobody thought of screaming for help in a crowded store?) The wounded Frank begs Adele and Henry to let him hole up for a few days until he's strong enough to flee. He's very polite, charming, a great cook, and hunky so, of course, they trust him. I mean, who wouldn't feel secure around a convicted murderer with Josh Brolin's eyes? Within 24 hours, Henry is smitten, Adele is aroused, and everyone is free to come and go without restraint. Because it's a holiday weekend and no trains that Frank can hop are running on the local tracks, the three are stuck with each other for five days. (Odd. I thought there were usually extra trains over holidays. Nor did I realize that everything shut down for five days because of Labor Day. I also thought long weekends were three days long.) A new family unit emerges before our eyes, the only inconvenience being that police cars keep patrolling the neighborhood in search of Frank. That could happen, right?

Is your credulity stretched yet? Wait for it. Adele's neuroses are so severe that her house is falling apart, so Frank spends his days fixing up the old homestead. In addition to being a great cook he's also a mason, a carpenter, a floor washer, a plumber, and pretty handy at fixing shingles. The guy who is too weak to go on the lam lifts rocks, swings a mean hammer, and spends a lot of time outside on a ladder, the roof, and the porch–despite all those police cars and a street full of neighbors. There's a lame explanation for all of this. If you buy it, you'll probably also believe that women fall in love when a man makes a peach pie. Yes, peach pie is also a plot device–device being the key word. This film has it all–nosy neighbors, a too-helpful local cop, a Goth girl interested in Henry, a weak-kneed biological father, flash-backs that explain how Frank ended up in jail, a flash forward to an adult Henry (Tobey Maguire in a cameo), and even an implausible attempt to run away as a family to Prince Edward Island. Why Prince Edward Island? Why not? It makes about as much sense as anything else in a film riddled with gaffes, clichés, and more holes than a tweed jacket at a moth picnic.

This film even managed to tick me off on a personal level. Much of it was filmed in nearby Shelburne Falls. For reasons that have to do with offering tax avoidance candy to filmmakers, Western Massachusetts is occasionally a location site. Aside from part of The Ciderhouse Rules (1999) though, nobody has made a watchable film emanating from this region since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Labor Day made me want to march on Boston and demand a rebate on my taxes. –Rob Weir

Jodorowsky's Dune: Art or Insanity?

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JODOROWSKY'S DUNE (2014)

Directed by Frank Pavich

Sony Classics, 90 minutes, PG-13

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The poet Arthur Rimbaud is credited with the line "There is a thin line between insanity and genius. I have erased this line." Frank Herbert's 1975 novel Dune is one of the most beloved science-fiction works of the 20^th-century. Long before "Star Wars," Herbert created intergalactic cultures and conflicts that involved fictive leaps of imagination that veered beyond normal ways of seeing and thinking. The planet Dune was a waterless terrain inhabited by giant sand worms. Humanoid life depended upon still suits to recycle bodily fluids and sustain life. Herbert's sprawling book was not the easiest read, but it was certainly a fascinating one. It hit the market just as just as the psychedelic 60s had crested. In many ways, reading Herbert was like an LSD trip in words. Filmmaker, artist, playwright, and musician Alejandro Jodorowsky certainly thought so.

Jodorowsky was born in Chile in 1929 and was never what anyone would call a normal child.  From an early age, Jodorowsy demonstrated a penchant for mysticism, spiritualism, and surrealism. In fact, he was among the last generation of Surrealists. It was hardly surprising that Jodorowsky, by then in his 40s, was attracted to the offbeat, swirling, tie-dyed weirdness of the 60s. He made several films that made Andy Warhol seem pedestrian. The closest thing to him today would be Terry Gilliam, but Gilliam seems a Boy Scout by comparison. Also not surprising, not many movie viewers had the slightest idea what was going on in Jodorowsky's films. Who better to tackle Frank Herbert's Dune?

Your first response might be: just about anyone else! As Frank Pavich's fascinating documentary suggests, however, maybe Jodorowsky was exactly the man for the task. Or maybe not. His Dune never got made, though it had everything except rolling cameras. We are taken inside Jodorowsky's exceedingly weird and wildly creative mind. His ideas were so adventurous that they often bore little resemblance to reality. Who would listen to such an offbeat character? For starters, some of the finest film set and storyboard designers of the day: Dan O'Bannon, Moebius, H. R. Giger, Chris Foss…  And it got better. Pink Floyd was interested in doing the soundtrack, Orson Welles had agreed to be in the film, and none other than Salvador Dali had agreed to appear as the Master of the Universe. The collaboration between unorthodox minds yielded a gorgeous artifact: a massive perfect-bound tome of all of the storyboards, dialogue, and narrative arc necessary to bring Dune to life. It was sent out to myriad producers and potential backers. Just one problem: convincing Hollywood players that Jodorowsky was the man to make this film. They thought he was nuts. You know the rest–in 1984, David Lynch directed Dune. It was one of the worst bombs in Hollywood history.

Pavich raises the question of what would have happened if Jodorowsky had made Dune. Would it have been a Terry Gilliamesque train wreck, or art for the ages? Of course, it would not have been hard to make a better film than Lynch's, but the documentary is appropriately ambiguous as to whether Jodorowsky's vision was simply ahead of its time, or one unlikely to exist in any time. The documentary is infinitely more interesting than Lynch's movie––including interviews with those were still around to comment upon Jodorowsky's filmic vision, including Jodorowsky himself who is just as odd now as he was 30 years ago. It probably would not surprise you that others render a split decision between insanity and genius.

The question of whether not such vision can find any niche is actually answered. At age 85, Jodorowsky has found an outlet for intergalactic musings and other out-of-this-world thinking–he produces graphic novels. You should watch this documentary even if you have never read Frank Herbert's novel. From time to time I see bumper stickers with the probing question "Why be normal?" Alejandro Jodorowsky has spent his life erasing the line between sanity and genius. Watching this film may give you permission to do the same.—Rob Weir

The Interestings: Good, but not Great

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THE INTERESTINGS  (2013)

Meg Wolitzer

Riverhead Books, 480 pages, 978-159488399

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Entertainment Weekly Magazine proclaimed The Interestings one of the best novels of 2013. That's quite an exaggeration in a year in which its list did not include The Goldfinch, which just happened to win the Pulitzer Prize! But one can certainly understand why the editors of a pop culture magazine would like it. The novel's major characters were born in 1960, which technically makes them Baby Boomers, but these are kids for whom the mythical 60s were passé before they got out of grade school. They talk about the 60s, but as parrots mouthing lines from their parents and TV. In actuality, their blossoming values owe more to the Stoicism-meets-pragmatism-and-materialism of the emerging generation. In fact, you might want to think of the last half of The Interestings as Doug Coupland's Generation X grown up–a bit like some of those on recent EW boards.

The Interestings opens in 1974, when Jules Jacobson finds herself at the Spirit of the Woods summer camp. She's a gawky, frizzy-haired, Jewish middle-class kid amidst the spawn of the rich and would be the proverbial fish out of water if she had the faintest clue of who she was in the first place. Her forays among the rich and beautiful convince her that she wants to escape the bourgeois 'burbs but as projectiles go, she's more sponge than skyrocket. At the camp, she hangs out with five others above her socially: Jonah Bay, the son of a famous folksinger; Ash and Goodwin Wolf, well-heeled New Yorkers; Cathy Kiplinger, who yearns to be a dancer; and Ethan Figman, an imaginative but dorky-looking guy who lives in a dream world of his own invention and illustration. Jules gets by with snark and obeisance, the six dub themselves The Interestings, and they revel in pretensions of their own superiority whilst sipping vodka and Tang cocktails. Amidst the solipsism, Jules and Ash become best friends.

The book follows the six across the decades and against a (stereotypical) backdrop of the cultural markers: cults, women's liberation, Nixon's resignation, New York City's descent into near-bankruptcy, the Yuppie greed of the Reagan years, MTV, AIDS, TED-like conferences…. Personal journeys evoke the age-old question of whether it is better to flameout in youth, or to suffer the disappointments of adult life. Jules dreamed of becoming a comic actress, but instead became a psychologist married to the steady but average Dennis and wonders if she ever had any aptitude for much of anything. Cathy never became a dancer, the gifted Jonah gave up music, and the hunky Goodman's only talent was for being a jerk. There's also the frustrating question of proven soulmates who know they cannot be together, as in the case of Jules and Ethan. Ethan has become fabulously successful and rich–his boyhood fantasies converted into Matt Groening-like cartoon, TV, and film franchises. He and Ash are married and she is a successful feminist playwright. They are also best friends with Jules and Dennis, but there is an enormous wealth gap between them, which leads Jules to realize that it has always been such. An attempt of Jules and Dennis to turn back the clock is particularly poignant because we know what they do not–you can never go home again.

This is a book that probes whether or not the identities we show others are reinvention, subterfuge, or charlatanism. It is also about dreams and frustrations, social class and assumed privileges. Many reviewers, like those of Entertainment Weekly, have given it more gravitas than it deserves. Wolitzer's characters are well developed and their back stories keep our interest, but there simply aren't many layers to either. Similarly, Wolitzer's peeks into American society feel more like contrivance than relevance. The book is also relentlessly New York in its outlook–a bit like a Woody Allen script with more believable dialogue. Like an Allen movie, The Interestings is filled with delicious moments and vignettes, but its characters are hard to admire or love. They are the sorts with which we sometimes identify, but just as often want to smack with a plank. I suppose this gives the book an air of verisimilitude, so I give this book a qualified recommendation. It is a diverting read that has occasional insight, but don't buy into the hype. –Rob Weir

Ginger Baker: Jazz in Semi-Retirement

GINGER BAKER

Why? A Sampler

Show of hands—who remembers Cream? If you do, you'll probably also recall that Ginger Baker was the drummer backing Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. Baker was so identified with Cream and Blind Faith that few know that his first love was American jazz, not rock and roll. Baker is now 75 and lives in South Africa, but he's still playing music. He even hits the road occasionally, though it's almost always with the quartet Jazz Confusion. If the three-song sampler I recently received is any indication, there's plenty of verve and energy left in Baker's sticks.

The other members of Jazz Confusion are Pee Wee Ellis on saxophone, Alec Dankworth on bass, and Abass Dodo on African hand percussion. I am simply not qualified to judge the merits of Jazz Confusion or Baker's role in it. I have never played or listened to much jazz and, aside from a brief fascination with Buddy Rich, know next to nothing about jazz drummers. I can tell you that there's a lot of percussion on the sampler, including several Baker solos. The three tunes I sampled are in the bebop tradition. The tunes are thus conversations between the musicians with improv breakouts that Baker anchors with steady beats. Ellis–who has backed both James Brown and Van Morrison–is a marvel who draws so much inspiration from John Coltrane that you can be a jazz ignoramus and know that much. But make no mistake, this is exploratory jazz, even when the quartet interprets material such as "AikoBiaye," a Nigerian folk song.

Jazz fans should check out what Baker is up to these days. Those of you looking for "Sunshine of Your Love" should steer clear. "Why?" is the closest thing to rock on the sampler–it has gritty bass lines and pop hooks–but even it veers into the stratosphere. If you don't like this sort of music, Baker couldn't care less. On the other hand, I'd like to hear from those of you who like and understand jazz. This isn't my cup of tea, but I could be convinced to sip some more.  –Rob Weir