Western MA Banish Misfortune's Homegrown Celtic Music

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BANISH MISFORTUNE

No Strangers Here

Self-Produced

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Since time immemorial Celtic music has been learned, honed, and perfected in gatherings known as sessions–informal get-togethers held in kitchens and pubs. The Western Massachusetts sextet Banish Misfortune is such a band. I can recall hearing them in the early days when some of them were learning new instruments and, other than being mostly in the same key, much of what they did was play around each other rather than with each other. To paraphrase an old advertising slogan, baby look at them now. That’s how sessions work—tunes are shared, ideas get discussed, kinks are worked out, and before you know it, synergies emerge. Banish Misfortune now takes its show on the road and you can literally feel the musical pulse getting stronger. Also firmly within the sessions spirit, many of the tunes we here are drawn from a traditional well and are familiar—community-based music is rooted in participation, not showcasing. For instance, the band opens with a familiar Turlough O'Carolan tune "Planxty Fanny Power," a perfect set piece for a coordinated mix of fiddle, flute, whistle, accordion and guitar. The famed blind Irish harper gets covered again later on, though "Máire Dhall" is given a quieter solo flute treatment from T. J. Ezold, before the band joins back in for a spritely take on "Rolling in the Rye Grass." Most of the tunes covered are traditional jigs, reels, and waltzes. Especially strong are the "Pigeon on the Gate" and "Silver Spear" sets, both of which are lively and finish big. The vocals on this CD are likewise plucked from old fields and includes: "Rambling Irishman," "Wild Mountain Thyme," and "Isle of Innisfree." The vocals can charitably be described as more heartfelt and earnest than smooth or polished, but keep in mind that everything on this album comes from people with others lives and are not professional musicians. Even the rougher moments are in keeping with the idea that music not shared is just a monolog. –Rob Weir

Postscript: The band discussed above is from Western Massachusetts. Here is their Facebook page. The name comes from one of the best known of all Irish jigs, hence there are numerous bands bearing the same name in North American, England, and Ireland.Also, for those unfamiliar with the term, "planxty" means a tune written as a tribute to another person.

Disclaimer: I have known guitarist David Meuser for many years. He's a great guy, like everyone in the lineup except for Kira Jewett, who is a great gal!

Overlooked Fims: The Monuments Men

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THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014)

Directed by George Clooney

Columbia Pictures, 118 minutes, PG-13

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Great story in a not-so-great film

I avoided this one when it came out because I heard it wasn't very good. That's true. It's also not terrible—it's a classic Hollywood middle-of-the-road star vehicle. It's riddled with problems, but it's also a good way to pass a few hours on a slow night. (I saw it after a heavy meal on an evening too cool to walk it off!)

The Monuments Men is based (all too) loosely on the eponymous non-fiction book by Robert Edsel, which recounts the fascinating story of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program formed in the waning days of World War II. As most know, the Nazis looted tens of thousands of works of art from museums and homes in vanquished lands. All were destined for what was supposed to be the crowning jewel of Hitler's Third Reich: a massive Fuhrermuseum in Berlin. By 1944, it was clear that would not happen and rumors circulated of Hitler's "Nero decree" to destroy everything if the Reich fell. The Monuments Men were charged with finding and saving as much as they could. Especially at risk was "degenerate art" created by Jews and those considered to be of low character (like Van Gogh).

There were several dozen Monuments Men, but Clooney's film reduces them to a gang of seven, of whom all are composite figures except for Clooney in the role of Frank Stokes and Jean Dujardin (of "The Artist") in the role of Jean Claude Clermont. The rest of the cast was chosen largely for their star power: Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville ("Downton Abbey"), Bob Balaba, and Dimitri Leonidas. Cate Blanchett appears as Claire Simone, an art curator in Occupied France forced to aid the Nazis, though that character is also based loosely on others. What ensues is a combination buddy film and race against time, with pieces of art such as the Ghent Altarpiece and the Bruges Madonna holding (often heavy-handed) metaphorical significance.

Keep in mind that this film takes more liberties than a drunken sailor. It is decidedly not an accurate historical telling of the MFAA program; for that you need to go to Edsel, where you'll find out, among other things, that a lot of the art was saved by either intrepid locals or by guilt-ridden Nazis who defied orders to destroy it. It is also fair to chide Clooney for shifting the focus from the art to male bonding rituals. One might forgive him for this too, if he hadn't scripted much of those relationships as if they were an extended Hogan's Heroes episode. It was also a mistake to cast so many well-known actors. Put simply, you don't hire Blanchett, Damon, Goodman, et. al. and not give them screen time. The film feels cluttered, despite the fact that the major characters were pared in number. 

All of this is to say that The Monuments Men isn't great filmmaking. It is, however, a terrific story about a little-known subject whose history should be told. Recent acts of art barbarism committed by groups such as the Taliban and ISIS are poignant reminders of the fragility of what gets labeled "civilization." Would that Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq had their own Monuments Men to protect their heritage from modern-day fascists in headscarves.

The Monuments Men is an imperfect telling of a heroic effort. At times Clooney's direction borders on inept and he sure as hell could have used some scholars to prevent him from making freshman mistakes (like color slides in the 1940s). But the next time you admire a Monet, a Van Gogh, a Klimt, a Raphael, or a Rembrandt, think of the MFAA. For all its flaws, The Monuments Men reminds us of what could have been lost forever. Like I said, an imperfect telling, but an important tale.—Rob Weir

Tintseltown: Hollywood's Always Been a Tough Town!

Tintseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood. By William J. Mann. New York: Harper, 2014.

Who killed Billy Taylor? Investigators, conspiracy theorists, and scholars have been asking this question since 1922, when William Desmond Taylor, president of the Motion Pictures Directors Association, was discovered in his Los Angeles bungalow with a .38 slug fired from close range lodged in his body. Writer William J. Mann–known for his biographies of Hollywood luminaries such as Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Streisand–is the latest to finger a culprit. Although be builds a meticulous case for his suspect, he probably won't convince those invested in a different suspect. It's of little consequence, as the greater value of Mann's lies in its vivid portrayal of Hollywood in the silent era. 

Celebrity scandals, infidelity, substance abuse, bad behavior, and innuendo are the lifeblood of today's tabloid- and paparazzi-fueled culture, but those who consider Hollywood to be a modern-day Gomorrah will learn from Mann's book that it was always thus. His Hollywood is a literal Tintseltown–shiny and glamorous on the surface, but with a tawdry interior of casual sex, rampant drug use, ruthless ambition, backroom abortions, hard drinking, and poorly kept secrets. The biggest difference between then and now is that there were more powerful Americans disgusted by Hollywood immorality than fascinated by it. The history of the 1920s is often poorly refracted through a Jazz Age lens, a perspective that pays too little attention to surging fundamentalism, Prohibition, social intolerance, and the disproportionate political power held by rural conservatives. In short, powerful groups of religious and political moralists sought to cleanse American society and Hollywood was one of their main targets.

In 1922, the Hollywood film industry was not yet a decade old and movies themselves not much older. As numerous film historians have noted, early films were often more risqué than they would become when movies migrated from down-market working-class neighborhoods and into middle-class theaters. Not coincidentally, the industry consolidated into precisely the vertical monopolies attacked by Progressive Era reformers. By 1922, Adolph Zukor's Paramount Pictures was aptly named, and Zukor was so powerful that friends and foes alike nicknamed him "Creepy." Among Mann's fascinating insights is Zukor's megalomaniacal obsession with rival, Marcus Loew, who was as affable as Zukor was cold.

Zukor 's greatest insight was his realization that changing Hollywood's image was necessary to fend off regulators and moralists. Hollywood had serious PR problems, including starlet Mabel Normand's publicized cocaine addiction, Wallace Reid's dependence on morphine, the poisoning death of Olive Thomas, and the rape/murder accusation against comic actor Fatty Arbuckle, one of Hollywood's biggest stars. Although acquitted, Zukor sacrificed Arbuckle's career to keep moralists at bay. He also engineered the elevation of Will Hays to the post of president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America in charge of censoring movie content–just enough to get regulators off Zukor's back, but not enough to dull salacious consumers. Mann argues that Hays was not the prude of legend. He took his job seriously but, if anything, he was star-struck and prone to follow Zukor's lead.

Director Billy Taylor was a fulcrum around which all that was promising and unseemly about Hollywood revolved. Mabel Normand, the last person known to see Taylor alive, acted in several Taylor films and, depending on whom one asked, was either a dear friend, a former lover, or a murderous revenge-seeker. She certainly kindled the jealousy of Mary Miles Minter, an ingénue in love with and obsessed by Taylor. Minter was also rumored to be a Taylor paramour–troubling, as she would have been just 16 when their alleged affair began. Minter's stage mother, former Broadway actress Charlotte Selby, believed the scuttlebutt and made numerous threats against Taylor. Margaret Gibson also harbored a grudge; she made four films for Taylor under the name of Patricia Palmer, before he dumped her because of a reprobate life that included running con games, consorting with organized crime, prostitution, and drug use. And Taylor had a passel of secrets of his own, including his birth identity and his bisexuality. The latter cast suspicion upon his flamboyantly gay black valet, but Gibson made a deathbed confession to the murder in 1964. Mann isn't buying any of those suspects and identifies a different culprit.

Tintseltown is a real-life Day of the Locust. It's a history book and could be usefully pared back in length, but it is frequently as gripping as a work of fiction. Mann shows that the Hollywood Dream Machine has always been just a fantasy.

Rob Weir

Overlooked Films: Still Alice

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STILL ALICE (2014)

Directed (and screenplay by) Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Sony Pictures, 101 minutes, PG-13

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Julianne Moore won a Best Actress Academy Award for the title role of Still Alice, but there wasn't much Oscar magic in it; the film made a paltry $18.6 million in the U.S. market. Audiences did not flock to a  film about a vibrant 50-year-old Colombia professor prematurely felled by Alzheimer's disease. I ducked for a highly personal reason: my mother died of Alzheimer's and I feared that Hollywood would somehow present this faith-shaking malady with more hope and dignity than it merited. I also needed more emotional distance between my mother's death and the subject.

I am happy to report that, for the most part, this film—which is based upon Lisa Genora's best-selling 2007 novel–does a fairly honest job with Alzheimer's devastation. At several junctures, Alice is filmed as if all around her is hazy and indistinct, which accords with how I think my mother experienced things up to the moment where she didn't experience much of anything. Glatzer and Westmoreland also do a credible job of showing how families are cast into helplessness as the inevitable takes its course–in Alice's case her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), and their three children: Lydia (Kristen Stewart), Anna (Kate Bosworth), and Tom (Hunter Parrish). The directors try to provide back stories for each character, but the film is, by necessity, all about Alice. Moore is very good in the role. She's gorgeous, but not part of Hollywood's shiny wrapper/empty head crowd. Thus, she's totally believable as both a whip smart linguistics prof and as a desperate woman victim watching herself disappear piece by tiny piece. In one of the more remarkable transformations, Moore diminishes herself physically from a coiffed pulled-together Ivy Leaguer to a bedraggled lost soul–and she does so through sheer acting, not a bunch of make-up tricks. Her hollow eyes tell us all we need to know, as we watch the lights turn off.

Objectively speaking, though, Still Alice is merely a middle-of-the-road film. A good friend commented that it's a bit too obviously a Julianne Moore star turn and I find that fair commentary. Aside from Kristen Stewart–who has the chops to become this generation's Julianne Moore–no one else has much to do in the film. Frankly, the film also raises skeptical hackles. Alice is saddled with extremely rare Familial Alzheimer's. This explains her early onset Alzheimer's, but it's also convenient in that a bankable star such as Moore can play the part rather than someone who would appeal only to older viewers. This was, of course, how Genova wrote the novel upon which the movie is based, but it also means we do not see a 'typical' Alzheimer's profile.

I will give the directors a pass on this issue, but I cannot declare Still Alice the best film you can see about dementia*.  But that too can be forgiven as the competition is two genuine masterpieces: "Away From Her," Sarah Polley's stunning 2006 directorial debut–with Julie Christie every bit Moore's equal in the lead role–and Amour (2012) with the transcendent Emmanuelle Riva as a woman whose stroke leads her to descend into depression and (probably) dementia. Director Michael Haneke's Amour does something that Still Alice fails to do: ask what love (amour) means and what you would do in its name. Let's just say that Alec Baldwin is no Jean-Louis Trintignant when it comes to knowing what his wife would have wished.

Still Alice is a hard film, though if you can only stomach one movie about losing mental faculties, this one is the easiest of the lot. One can debate whether Moore's performance was Oscar worthy or simply just very good, but it's fine enough to justify watching the movie. After you do, pour yourself a stiff drink and give thanks for each day you live in which the only haze you endure is the one your sip from the glass.

Rob Weir

*No matter what Hollywood tells you, Alzheimer's, even the Familial variety, can only be definitively diagnosed posthumously. It is generally labeled via symptoms, but as long as the patient lives, the lines between Alzheimer's, severe depression, and other forms of dementia are, if I may, hazy.

    

Hannah Miller's Tough New Record One of Year's Best

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HANNAH MILLER

Hannah Miller

Sputnik Sound

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Think of the woman standing alone in a smoky bar at midnight–the one with the low-cut red dress who exudes desire and danger. If she made a record, it would sound like the latest from Hannah Miller. Miller states that she wanted to make a record without "coffeehouse-friendly songs." This one will certainly send the crystals-and-rainbows crowd running for cover! This is a very dark album. How dark? "Promise Land" is a reflection on the Chernobyl disaster, and it's not even close to being the hardest song of the bunch. "Been Around" might well be the album's theme song. Gothic organ notes spill out as she sings: "I ain't nobody's fool/I know what you're up to/It's not my first time out/I'm not new in town/I've been around." Later she intones: "Your words don't break my bones/I'm full of sticks and stones." Think she's kidding? "While you go down in flames/I play it cool/Cause I'm the one playing you/Like a fool."

Had you fill of little girl voices and frothy pop? Check out Miller's guttural, grown-up voice and tough songs. The dominant instrument on most of her songs is the bass—the chunkier and more ominous the better. The mood is somber, the pacing deliberate, the lighting set to low, and the mood dialed to no-nonsense. Her "Watchman" is a grim reaper, "Soothed" means she's come to terms with having come undone, and "You Don't Call" doesn't wallow: "You don't call any more/and that's fine." The closest she gets to sunny is "Outside In," the album's folkiest song, in which she tries to convince a lover that it's okay to get close. But she follows it with "Leaving," the album's grittiest song, one about a woman damaged by a broken and abusive family, betrayed trust, and so many disappointments that she's emotionally empty. "Go on and try to make me feel anything/What's a little leaving to a girl like me?" Yowser!  

Sound bleak? Yes, but here's the other thing: this is a seriously good album. It's filled with Chris Isaak-like reverb, amazing bass from Kevin Whitset, and loads of texturing synth, organ, keyboards, and guitar–all of which serve the songs brilliantly. Miller's voice is husky when it needs to be, vulnerable if called for, and as sharp as a knife when she needs to cut someone down to size. Miller's neither an innocent nor a shrinking violet; hers are songs for femmes fatale and revenge seekers, but also ones that demand acceptance of the music and of Ms. Miller on her terms. Call it ice and fire, sexy and sultry. Call it one of the year's smartest records. Rob Weir  

Overlooked Films: Lucy

LUCY   (2014)

Directed by Luc Besson

EuropaCorp, 89 minutes, R (graphic violence), English (and some subtitles)

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The French science fiction film Lucy did reasonably well at the U.S. box office, bringing in $43 million, but it was a smash sensation globally raking in more than ten times the North American box office. It also holds the distinction of being the first science fiction movie partially filmed using IMAX cameras, which gives it a hyper-real sheen in all the right places. The guarded enthusiasm in the United States is often explained by the fact that Lucy had only two recognizable names, Scarlett Johansson in the title role and Morgan Freeman in an expanded cameo. I'd like to suggest, though, that U.S. audiences got it right: Lucy is assuredly worth a rental, but it's far too uneven to rank as a great film.

If you like shiny surfaces and intriguing speculation, Lucy is full of both. It opens (and ends) with cells colliding and dividing and quickly cuts to a misty prehistoric dawn where a female Australopithecine is watering. As we learn, she is "Lucy," the sensational 1974 fossil find of paleontologist Donald Johanson that literally rewrote the story of human evolution. Flash to the 21^st century where another Lucy (Scarlett Johannson) is a 25-year-old student in Taipei lured by a shady boyfriend into the next leap in human evolution. He forces her to carry a briefcase into a bank and before you can say "Australopithecus" she's spirited away, witnesses murders, is sedated, and awakes to find herself as one of four individuals with bloody stitched slits in their guts. Each has one opportunity to live–become unwilling drug mules to Paris, Berlin, London, and Rome, where they will be relieved of the contents of their tummy tucks.

It's sci-fi, baby, so you know they aren't packing anything as mundane as coke or heroin. A group of unscrupulous Taiwanese scientists has synthesized the hormone pregnant women secrete to help fetal skeletons and brains develop. Ingested in small quantities, the drug opens Huxley's doors of perception and gives access to more than the 10% of the brain humans normally use. Before Lucy even boards the plane, though, something goes awry (because it is sci-fi, baby). In a very disturbing scene, Lucy is brutally beaten when she rebuffs the sexual advances of some Taiwanese thugs. A kick to the stomach ruptures the bag she is carrying—doses meant for hundreds of users. As neuroscientist professor Samuel Norman (Freeman) explains in a conference crosscut, if humans could access 20% of their brains, they could control their own bodies, objects, and others. But what would happen at 30%? 50%? 100%?

Director Luc Besson acknowledges that Lucy is a pastiche of three other films: Léon: The Professional (1994), the story of an assassin, which he wrote; the popular mind-altering film Inception (2010); and Stanley Kubrick's path-breaking 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Be warned: the violence in this film is Quentin Tarantino-like in its bloodiness and its amorality. The attack on Lucy transgresses the border between advancing the plot and misogyny—so much so that it is very tempting to stop the film. Obviously, Lucy survives, but I leave it to your judgment to determine if what follows is worth it. The film is certainly open to intense criticism on this score, as well as whether Besson's mix of violence, drugs, and the future of humanity is intriguing conceptually, but too uneven on the screen. Drug overlord Mr. Jang (Choi Min-sik) pursues Lucy to Paris–where she hopes to enlist the aid of Professor Norman–and we get numerous showdowns with thugs, a car chase across Paris, and a beat-the-clock dénouement. Once again, it's probably a personal judgment call as to whether all of this is really innovative f/x, or just your run-of-the-mill chase scene dressed up in fancy clothes. Ditto the question of whether Besson has solved the mystery of Kubrick's black obelisk and written the next chapter of the space child, or whether he has merely contrived his way to 2001 Lite.

For me, there were enough fresh ideas to carry me over the creepiness threshold. I see Lucy to be a deeply flawed film, but was intrigued. I would not, however, judge anyone who turned it off a third of the way through. My only defense for (sort of) liking this film is–you guessed it—it's sci-fi, baby!   Rob Weir

Neil Gaiman Short Stories: Lots of Hit Targets and a Few Stray Bullets

TRIGGER WARNING: SHORT FICTIONS AND DISTURBANCES  (2015)

Neil Gaiman

William Morrow, 308 pages, 978-0-06-233026-0.

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Trigger warnings are those small cautionary flags thrown up to warn that some sort of content (image, speech, written word) may induce discomfort for some listeners, viewers, or readers.  They are, depending upon one’s point of view, either polite warnings, excuses to present objectionable material, or a form of censorship aimed at further infantilizing American culture. (Full disclosure: I am in camp # 3.)  It’s a perfect title for a Neil Gaiman book, as few modern writers take readers as far from their comfort zones as he.

One of the things that makes Gaiman a great writer—as opposed to pulp hacks like Stephen King—is that he knows that “disturbances” are caused as much by the imagination as by any specific action or image. Like earlier writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, his horrors often reside in dream worlds, random thoughts, imagined terrors, and mental meanderings; in essence, we fear the things that we can envision more than the unknown or unseen. In a new collection of short stories, Gaiman demonstrates another level of wisdom: the understanding that triggers are linked to more than simply raw fear­–they are highly individualized and they come in unexpected forms. Sometimes it’s an encounter with a man who might be a werewolf (“A Lunar Labyrinth”), but it might be a terror linked to faded memory  (“The Thing about Cassandra”), or even musing upon a David Bowie lyric (“The Thin White Duke").

Trigger Warning contains two dozen stories and original poems. Like all such collections, the quality varies from chapter to chapter. There is, frankly, some filler in the new book, the likes of which probably would never have seen the light of day if penned by an unknown. But when Gaiman is good, he’s very good. “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountain” takes a familiar story—a mysterious traveler seeking a guide that will take him to a place locals claim is haunted—and uses Scotland’s Isle of Skye, a real-life dream world, as a creepy backdrop for a tale that grows more ominous by the paragraph. In “Orange,” he builds suspense through 70 out-of-context answers to an interviewer’s questions. He does something similar in “A Calendar of Tales,” which is true to its title: a dozen tales, one for each month—some of which are scary, some humorous, and others surreal. (Gaiman knows that for many people, nothing is more terrifying than a departure from that which is defined as “normal” or “real.”)

Those familiar with Gaiman’s work will recognize a few of his personal inspirations. He has written a tale of aged Sherlock Holmes (“The Case of Death and Honey”), a new Doctor Who episode (“Nothing O’ Clock”), and reworked fairy tales (Cinderella in the case of “The Sleeper and the Spindle”). He also reduxes his character Shadow from American Gods in “Black Dog”. One his more deft turns is using humor as a trigger warning, which he does to great effect in “And Weep, Like Alexander,” an offbeat tale about an odd little man whose profession is that of an Uninventor. That’s right—he uninvents things humankind creates that would simply cause more havoc than good. (Where was he when the Segway was manufactured?!) This tale is typical in that there is, in fact, nothing in the entire collection that would tempt you to sleep with the lights on. But make no mistake, triggers are repeatedly pulled.

To return to an earlier point, not every effort is a winner. As a poet, he reminds us that he’s a novelist, and a few stories simply trade on the unexplained to build bizarre scenarios that go nowhere. In “Adventure Story,” for example, he spins a tale of his father, World War II, Aztecs, and pterodactyls that is either supposed to highlight his dysfunctional family or suggest a paranormal experience, but nothing is more than mentioned within four scant pages, so who knows? A few others are something we seldom expect from Gaiman: obvious. But when Gaiman puts his finger on the trigger of the metaphorical gun that’s pointed at you, you feel the disturbance, even when it’s more frisson than fear.  Rob Weir