The Red Headed Indian a Talent Worth watching

THE REDHEADED INDIAN

Honey (2014)

Self Release (available from Noisetrade.com)

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Lots of young musicians leave home and end up in Nashville. Most end up either making the reverse journey or deciding to downsize their careers in the name of something more probable than the seductive notion of headlining at the Ryman Auditorium. If the Red Headed Indian–actually Florida native Caroline Kingsbury–has to retreat, it won't be because she lacks the chops to make the Ryman ring. Her six-track EP Honey showcases a young voice that's surely more memorable than most.

Kingsbury counts Joy Williams (The Civil Wars) and Ray LaMontagne among her influences, two pretty good role models. You can certainly hear analogous LaMontagne housebroken-but-also-heartbroken themes in Kingsbury's songs and, like Williams, hers is a voice that's as fragile as Limoges cup one moment and like a bar of iron the next. Its qualities reminded me quite a bit of Lori McKenna with more twang. There are, of course, loads of great voices out there but three things make Kingsbury stand out: her sense of phrasing, her ability to build a song, and her cross-genre facilities. My favorite track was "January." It has memorable lines–January is a lovely dame/She sparkles the future of heartbreak and pain–and Kingsbury punctuates them to give the composition a syncopated feel even when parts of it are crooned on the offbeat. The effect is that the performance feels simultaneously sweet and edgy. "From Colorado" is a clinic on building a song a different way. It opens with power chords and a furious start, then settles into a quiet acoustic middle, regroups for soulful, soaring vocals, then pulls back a second time and fades out with cadences evocative of a chain gang finishing a long day. She also toys with a country/soul feel ("Please Come Home") and rounds off the EP with "You," a selection that initially evokes a lullaby but then morphs into something more lush and mysterious.

I can't promise that The Red Headed Indian will light up the charts any more than I can attest whether she has an ounce of native blood in her veins. But I can say that that Honey is a tantalizing, tasty teaser for what I hope will come next.  Rob Weir   

Reese Witherspoon Takes a Walk on the Wild Side

Wild (2014)

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee

Fox Searchlight, 155 minutes, R (nudity, language, drug use)

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How does one deal with grief and misfortune? Seek to rise above it or sink below it? That’s the central question in Wild, the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed 2012 memoir.

If Strayed doesn’t sound like a normal last name, it’s not. Strayed was born Cheryl Grey and adopted the last name Strayed as an ironic descriptor for the self-made hell she put herself through. It began when her mother, Barbara “Bobbi” Grey, died of fast-moving cancer when Cheryl was a senior in college and passed through phases such as survivor’s guilt, a failed marriage, heroin abuse, random promiscuity, and abortion. Wild tells the story of how she began to rebuild her life while on a 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail from California’s Mojave Desert to the Oregon/Washington border.

In the film, Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is forced to contrast her jaded cynicism with her mother’s (Laura Dern) carefree bohemianism. Bobbi had way more reasons to stray than her daughter–flight from a physically abusive, alcoholic husband sentenced her to a too-short lifetime of single motherhood lived just above the poverty line. Yet when we see Bobbi in flashback, she’s the one who breaks into song, sashays across the room, and explodes into convulsive laughter at her own silliness. In a key adolescent moment Cheryl seeks to belittle her mother by noting it must be hard to have a daughter who is more “sophisticated” than she. Bobbi unashamedly replies, “That was always the plan.” 

The story is moving, the scenery stunning, and the journey perilous. Witherspoon continues to prove that there’s a real actress residing in her luminous body. She actually lugged a 65-pound backpack for this film, a feat that adds verisimilitude to the scenes in which trail weariness is etched on her brow. She also fearlessly doffs her clothing and her dignity to underscore how thin the borders had become between Strayed's pretty girl promise and use-me depravity. When Strayed and her ex-husband, Paul (Thomas Saduski) receive identical tattoos the day their divorce is finalized, the parallel between the external abuse cycle from which her mother fled and the internally constructed one Cheryl embraces is literally etched upon her bicep.

Strayed’s three-month walk along the Pacific Crest Trail is strewn with possibility for both damnation and grace. Though we know the latter will win, it does not diminish the poignancy of the journey. The final leg of the sojourn takes her through Ashland, Oregon, where she learns that Jerry Garcia has just died and finds herself in the midst of mourning Grateful Dead-style. It is there she connects her mother’s grief with her own as a tribute band wails out the words to “Ripple:”

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

Wild is a very good movie though, like many road films, there are places where the languid pace is wearisome. Scriptwriter Nick Hornby tries to enliven this through an episodic account of the trek, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are several scenes excerpted from the memoir that seem ham-handed on the screen, including Strayed's encounter with an erstwhile journalist who insists she is a female hobo even when told otherwise, and a ride with a burnt-out hippie couple dealing badly with their daughter’s death that has little context. Each probably make more sense in the memoir (as would Cheryl’s decision to divorce Paul). We can also predict most of the menaces Strayed will face—and she does. Serious hikers might also tut-tut scenes in which Witherspoon is referred to as a reeking trail mess, but never seems to be much messier than a sweat stain, blisters, brush burns, and pack bruises. Still, Witherspoon gives a superb performance worthy of the Best Actress Oscar nomination she garnered. Inexplicably, Dern got one for Best Supporting Actress. I love Laura Dern, but her appearances in Wild are little more than expanded cameos—too slight for a nomination, IMHO.

 

This film won’t isn't for those who want thrill-a-minute action. There's more tension in the possibility of what might happen than what does. Still, it's well worth lacing up your own REI boots to walk a few miles in Cheryl Strayed’s shoes, even if you're not born to be wild.-- Rob Weir

Rhythms of Labour an Important Collection of Bygone Work Songs

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VARIOUS ARTISTS

Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain

Harbourtown Records

Can you imagine it? Noon rolls around and office workers begin to sing: “Boss man called a meetin’/At a time I should be eatin’/Didn’t hear a word he said/Just wanted to get fed/Got them working lunch blues, un huh….” Or you walk into Target and wage earners sing as they restock shelves in unison.  From the wings you hear administrators lining out “The Ballad of the Busted Copy Machine.” Workers do still sing, of course, but these days it’s more likely to occur among non-English-speaking migrant workers or on (an increasingly rare) picket line. By the time Stan Rogers penned “White Collar Holler” back in 1979, one of the things that made it so funny was the very idea that postindustrial workers had any sort of folk community.

Rhythms of Labour takes us back to the days in which English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh workers sang to set the pace of work, pour out their aspirations, build community, and wile away the time. It is a two-disc companion piece to an academic investigation into work songs by professors Marek Korcznski (Nottingham), Michael Pickering (Loughborough), and Emma Robertson (La Trobe, Melbourne). The 50 songs contained herein are mainly those once commonly called “source songs,” those collected in the field by folklorists and ethnomusicologists and then reinterpreted by professional folk musicians.  Featured are songs from now-passing occupations such as droving, quarrying, cloth fulling, shepherding, street vending, wooden ship sailing, hand milking, doffing, and hop picking. Most of these are field recordings made from the 1920s though the early 1970s, though there are a handful of songs from contemporary performers such as Lee Enstone, Laura Hockenhill, Brona McVittie, and Will, Ed, and Ginger, who have mined old song collections. Only a handful of the source singers bear familiar names: Harry Cox, Lizzie Higgins, Stan Hugill, Sam Larner, Flora MacNeil….

Another way that Western society has changed is the way we hear music. Casual listeners will need to readjust their habits to appreciate the richness of these songs. Their value as historical documents is obvious, but these songs come from common folk and the voices are often rough, sparse, unaccompanied, and unhurried. A superb 48-page booklet accompanies the collection and gives detailed information on the material, performers, and collectors, but appreciating the scope of this impressive project requires patience. It is very much unlike anything pop-weaned, ear-bud-wearing workers today experience.  More’s the pity. I wish someone would create a similar encyclopedic sampler of North America’s bygone work traditions. I’d like to imagine push back against latter day straw bosses.

Rob Weir

The Signature of All Things aQuirky Delight

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The Signature of All Things (2014)

Elizabeth Gilbert

Riverhead Trade, 512 pp. ISBN: 9780143125846

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Elizabeth Gilbert is also the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir of the author's full circle flight from marriage back to romance. It struck a resonant chord, I suppose, because there are so many women who feel as if they've been dealt raw deals in their relationships. Nonetheless, Eat, Pray, Love was chick-lit–a term I do not use lightly–at its worst: fantasy and exaggeration masquerading as power gift-wrapped in a mawkish box. (It was, though, way better than the 2011 Julia Roberts movie of the same name.)

I needed to say that because Gilbert's latest, The Signature of All Things, has been called a 19^th century version of Eat, Pray, Love. It's not. First of all, it's a novel, not a memoir. Second, it's a very good book–good enough to make us thing of Ms. Gilbert as a serious writer, not more fodder for the Oxygen channel. It is also inventive, quirky, and unique. Name me another novel whose themes include the following: botany, the birth of science, female masturbation, spirituality, spiritualism, fellatio, altruism, rivalry, the struggle for existence, and moss. Yes, moss. And masturbation. And fellatio.  

Gilbert's sprawling novel opens in the late 18^th century when Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) directed London's Kew Gardens. The imperious Banks built Kew into the world's premier botanic showcase, largely by collecting faster than he could inventory–perfect opportunity for a working-class lad, Henry Whittaker, to divert seeds to collectors and make some money. When his scheme comes apart, Whittaker boldly convinces Banks to employ him as a collector instead of sending him to the gallows. Henry didn't bargain on being sent to sea on Captain James Cook's third voyage (1776-79) or on being insulted when he returned to England with rare specimens.

Move the calendar and we find Henry has transplanted himself to Philadelphia in the new American republic, where his White Acres estate rivals Kew Gardens. Henry also has a bulging bank account; a sturdy and opinionated Dutch wife, Beatrix; a stern Dutch housekeeper, Hanneke du Groot; and a homely but brilliant daughter, Alma. The Whittaker household is a veritable salon in which visitors and family members debate the principles of science, a term that won't even be invented until 1830. Henry is hell-bent on collecting orchids that will enrich him beyond Banks' level, but Alma–who quickly outshines her tutors–gravitates to bryology, the study of mosses, a plant species whose presumed plainness matches her own. Barbara Kingsolver labeled the book "the botany of desire," but in many ways it's really about orchids (beautiful but fragile) and mosses (hardy survivors). Among the orchids are Alma's adopted sister, Prudence, a gadabout attractive neighbor, Rette Snow, and the pure Ambrose Pike, a clipped wings angel in temperament. Suffice it to say that anyone Dutch and/or born Whittaker is a species of moss.

The Whittaker world is rocked when Ambrose arrives at White Acres as Alma is about to turn 50 and marries her, though she is a decade older and is as blockish in body as he is perfect. What could he see in her? What indeed? It's not what Alma expected, nor what you will see coming. His presence sets loose a chain of events that will take Alma to Tahiti, where she will live among natives and missionaries, including the saintly Rev. Welles and his adopted Tahitian son, Tomorrow Morning, who is equal parts charismatic genius and rogue. Several pivotal things occur on Tahiti, one of which takes place in a mossy cave and is shocking. 

The action will eventually shift to Amsterdam, where lots of loose threads come together, including Alma's "theory of competitive alternation," her musing on evolution that is roughly coetaneous with Darwin's theory of natural selection and Alfred Russel [sic] Wallace's musings on biological adaptation. Alma deflects Wallace's urging to publish her work because she cannot solve the "problem" of altruism. (Wallace has his own ideas on that subject, which Alma rejects as non-empirical.)

The Signature of All Things is indeed an odd book. Gilbert's story has more twists than a rope factory and she's a marvelous storyteller. It is a smart book, though not always a literary one. At times it can read like a botany lecture and readers should steel themselves for rather dramatic tone shifts. There are long sections that can be skimmed without losing the thread of the tale, and one feels that a stern editor could have pared the text by 15-20% to good effect. Still, the story is so original and (that word again!) odd, that you will feel richly rewarded when you've finished. And you'll never think about moss the same way again. As for the salacious bits, I'm not saying!

Rob Weir 

Did Oscar get it Right to Snub Selma Director?

Selma (2014)

Directed by Ana DuVernay

Paramount, PG-13, 123 mins.

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But it wasn't one dream!

By now you know that many people are angry that the Oscars snubbed Selma. The film is up for Best Picture, but odds are long given that director Ana DuVernay wasn't nominated. Nor were any of the actors–Selma's only other nomination is for Best Original Song (John Legend and Common, "Glory"). Oscar's timing looks so insensitive in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner slayings that cynics have questioned whether the white folks who control Hollywood have turned their backs on Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy. But what if Oscar got it right?

Selma-the story of the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama–is simply one of the most important chapters in the battle for racial justice in American history. Three attempts at the simple act of crossing the Pettus Bridge into Selma ultimately cost three lives, sent dozens to the hospital, and resulted in hundreds of arrests. You can be forgiven for inferring from the film that the toll was even higher–the reality was bad enough and shocked the collective conscience of a nation. Selma was the reason that President Johnson reluctantly advanced the 1965 Voting Rights Act. My take on Selma is that it's an important and inspiring cinematic experience wrapped in a good movie, though not a great one. Pay attention to the opening and closing sequences of the film, as they are, by far, the most innovative pieces of filmmaking on display. Everything else is perfectly competent, but hardly path breaking.

It's very hard to make a movie about events in living memory. Audience members come into the theater armed with images of events and principals that have been chiseled into their brains by personal experience, teachers, or by endless viewings of archival footage available on YouTube. (Is there a student over the age of 12 who has not viewed a Martin Luther King speech? If so, that child's social studies teachers should be fired!) Try as one will, it's difficult to avoid comparing actors on the screen to what we think their real-life counterparts looked and acted like. The first third of Selma is rather slow-paced, as if DuVernay wanted to give us time to imagine David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon Johnson, Tim Roth as Governor George Wallace, Dylan Baker as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Oprah Winfrey as frustrated black voter registrant Annie Lee Cooper. If that was DuVernay's goal, two problems emerge. First, it doesn't negate the pacing problem and, second, the actors don't succeed in making the audience suspend disbelief. Oyelowo delivers a mixed performance, but at least we think of him as Dr. King. That's simply not true of Wilkinson, Roth, Baker, or Winfrey; Wilkinson is too controlled for LBJ, Roth not intransigent enough for Wallace, Baker not evil enough for Hoover, and Winfrey not determined enough for Cooper.  

If I had to pick one performance that was snubbed, it would be that of Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King. She not only looks like young Coretta, but also plays her with the articulation, steely resolve, and simmering sense of personal and social injustice that anyone who ever heard her speak will recognize. Also noteworthy is the acting of Stephan James as John Lewis–the SNCC leader who came to see tactics as more important than turf wars. DuVernay also did well in choosing secondary actors that looked similar to the people they portrayed: Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Father James Reeb (Jeremy Strong)…. It makes one wonder if she might have been better off staying away from actors with recognizable faces.

But let's cut to the chase: The reason why DuVernay and Oyelowo aren't in the Oscar chase is there isn't anything particularly distinguished in their craft. The story is told straightforwardly and sequentially. But here's also a problem–by focusing so tightly on Dr. King, DuVernay gives us more hagiography than history. Oyelowo plays King as a saint–a man always able to divert his personal outrage into moral outrage. Such a view confuses the private man with the public rhetorician, just as the ambiguity over whether he had cheated on Coretta is out of accord with the objective reality that he did. Maybe some people need heroes as pure as the driven snow, but I don't believe in saints. If I can be so bold, DuVernay gives us a Hollywood Martin Luther King, an unsettling mix of blandness, fieriness, and Buddha-like serenity. Mostly Oyelowo's is a version of Chekov's gun–the pivot around which all action must center. It does nothing to diminish King's honor to say that King was the public symbol of the Selma, but that locals (Annie Cooper, Amelia Boynton), SNCC (James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael), and SCLC operatives such as Diane Nash and Hosea Williams did most of the nuts-and-bolts work.

Go see Selma. It will make you angry, make you weep, and make you yearn for social justice. It is a very good thing to revisit this courageous struggle at this particular moment in history. Let the experience wash over you and let your voice cry out for social justice. In moments of reflection you can admit that this movie is no 12 Years a Slave. It doesn't need to be. —Rob Weir

Pat & Tex LaMountain: Hills and Hollows Music

PAT and TEX LaMOUNTAIN

Rivers Roads & Bridges

Garden Gate Records 1008

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As noted in an earlier post, country music long ago jettisoned its “western” swing half and, in recent decades, it’s pretty much left its rural roots as well. What we now call country music is really just middle-of-the-road rock and roll fronted by dudes wearing cowboy hats and dudettes dressed in fringe and boats. Their material doesn’t come from the heartbeat of America, it’s processed and canned in Nashville. Maybe it’s time to invent a new genre for rural-based acoustic singer/songwriters and call it “hills and hollows.” What else fits artists such as Linda and Robin Williams or the Western Massachusetts duo Pat and Tex LaMountain? 

If you’re looking for recycled hooks, clichés masquerading as profundity, or existential angst, don’t listen to Pat and Tex. If, on the other hand, you enjoy music from folks that actually live in the country, walk in the woods, ride horses, and paddle down rivers, Pat and Tex are your ticket. Forget flash, polish, and spit shine—Pat and Tex make homespun music because they are homespun. A song like “I Will Comfort You” would sound unbelievably hokey from some CMTV duet, but it’s touchingly sweet from life partners such as the LaMountains. Several songs—especially “Down the River” and “Fly like a Bird”—evoke nature as the antidote to urban and workday woes. Overall, the best way to describe their music is that it’s gentle, straight-forward, affirming, and honest. It doesn’t make you want to jump up and sweat—it makes you slow down and do the “Sunderland Bridge Softshoe.” In keeping with its down home flavor, guest artists include local talents such as John White (bass), Pick Mauran (percussion), Jerry Noble (piano), and fiddlers Chris Bashear and Zoe Darrow. No one's there to show off, just add a bit of texture to the LaMountains’ smooth canvass. Hills and hollows music from hills and hollows folks…. Rob Weir

Dumb Things Westerners Believe about Terrorism: Part Two

Myth Four: The West can defuse tension by seeking dialogue with terrorist groups and unfriendly governments.

Even Deepak knows there are some gulfs that can't be bridged

Barack Obama believed that when he was a candidate. He's wiser now. Call this myth "dreams gone wrong." Belief in reason is a foundational value in the West. It's a key component of what anthropologists call worldview. It's why the West (plus Asian democracies and secular China) pioneer in science, medical technology, electronics, consumer goods, creative culture, aeronautics, computers, and (alas!) military hardware. We believe in the power of reason so much that we have trouble understanding alternative worldviews.

Faith-based and ideological worldviews–including those of troublesome groups in the West–demote or reject the power of the reason. What person grounded in empiricism believes that 72 virgins will greet each religious martyr in the after-world? Or that prayer alone will set a broken arm? Or that it's fine to kidnap children? Or that it's logical to make threats against a military superpower when you command tin soldiers?

But you know what? It's pretty dumb to hew to the logical path when your adversary thinks reason is a bigger fairy tale than Cinderella. Diplomacy is for diplomats, not ideologues. If you're not on the same worldview page as your opponent you must either find some other sliver of common ground, or stop talking.

Myth Five: International bodies such as the United Nations and the World Court can mediate disputes.

Perhaps it's time to call many of these bodies noble experiments that have failed. Economic sanctions have a decent chance of working, but international law is an oxymoron. (See Myth Four!) It always has been. Does it matter if Al-Qaeda leaders are labeled as having committed crimes against humanity? Or that the Kymer Rouge committed war crimes? Only if you defeat them, something that blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers are forbidden by charter to attempt.

Reason can involve as much blind faith as a religious worldview. We treat international laws as if they are  objective standards of decency when they've never been more than a victor's fiction since the days of Nuremberg when they were invented. Classic example: If the Axis had won World War II, would the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor have been crimes against humanity? Nope, but the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan would have been. Don't like hypotheticals?  Since World War II the only Westerners mentioned as possible war criminals are Americans associated with the My Lai Massacre and Serbian leaders. What do they have in common? Americans lost Vietnam and the Serbs the Yugoslav civil wars. The U.S. military prosecuted William Calley for My Lai and has since maintained the position that American combatants cannot be tried in international courts. The U.S. has also extended this principle to its Allies. Don't hold your breath waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to be tried as a war criminal. On the other hand, I'd not get too comfortable if I were Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

At best, international bodies such as the UN, the World Court, and the Geneva Convention can restore some order after the fighting ends. At worst, they are idealistic anachronisms. In neither case can they be said to solve or prevent conflict–unless both sides are willing to submit to mediation.

Myth Six: The West wishes to bring democracy to the globe.

No, it doesn't. Nor would it if it could. There are legions of terrorist leaders in the world; often the only difference among them is that a few receive Western sanction for assumed titles such as president or king. You tell me what made El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson, Chile's Augusto Pincohet, or Guatemala's numerous juntas valuable U.S. allies, but Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro were allegedly dangerous.

 The West has always been selective in its demonization of "tyrants," so why not just admit it's all about self-interest? In 1946, George Kennan counseled that the U.S. should identify and support "core" nations vital to U.S. interest, and mostly ignore "peripheral" lands inconsequential to those concerns. Then and now such advice smacks of cold-heartedness, but that doesn't mean he was wrong in describing what the West has done and should do. It should surprise no one that the West did little more than lament tragedies in Rwanda and Bosnia, but took an active role in Iraq. It's called oil, as in the first two have none but Kuwait and Iraq do.

Part of the Western improvements in Iraq

The West gets in big trouble when it thinks it can be a nation-builder. Does anyone with an ounce of Western worldview reason think that Iraq is better off today than when Sadam Hussein was in power?  Sure; all those elections have made it a pillar of hope–for ISIS. About those peripheral nations, Afghanistan or Palestine anyone? I'm uncomfortable with the idea, but would the West be any worse off to announce that it's done with nation building and that future acts of aggression against it will be met with indiscriminate force? Elections don't deter terrorists, and smiling boots on the ground don't make populaces embrace Western values. I'd prefer we butt out and let history run its course, but wasn't it Machiavelli who said it's better to be feared than loved?