Bad Ideas: September Edition

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Why is lunacy so rampant? Here's another installment of head-scratching stuff.

And a sleeping driver accomplishes both.

1. Topping the list is the Trump administration's decision to cancel an Obama executive order that would require periodic sleep apnea testing for people involved in mass transit and long-distance trucking. The same rule would apply to pilots and railways engineers. Call me crazy, but somehow or other it seems like a good idea to make sure that the person behind the wheel of a loaded 70,000 pound truck isn't likely to fall asleep at the wheel. This shouldn't be a political issue—it's just commonsense. That's the position taken by the National Transportation Safety Board, the folks whose recommendation Obama took. But not Trump.

Such reflexive aversion to all regulations is bereft of logic, morally bankrupt, and dangerous. I expect no less from the Snollygoster in Chief, but are there any other adults in the room? Apparently not in the American Trucking Association, which lobbied hard to have Obama's order reversed despite the fact that one in eight fatal accidents involves a long-distance truck. The ATA is the last group that ought to oppose this—unless it simply sees drivers as single servings of meat. Somehow I don't foresee a lot of sympathy coming their way in the very immediate future when self-driving vehicles and investment in light rail decimates trucking as we know it.

Not on this planet!

2. A close runner-up was the decision of K A Design to market the New Swastika shirt. The 5-watt light bulb went off somewhere in the firm that made it think it could reclaim the swastika's ancient Sanskrit meaning of good luck and prosperity. While it's true that the symbol has appeared in many cultures, including ancient Babylonia, India, and early Christianity, can we just say that the ship has sailed on how just about everybody in the world who doesn't work for K A Design perceives it now? I wonder if the firm will even survive this harebrained scheme. Whether or not it's true, it really looks like a backdoor effort to legitimize fascist genocide.

Can you find sexism with Google glasss?

3. There have been mishandled rumblings inside Google and Facebook . Google stumbled in firing the author of a long internal sexist memo that justified the testosterone-fueled culture of Google. I'm not defending the little oinker who wrote it, but there are two PR problems here. First, it was not supposed to be a public document, so there's a bigger security problem inside HQ. The bigger issue, though, is that it's one of the worst kept secrets in the world that Google has a severe gender problem. Unless a comprehensive program to redress sexism inside Google swiftly accompanies this firing, it will smack of tokenism and add fuel to smoldering resentments about to flame.

That's the official story!

It comes as little shock to hear charges that Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of manipulating algorithms that push conservative content to the top of Facebook postings. Some think he's positioning himself for a run for something, though he's just 33, and would just meet the constitutional age threshold in 2020. Besides, most indications suggest he's prone to libertarianism of  its more paranoid permutation. If the allegations are in any way true, his decision is a weird one. If any company's business plan is dependent upon not pissing off people, it's Facebook's. It allegedly has two billion subscribers and I'm pretty sure not all of them are conservative or libertarian. Put another way, angering FB users might actually create a real challenge to its dominance. At present Google+ and upstarts like Diaspora and Ello are mere pretenders, but that reckless disregard for users could change that. These days people are quite testy when it comes to politics.

And therein lies a tale.

4. This is not a defense of the Teamsters per se, but if you've followed the Top Chef trial in which union leaders are accused of trying to extort jobs from the show's producers by harassing some of its personalities, you've got to wonder why the TV crew thought it could go into a union town like Boston without negotiating with the pro-labor mayor, the Teamsters, or other organized bodies. It concerns me that rough language is now lawsuit material. Again, this isn't a defense of violence or for-real threats, but I worry we've lost our ability to distinguish between anger and actual threats It's basic: If you hone in on people's livelihood, they are going to take offense. I've been on a few picket lines, and I know that tempers rise. Lots of "we oughta" scenarios arise—almost none of which are more than blowing off steam.

A jury decided the case in favor of the Teamsters, though a civil suit remains. However it comes out in the end, I think it's time that we realize that bullying and unpleasantness are what happens in a society in which organized labor doesn't have many other resources at its command. We have stripped away the very idea of countervailing forces and have given moneyed interests the upper hand. That's a bad idea.

Love and Other Consolation Prizes: Sweet and Likable

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LOVE AND OTHER CONSOLATION PRIZES: A NOVEL (September 2017)

By Jamie Ford

Ballantine, 330 pages.

★★★★

A novel about forced emigration, a harrowing escape from death, youngsters being sold in raffles, growing up in a whorehouse, the effects neurosyphilis, and spending one's adult years trying to mask the past doesn't generally lend itself to adjectives such as "sweet" and "charming," but this one does. Those familiar with Jamie Ford's debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, know that he can tackle bleak subjects with a light hand—too light for those who see his work as analogous to an overly sunny Ken Burns film—but with enough aplomb to make his books engaging reads for my tastes.

Ford opens his novel in China in 1902, a decidedly non-propitious year. It is just twelve months after the collapse of the Boxer rebellion, millions are addicted to drugs, foreigners are picking the corpse of the decaying Qing Dynasty, and rural Chinese face hunger and starvation. Such horrors would have been the fate of Yung Kun-ai, had not his mother sold him to a shipping company bound for North America. Yung, who is about five-years-old and has been told the ship is owned by his "uncle," is crowded into the fetid hold of a rusty ship with dozens of others—the girls earmarked for brothels and the boys for picking cane in Hawaii, mainland servitude, or being dumped in the ocean if approached by maritime inspectors. As if Yung doesn't have enough problems, he is a "half-breed" pariah because his father was Caucasian. He too would have drowned, had he not used his mother's hairpin—his only link to his birthplace—to cut his way from the bundle to which he was hastily tied and tossed overboard.

Yung is plucked from the waters of Seattle harbor and, after a few more misadventures, is taken in by Mrs. Irvine, a moral crusader and patron of both a children's home and a Christian academy. As Ernest Young*, he spends seven years with Irvine, before parting company with her. As her final "gift" to Ernest, she takes him the world's fair, the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific (AYP) Exposition, where he is raffled off to the highest bidder. Yes—you read that right; children were raffled at the AYP. Ernest's new patron is Florence Nettleton, known professionally as Madame Flora, and her profession is the world's oldest. Hijinks, heartbreak, an eye-opening education, love, and other consolations are about to come Ernest's way in Seattle's Tenderloin district, where Flora runs her high-class house of ill repute.

The novel jumps back and forth in time bound by the AYP at one end, and the 1962 Century 21 Exposition that gave Seattle its iconic Space Needle and monorail system at the other. We meet Ernest as a boy and teen in the early 20^th century, surrounded by the painted ladies of the Tenderloin, the colorful household staff, and his special friends Maisie (Flora's daughter) and Fahn—on both of whom he holds serious crushes. These parts of the book are essentially a coming of age story, albeit a very unorthodox one. In 1962 we encounter an aging Ernest, a married man whose wife has dementia-like symptoms. He passes his days caring for his wife, hanging out with Pascual, his Filipino best friend, and visiting with his daughters: Juju, a journalist, and Hanny, a flirty showgirl. Juju is slugging it out in the old boy's press room and the 1962 world's fair provides her with a good excuse to write the story of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigration to Seattle. Her parents would make excellent subjects, except her mother's memory is unreliable and Ernest's tongue isn't flapping.

Ford plots his story well and this novel moves at such a crisp pace that it seems much shorter than it is. It is fair comment to say that overall Love and Other Consolation Prizes is closer to pulp fiction than to that elusive (and often over exalted) category called "literature." The action, details, and relationships of Ernest's AYP years are far more interesting than the parts of the book set in 1962—and not just because coming of age tales tend to be more satisfying than leaving the stage narratives. Although we are left to piece together what happened in the intervening fifty years of Ernest's life, Ford's book could benefit from a sprinkling of red herrings as it's too easy to predict the book's overall arc. This makes certain resolutions feel more convenient than convincing. In addition, Ford captures the "feel" of the early 1900s better than he does mid-century. Juju, in particular, seems too modern for 1962. All of this aside, young Ernest, his circle, and his world are so winning that one can take, if I might, consolation in them when future thrills wear thin.

Rob Weir 

* Ford, whose father and grandfather were of Chinese descent, interjects a biographical parallel in the Anglicization of Yung Kun-ai. By all rights, the author should bear a Chinese surname, but his paternal grandfather changed his family's last name to Ford for mysterious reasons.

Julieta is Almodovar's Best in Many a Moon

JULIETA (2016)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Warner Brothers (Spain), 96 minutes, R (nudity and sex)

In Spanish with subtitles

★★★★

After a long string of regrettable cinema experiences, I gave up on Pedro Almodóvar. For me, he had become the Spanish Woody Allen—a self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual constantly recycling shopworn ideas and trying to hide his lack of creativity behind a screen of pretentious dialogue the likes of which no earthly person actually utters. When a trustworthy soul told me that Julieta was different, I relented and I'm glad I did. This is the best thing Almodóvar has done since Talk to Her (2002). Julieta is everything Almodóvar has been lacking. It is focused, tightly structured, and humane. In fact, it's that rarest of films: one about tragedy that is simultaneously sweet, hopeful, and biting.

Almodóvar skillfully weaves three Alice Munro short stories to cover approximately thirty years in the life of Julieta Arcos. We first meet her older self as she is on the verge (pun intended!) of the downward slide away from middle age, but toward a new adventure. She is about to leave Madrid and relocate to Portugal with her attentive and sensitive long-time partner Lorenzo Gentile (Darío Grandinetti). A chance encounter with Beatriz, a young woman who was her daughter Antia's childhood friend, opens a sealed off chapter of Julieta's past.  Beatriz bears the news that she briefly saw Antia in Switzerland, which sends Julieta down a rabbit hole of depression, regret, and deep hurt as her daughter left home at 18 and severed all contact with her mother. Julieta impulsively rejects Lorenzo and moves back to an apartment building where she and Antia once lived. There she composes a confessional journal, but to whom? She has no way of contacting her daughter.

Almodóvar has never been a fan of linear filmmaking, but this time he connects flashbacks with the present so expertly that we easily connect the tragic dots that led to mother/daughter estrangement. A train journey and two chance encounters touch off the butterfly effect. Or perhaps I should say the ruminant effect, as a magnificent stag charging across a snowy trackside field symbolizes determination and desire, but also reckless passion. The human encounters tie Julieta's future to Xoan (Daniel Grao), a fisherman with a comatose wife and animal magnetism; his Bride of Frankenstein-like housekeeper, Marian (Rossy de Palma); and a free-spirited sculptress, Ana (Imma Castro). Each will play a role in the mother-daughter drama.

Passions of all sorts are unleashed in this film: libidinal, intellectual, artistic, maternal, spiritual…. They play out against various tragic backdrops, including drowning, disease, infidelity, guilt, and unspoken resentments. As you might surmise, the latter two are, in their own way, more deadly than mortality itself.

Almodóvar cast exceptionally well in choosing Adriane Ugarte as Julieta in her young adult years and Emma Suárez as her older self. Ugarte is breathtakingly beautiful, but Suárez is so much like her facially and physically that we can easily imagine Ugarte thirty years hence as a still-attractive woman whose innocence has been tempered by sophistication and experience. Grandinetti also strikes all the right chords as an urbane gentleman torn between lingering and moving on. All of the secondary characters contribute convincing performances.

It is worth paying attention to many things that could easily be overlooked amidst the emotional pulls of the film. There is a lot of foreshadowing and repetition that marshal Munro's three stories into a circular structure, but also visual details that reel us in, such as the use of bold patterns, the stark jolt of contrasting colors, and the use of art as both texture and prefiguration. Plus, few rival Almodóvar when it comes to etching the film's arc upon the human face. Days later you could be shown a dozen random stills from the film and extrapolate the script from the characters' expressions. Though the movie is just an hour and a half long, its emotional scale feels epic.

Those who like Almodóvar's more loosely structured films have been lukewarm about Julieta, but I feel the opposite. With Julieta, Almodóvar wins a reprieve from my no-view ban. It would, however, take a miracle for Woody Allen to win a pardon.

Rob Weir  

#julietafilm

#almodovar

World Music Releases: Neotolia, Janka Nabay, Nie Project, Rakkatak

 

Jazz can be too complex for its own good and come off more as a personal pursuit than something for mass consumption. But when it’s good, it’s transportive. Turkish-born/Boston-based vocalist Nazan Nihal and pianist Utar Artun are amazing in their own right, and when they join forces with world musicians from places such as China, Iraq, Finland, the USA, and the Near East, they are spectacular. Neotolian Song mixes Turkish song, originals, and jazz in an ethereal West-meets-East brew of everything from piano, cello, violin, guitar, and drums to Chinese flute and erhu (two-stringed fiddle) to Turkish ney (flute), oud (mandolin-like lute) and qunun (zither). Nihal’s vocal range is so wide that on the title track her high notes approach the pain threshold. By contrast, “Manastir T” is as delicate as a glass figurine, and her take on an ancient melody in “Lydianic” is bird-like. Thoughtful arrangements abound. The strings in “G + El Kuruttum” cry out like a muezzin over Artun’s rain-like piano notes. “Pendulum” swings like its namesake, with dancing vocals, pulsing instruments, and big cascades of piano; “Rondo Afro Turca” mixes vocal thrums and scat with a tune reminiscent of breezy Latin jazz; and “Degmen Benim” scurries with the suggestiveness of a tune chasing itself. This is a triumphant release. ★★★★★

@nazannihal #utarartun

Do you want to dance? Ahmed Janka Nabay fled the civil wars of Sierra Leone and now lives in the United States, but he’s still the foremost modernizer of Bubu music, which began life as ritual witchcraft music for the Temne peoples, but now beguiles in a different way; it’s played during Ramadan! Nabay takes it to the party on Build Music. Although songs like “Sabonay 2016” bear serious messages such as women’s empowerment and peace, the instrumentation would be more at home in a discotheque. Traditional Bubu melodies use bamboo flutes and blown metal pipes, but Nabay’s band mostly uses Casio keyboards. In fact, most of the album consists of three or four repeated notes that sound as if they could have been made on a child’s melodic. Add consistent beats and Nabay’s voice, which is at turns growly, polished, or winsomely sexy and is backed by a female chorus. “Santa Monica” is another that touches on weighty matters—his harassment by local police—but has a sunny feel. Most of the album is even lighter—“Bubu Dub” with its repeated lines “My baby loves to dance/she likes to sing… all she does is jump and dance;” or the Caribbean-like “Stop Jealous” with decidedly non-poetic lyrics such as: “Oh my baby, I really love you… Baby I love you… I love… My baby I love you.” Okay, so don’t look for a Nobel literature prize, but if you want to sweat and shake, this one will answer. ★★★

#bubugang

The world needs more folks like the dozen musicians in The Nile Project. Their new album Jinja is a follow-up to 2013’s Aswan and like it, seeks to unite and educate peoples who live in the eleven nations along the 4,258-mile-long Nile. The group brings together musicians from Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda, sings in six languages, harmonizes voices, and blends various lyres, harps, flutes, and guitar styles. The sound is, at heart polyrhythmic and the percussion a complex marvel. That such things happen amidst songs that at first listen seem simple is testament to the musicianship. The harp on “Mulungi Munange” is so light that it evokes a balalaika, but suddenly electric instruments intrude with a big bump and female ensemble singing powers a piece in which the percussionists pound through, across, and into the melody. Later a male voice is added, but it’s like a knife slicing into the mix. The result is edgy, filled with nervous energy, and pop-like in feel without being like any pop you’ve ever heard. All sorts of modes emerge: the North Africa ambience of “Allah Bagy” with its trance-like and praiseful lyricism; the improv horns of “Tenseo” with a dramatic male voice that would be operatic were it not for its microtonal slides; the kora/saxophone/guitar/vocal conversations in “Biwelewle” that create a hooky melody; and the emotive vocals and muscular instrumentation of “Ya Abal Wuha.” Another amazing piece is “Uruzi Nil,” which is quick-paced and scurrying and its flute/electric mix reminiscent of Jethro Tull in places, yet is also jazzy and free-spirited. Kahlil Gibran once said that, “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” The Nile Project is certainly doing its best to make that true. ★★★★★

@NileProject

#thenileproject

The term "fusion" often fails to live up to the hype. In the case of Toronto-based Rakkatak, though, it's appropriated and appropriate. The goal is to take Indian classical music, give it a contemporary twist, and knock down a few barriers along the way. The music is built around the tabla playing and occasional raga vocal scales of Anita Katakkar, and the dreamy bass of Oriana Barbato. Two women fronting an Indian music ensemble is just the start—Katakkar's heritage is Indian/Scottish/Canadian and Barbato is Chilean. Featured sitar player Rex Van der Spuy is of South African and Indian extraction and, when not manning the sitar, is a video game designer and prolific tech author. Small Pieces, Rakkatak's third CD, is as advertised—music designed to lull you into submission rather than impress through volume or showiness. "Medley" fuses a hypnotic groove with a segued cover into The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" and, like all nine tracks, takes its time in developing. Much Indian composition is built on the concept that music should "color the mind." To that end, "Dreaming" is a somnambulant stroll and "Thoughts of You" is drifty and introspective. My favorite piece is "Rain After Fire," composed in response to Western Canadian wildfires. Bass and tabla lurk in the background with quiet drama, with the sitar evoking on again/off again showers that spurt, drip, and fade to mist. Those who want a splash of loosely structured jazz should sample "XYZ" with its atonal flirtations, or the creative noodling of "Riffing on 9." ★★★★

#rakkatak

@rakkatak

#smallpieces

Rob Weir

 Note: YouTube footage and album tracks often vary in presentation stye.

Christina Baker Kline's Triumphant Look at Christina's World

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A PIECE OF THE WORLD (2017)

Christina Baker Kline

William Morrow Publishing, 325 pages.

★★★★ ½

A weathered frame house and farm buildings sit atop a timothy-covered slope, but our gaze is diverted to the lower foreground, where we see the back of a spindly dark-haired woman twisting her way up the hillside on thin arms and unmoving legs. Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is among the two or three most famous American paintings of all time, but what do we know of its subject: Christina Olson (1893-1968)? A quick search reveals that she was nearly immobile by the time Wyeth completed the painting in 1948, a victim of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, a form of muscular dystrophy. But who was Christina? What was her family life like? What did she think and dream?

Christina Baker Kline snared me with this early passage in her subject’s voice:

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn’t. Not really. He [Wyeth] wasn’t even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house from an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It’s not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He did get one thing right: Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I’ve spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me.

This lovely passage sets the tone for the life that lay beneath Wyeth’s canvas—one marked by history, family, longings, lost opportunities, and seized relationships that give Christina Olson a breathing subjectivity that not even as draftsman as skilled as Wyeth could capture.

We learn about the house—built on Hathorne* Point, Maine by Captain Samuel Hathorne II in 1743, and remodeled by generations of Hathornes, all descendants of Salem witchcraft judge John Hathorne who fled to Maine to escape the ignominy of that surname. Christina’s mother, Katie, bore Hathorne blood, though her feisty nature might have gotten her in trouble had she been born in Salem 200 years earlier. It was probably fated that she’d marry a man whose name changed from Johan Olauson to John Olson. The Olsons would have been just another big farm family with its joys and tragedies had not Andrew Wyeth arrived in 1939—a dozen years after Katie died and four since John’s passing. By then, the only Olsons left in the house were Christina and her devoted brother Alvaro.

Kline fleshes out the deeper family histories in ways that remind us that frozen images are lies. The inherent sadness of a self-sacrificing brother caring for his crippled sister in a remote part of Maine tells us nothing about the various turns in people’s lives that led to one path being chosen rather than another. MD is a progressive disease. Christina had a hard life; she fell down a lot, but she didn’t always emulate a crab to move from place to place. As we learn from the novel, she even fell in love with a summer visitor—and it wasn’t Andy Wyeth, twenty-three years her junior, whose presence in Maine began with his courtship of a different Cushing local: his future wife, Betsy James, who knew the Olsons. Andy emerges as Christina’s kindred spirit—a young man who had been sickly as a child, understood Christina’s plight, and befriended her as an equal, not an object of pity. He spent thirty summers in Cushing, coming and going as he wished to a makeshift studio in unused second-floor rooms of the Olson house.

A Piece of the World is a novel that imagines dialogue, discussions, and circumstances, but it hews closely to what is known of its subjects. Kline hails from Bangor and knows Maine life too well to sanitize it. Her prose is lovely, but it’s not rose-hued—more like the somber earth tones Wyeth used. There is something inherently honest about this, with the joys shimmering brighter in contrast to the sorrow and the lonely family cemetery beyond where Christina is posed in the painting. It is a triumphant novel which, ironically, Christina’s World was not until much later. Wyeth called it “a complete flat tire,” and the Museum of Modern Art purchased it for just $1,800. Today its value would be in the millions. Wyeth’s relationship with Christina was a greater treasure, though; when he passed in 2009, per his will he was laid to rest in the Olson graveyard.

Rob Weir

*You will find various spellings of this name, including Hathorn and Hawthorn. Colonial spelling was not standardized.  

#christinabakerkline

#bakerkline

New Stuff: Edward + Jane, Treehouse Sanctum, Steve McComick, Mark O'Connor, Dreadnaught

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Edward + Jane are actually Timothy and Emilie Carpenter, two folks who were born in Ohio, went to college in Chattanooga, married, stayed in Tennessee, and overcame the relocation blues by building an intentional family of friends. As Family We Gather is testament to the success of their endeavor. This is small gem EP in the best Americana tradition. Normally that’s just a label for those running from the term “folk music,” but in this case, it describes a music that’s a not quite folk, bluegrass, mountain music, or country but has echoes of each. It is a lovely harmony-driven EP that’s both intimate, but has a big sound. The latter is because of all those friends who now feel like family. You’ll hear lots of instruments in “We Will Meet Again,” but nothing gets in the way of their perfectly balanced harmonies. This is wholesome, energetic, goes-down-easy music. On “Days” they sing: There are things you don’t understand yet, but your family gets. And family is both who you are and who you find on the way. ★★★★

@edwardandjanemusic

Treehouse Sanctum tells about a different Jane. In "Jack and Jane" this six-piece Denver-based folk rock band personalizes the age-old question of whether boy + girl = good pair, or bad match through a catchy tune, robust instrumentation, and the sharp-edge/soft-edge vocals of Sam Rymer and Danya Lynn Uptegrove. It's one of eleven amazing songs on Vivere, which means "to live" for those of you whose Latin is as lousy as mine. This band is new to me, but now that I know, I can't get them off my playlist. You name it and they do it right—splashes of trumpet of "Chacala," punchy 1-2-3 vocal combos, a magic moment, and shifts accurately described as "hush to howl." Rymer is a gifted singer in the sense of really knowing how to use his voice effectively. On "Rest of Me," for instance, he puts one in mind of Van Morrison without channeling him. It's the way Rymer uses his voice to punch through a big mix and then let it ride with the sequencing. About those big mixes, I mean rolling Hammond B-3, brass, and percussion-enhanced big. The title track uses the tale of Paul on the road to Damascus as a foil for the moment when life takes a 180-degree turn and, if you have any doubt about this band's IQ, some of the lyrics are indeed in Latin. The way in which the song builds is a marvel, with power chords, crisp drum beats, swelling sound, and mighty vocals marking the conversion. It's the sort of song that would called "signature," were it not for the fact that they top it with"Pilot and Crew," which recounts the true tale of a World War II crew of ten shot down over Germany that endured ten months of a POW camp. Check out what they do with snippets in the opening and close, and how well they evoke an aerial melee. Want more? "Shelby" is a bluesy jazz piece built around big-production piano. This CD is a dazzler. ★★★★★

@treehousesanctum

Steve McCormick is one of those versatile "How 'ya want it?" musicians. Maybe it's because he's spent a lot of time doing sessions work in LA cranking out tunes for commercials, writing movie soundtracks (Felicity, Jack Frost), building high-end microphones, and collaborating with big name producers. Or maybe he's just eclectic. His new Noisetrade EP The Tripping Years showcases his many moods. He puts on detached hipster garb for "Say a Prayer for New York City," which unfolds to blue horns, robust bass, and attitude: Say a prayer for New York City….don't you dare show no pity…. At the other end of the spectrum is a country/pop cover of Townes Van Zandt's "At My Window," and a take on Lucinda Williams' "Fruits of My Labor" that milks emotion from keys and blue-eyed soul. In between lies the Delta/Chicago blues fusion of "Lying on the Bottom," which features grit, spit, grungy guitar and gospel-like female backup singers. Flip it again for "Hello, Hello," which is simultaneously melancholic and inviting—literally so with lyrics like: Come into my life my love/Don't you be alone. This is a really strong body of work that proves that McCormick can command the mic on his own. ★★★★

@itsmccormick

Anytime you see the name Mark O'Connor you want to pay attention. At this writing, O'Connor is about to drop Coming Home, a live CD that features his own genre-defining fiddle work with additional string work from his wife Maggie and his soon-to-be daughter-in-law Kate Lee, plus mandolin from son Forrest, standup bass from Geoff Sanders, and flat-picking from Joe Smart. How good are they? Three sample tracks told me all I need to know. "Those Memories of You" is a live track that leaves the station on a high, lonesome note and arrives with a full head of steam that needs to cool down after one of the best covers of “Johnny B. Goode” you’ve heard in ages. Among the passengers: sizzling fiddle work, newgrass jazz licks, bold slap bass, vocals delivered auctioneer-style, and sold-my-soul mandolin virtuosity. "A Bowl of Bula 14" unfurls with quick mando runs and five minutes later, you'll find yourself gasping for breath. Instruments break across each other's bows and wakes like they're in a mad dash to make it to harbor first. Do I even need to tell you that O'Connor paterfamilias is pretty damn good? "Macedonia" impresses in a different way. Forrest O'Connor uses his mando to set up musical conversations within a melodic structure punctuated by breakouts and swells. I've not even heard the rest of the album yet, but I'm already thinking five stars!

#duoviolin  

 

 Since 1996, New Hampshire's Dreadnaught—not to be confused with an Australian metal band of the same name—has cranked out what it calls “experimental prog-Americana.” It’s latest effort, Hard Chargin’, will be hailed as inventive by some and a big mess by others. I’m somewhere in the middle. Imagine a heavy metal band with the weirdness of Frank Zappa and his serious forays into jazz, and you’d get something like this. “Have a Drink With Dreadnaught” is like heavy metal cowboy music fused with pop. By contrast, “Mummies of Cobboseecontee” is a blender full of soundscapes, electronic pulses, jazz, and metal. “Bo-Leg-Ba” is both the title of a track and its entire lyric, and “Takin’ a Ride With the Fat Man (Fatta Fattta Puck Puck)” isn’t a whole lot more verbose. This one left me perplexed, as it struck me as an intriguing departure from the ordinary at one moment, and just an excuse to make loud noise the next. ★★

Wind River One of the Year's Better Films

WIND RIVER (2017)

Directed by Taylor Sheridan

Weinstein Company, 111 minutes, R (violence, rape, language)

★★★★ 1/2   

Taylor Sheridan, who penned the Oscar-nominated script for Hell or High Water, is no stranger to gritty drama set in wide-open spaces. In Wind River he tries his hand at directing and serves up a first-rate murder mystery set in the namesake mountain range and Indian reservation of central Wyoming. It is an awe-inspiring setting, but of the variety that is equal parts beautiful and terrifying. It takes a self-contained person to live amidst such isolation, bone-jarring winters, and soul-sucking poverty—the kind that knows how to suit up for subzero temperatures and dash across high altitudes in a snowmobile.

Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is a laconic U.S. Fish and Wildlife official whose tracking, hunting, and wilderness skills make him a modern-day mountain man. That handle also fits because he's not nearly as adroit in people skills and has an Indian ex-wife named Wilma (Julia Jones) to prove it. He tries to be a good dad to his young son, Casey, and a good neighbor to everyone, but he's more the kind of guy you admire than love. We suspect he's psychologically scarred, which ironically makes him one of the few Anglos that local Indians and mixed bloods respect.

Wind River is built around Lambert's discovery of the body of 18-year-old Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Chow), the daughter of Martin (Gil Birmingham) and Annie, a Native-American couple whom Lambert has known for years. It's clear from Natalie's gashed forehead and bare feet that she has been murdered, but several technicalities—including the 'official' cause of death and the part of the mountain in which she was found—cloud the investigation. Is this a matter for the tribal police—basically its chief, Ben (Graham Greene) and part-time deputies—or the feds? Not even the FBI knows for sure, which is why they send a single agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), and she's a Floridian by birth. Basically Ben and Banner are left to sort it out and both know they will need Lambert to aid them.

I mention this setup because, at this juncture, Wind River could have become a cookie cutter film. You know the type—people from differing backgrounds cooperate, learn to respect each other's differences, and beautiful relationships blossom. The fact that none of this happens in Wild River is among the things that makes it a really fine film instead of a string of high-altitude, high-toned clichés. Another is that its characters don't—if you will—break character and become snow-suited versions of Mr. Rogers. There's stuff in the back-story that won't reduce to formula: the (often warranted) distrust between locals and outsiders, the crushing despair that can break those who lack purpose or opportunity, deep wounds that might never heal, and the incompatible pulls between tradition and whatever the hell modernity means in a place so remote.

Despite its grisly scenes and forays into violence, this is a gorgeous film to watch. Sheridan uses Wyoming's grandeur to do far more than provide a pretty frame. There is the palpable sense that people such as Cory, Ben, Wilma, Martin, Annie, and others are close with their words because the land reminds them of their ephemerality. In this sense, Renner's performance is tone perfect, and Birmingham and Greene are just a half note behind. Olsen is competent as FBI agent Banner, though l longed for an ineffable something that I imagine a young Jodie Foster would have brought to the role. Truth be told, the bad guys are presented with a heavy hand that plays out too much like a Western, but Sheridan redeems himself with a memorable and satisfying vengeance scene.

Perhaps the biggest rap against the film is that Sheridan doesn't have a very good sense of timing. This film, like last year's Hell or High Water, hasn't gotten the audience it deserves. Weinstein, the film's distributor, initially backed out and then reconsidered. This pushed the film into summer release, a time in which it's hard to gain traction amidst all the mindless blockbuster-at-the-mall hype. Wind River has garnered film festival accolades, but it's in limited theater release and is easy to overlook. Don't make that mistake; this is one of the year's best films.

Rob Weir