New Releases from Soko, Stern and Leahy and Vallely

CD Clear-Out:

Rob Weir

It’s as predictable as a Fox News hissy-fit: every January I find myself with un-reviewed CDs about the time I need to crank it up for spring semester. So here are several capsule reviews of music you might want to check out.

Robert Soko, Balkan Beats Soundlab (Piranha 2649)

 * * * 1/2

Bosnian mix master Robert Soko serves up a smoking selection of dance tunes for younger hearts and legs than mine. Normal disco music is around 120 beats per minute, but I’d swear some of these are closer to 180! And the music–where Balkan sounds-meet-dance hall-meet punk-meets jug bands–is far cooler than the generic sounds associated with look-at-me discos. This is music that by turns, crunches, jazzes, rocks, and sweats.

Christy Leahy and Caoimhin Vallely (Traditional Arts 001) * * * ½

If Soko wears you out and you feel the need for something more traditional, these two Irish vets offer a baker’s dozen collection of tunes performed on instruments that tickle two different sets of keys: button accordion and piano. Leahy and Vallely have been colleagues in the raucous pub band North Cregg, but here they offer solid sessions-style jigs, reels, and polkas that’s more toe-tapping music than the full-body fling necessary for keeping up with Soko. You can almost smell the turf fire on this intimate, but highly accomplished album. 

Leni Stern, Smoke, No Fire, (Leni Stern Recordings 1041) * * *

  

Speaking of fire, usually a title such as that on Leni Stern’s new release invokes a lack on enthusiasm, but it’s actually quite appropriate for a record that smolders instead of combusting. Stern is a renowned blues and jazz guitarist who also loves Malian music. She combines all three on this record, and her playing demonstrates deep understanding of West African rhythms and phrasing. She also dazzles on the banjo-like ngoni. The vocals are less successful, in part because her voice lacks deep resonance of her African backup singers, and in part because the miles are starting to show. But as a meeting place between cultures and styles this recording offers many sublime moments. 

Gone Girl Deserving of Accolades

GONE GIRL (2012)

By Gillian Flynn

Crown 9780307588364

* * * *

Most movie fans would pick the shower scene from Psycho as director Alfred Hitchcock’s most horrifying film moment. Maybe, but Hitchcock made his reputation as a master of psychological horror and suspense, not overt bloodiness. He understood that life’s most frightening moments are those in which we don’t know what’s going on and begin to imagine all manner of terrifying possibilities. Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl is much in this vein. It’s scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote, though it’s not a book in which foreboding killers emerge from dark recesses, and the only monsters are internal.

An old adage holds that things that look too good to be true probably aren’t. This is certainly the case of Gone Girl’s protagonists Nick and Amy Dunne. Nick is a devastatingly handsome man of simple virtues, and Amy is beautiful and whip smart. In fact, on the surface she is the grown up version of Amazing Amy, the series name of best-selling children’s books penned by her psychologist parents, Rand and Marybeth. Not coincidentally, royalties on those books inflated Amy’s trust fund/dowry. When Nick and Amy marry, it’s like a royal wedding. Replace the castle with a restored Brooklyn brownstone overlooking the Manhattan skyline, and aristocratic hideaways with the limitless glamour available to rich, young New Yorkers madly in love, and the royalty analogy comes into sharper focus. The only problem is that Nick and Amy’s marriage is actually more Charles and Diana than William and Kate.

Things begin to unravel when Nick convinces Amy to leave the city and settle into the Dunne family homestead in North Carthage, Missouri, to care for Nick’s mother, who is dying of cancer. North Carthage has already passed on–a Mississippi River corpse just outside of Mark Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal that can’t even sustain a mall. (It’s likely that the model is Hannibal, as the real Carthage, MO is on the other side of the state near Joplin. It’s also consistent with my observations of today’s Hannibal.) Amy ends up being the solo nursemaid, as Nick and his soul mate sister Margo are busy running a bar purchased with the last of Amy’s trust fund money. We also quickly sense that Amy has grown bored with Nick, who isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. She has nothing to do once Mrs. Dunne passes, and it’s as if she’s an exotic fish gasping for air after jumping from her backwater tank. Nick is oblivious to Amy’s deep unhappiness. On their fifth anniversary, he faithfully fixes her a nice breakfast, trudges off to work, and returns to find her gone.

Unraveling Amy’s fate is the core of the novel, and all signs–including a series of enigmatic scavenger hunt clues left by Amy–point to murder at Nick’s hands. What unfolds next is complex and creepy. Whatever you do, do not leaf through the book’s final chapters to find out what happens because the journey on which Flynn takes us is a giant puzzle whose pieces we must assemble one at a time. Don’t trust what you think you see or foresee, as very little is as it seems. This includes the personalities of most of the book’s characters. There are so many red herrings in this book that the reader often experiences existential dread analogous to the viewer of a Hitchcock film. I imagined murder motives running the gamut from Oedipal jealousy to filicide to psychopathic obsession, and I’m not commenting on my sleuthing skills! Let’s just say that truth is elusive, no matter who purports to utter it.

Flynn is a talented storyteller, which is essential when your narrative is populated by characters that routinely spin yarns of dubious authenticity. She tantalizes us with clues, adds appropriate touches of humor to keep the tone from becoming too somber, and manages to make even implausible clues seem possible. (That’s another Hitchcock trait!) She also makes us care about or loathe the book’s characters so intensely that we feel the same emotions as they, right down to imagining suitable revenge scenarios.

This is the proverbial page-turner. Gone Girl showed up on just about every book critic’s list of top books for 2012, and deservedly so. Two things will happen when you finish this book. First, you’ll wish it had been longer. Second, you’ll feel so soiled you’ll wish to take a long, cleansing shower, Psycho notwithstanding.   --Rob Weir

Quartet Predictable and Tepid

QUARTET  (2102)

Directed by Dustin Hoffman

BBC Films, 97 minutes, PG-13

* *

Dustin Hoffman is perhaps the greatest actor of his generation but as a director, he’s no Martin Scorsese. The new British comedy Quartet is akin to having a conversation with a high-IQ slacker–you keep waiting for it to go somewhere, but it never does. It is an unremarkable paint-by-the-numbers vehicle for elderly actors that takes no risks and pulls every punch hence it packs no wallop. Moreover, it’s derivative of many films we’ve seen before, most of them superior. Call it Best Exotic Marigold Hotel set in Buckinghamshire with an operatic soundtrack. It even has a common link to that film: Maggie Smith.

One of my movie-going friends commented that she has Maggie Smith Fatigue–largely because the 78-year-old Dame Smith has been reduced to typecast roles. If you look at what she’s done in the past 15 years, most of it is a variant of her Downton Abbey star cameo turn as the Dowager Countess of Grantham. You know the type–a faded patrician whose aristocratic airs have grown stale, but one that refuses to tamper her egotism or her frosty disdain for perceived social inferiors. Of course, that steely exterior is all surface; inside lurks a woman capable of wit, wisdom, and unexpected compassion. In Quartet Smith’s Dowager Countess is reconfigured as Jean Horton, once the world’s finest operatic soprano. Now she’s old and broke, a charity admission to Beecham House, where past laurels are still good enough to command deference and perquisites.

Beecham House is a special place, a former country estate barely hanging on as a retirement home for master musicians. It’s really an assisted living facility, but at least it sings and swings; in other words, Downton Abbey as a stone music box. Jean is thrust into a facility that not only contains her one-time rival, Anne Langley (Gwyneth Jones); but also the first of three husbands, Reginald Pagent (Tom Courtenay); a doting not-quite-peer, Cissy Robson (Pauline Collins); and the rakish Wilf Bond (Billy Connolly).  Jean, Reggie, Cissy, and Wilf collectively make up the four greatest opera singers of their generation. Alas, that generation was a long time ago–so far in the past, in fact, that Jean refuses to sing lest it destroy her frozen-in-amber illusion of herself as a global diva. She cannot come to grips with either her mortality, or the reality that few outside of Beecham House and its inner circle of patrons remember who she was.

What do we do with this? How do we divert attention from the journey to ashes we all must take?  As has been done in numerous movies, we put the institution in peril. Beecham House needs a serious cash infusion or it will fold within six months. Luckily its annual Verdi’s birthday bash is coming up, and wouldn’t the world’s greatest opera quartet be just the thing to fill the hall and shake loose some serious donations? A final curtain call, if you will. If only Jean will agree. There are, of course, complications. Cissy is tottering on the edge of memory no return, Wilf is more interested in sexual scores than those from Verdi, and Reggie and Jean have major unfinished business. You can probably finish the script from there; in fact, you could probably do better than Ronald Harwood’s screenplay. If Hoffman is serious about directing he will need to do more than simply turn loose his actors, superb though they are.

These old pros offer some redemption for the uninspired script and laissez-faire direction. Maggie Smith doesn’t just mail in her performance; she’s rather affecting as Jean because, for once, she lets us inside enough to feel her conflicted emotions. Pauline Collins is very solid as Cissy, as she walks a thin line in which her self-control is as thin as her grip on her fading mental faculties. She’s at once fawning, exasperating, and tragic. The vastly underrated Tom Courtenay holds Reggie’s smoldering torch with a shaky determination and is so convincing that he adds dimension to what is essentially an underwritten part. Connolly is our Falstaff–a randy satyr whose minor stroke has robbed him of the few filters he ever possessed. He’s equal parts charming and vulgar. There are also delicious small parts–Sheridan Smith playing the lovely and competent Dr. Lucy Cogan, the director whose whip smart instincts help her keep giant egos in check. Dame Gwyneth Jones is also a delight as the puffed up Anne Langley and is a perfect foil for Smith. Michael Gambon likely had a blast in the role of Cedric Livingston, an insufferable impresario who gets to chew scenery and who must have bribed the costume mistress for his popinjay wardrobe.

Does this redeem Quartet? Not really. The film is just 97 minutes long, but it feels longer because it doesn’t have much to say and leisurely fails to say it. It’s so pedestrian that we know what must happen long before it does. Add this film to the list of weak 2012 offerings. I can’t recommend it unless you are looking for pure diversion. But if you do go, a tip: Stay through the credits as there’s a sweet treat in them that’s more endearing than the film itself. --Rob Weir  

Musaner Misses the Mark but DeLeon is on Target

Musaner; DeLeon

Once Upon a Time; Tremor Fantasma

Lucent Music; Tremor Fantasma

*/****

Jazz has become the masala of music. It spices everything from rock and folk music to Celtic and Country. In fact, we’re so used to hearing it mixed with other things that it can sound uninspired on its own, a problem that plagues a new release from the Armenian jazz ensemble Musaner.

I had high hopes that I would hear some intriguing experimental fusion music from an 11-member ensemble led by classically trained pianist Ara Sarkissian, a man of Armenian ancestry born in Cyprus, sired in Lebanon, and now in Boston. What we get instead is pretty tame stuff that would be pleasant if heard in a late-hours café, but is tepid stripped of context. Many of the titles belie what we hear. “A Ride Through the Mountains” sounds like an unfocused Paul Winter composition, with clarinetist Todd Brunet in the Winter role. There are intriguing piano and sax notes interspersed throughout, but they are cool in both senses of the word: impressive, but also unapproachable. The title track is the album's strongest track. It too is cool in that it has a wintry feel enhanced by Sarkissian’s icy-but-light keyboard fingering. But at 9:13 it’s way too long to sustain the feeling and it has an improvised middle section that comes off as a force fit. You’d probably expect tracks such as “Overnight Train” or “Strewn by the Wind” to pick up the pace, but they don’t. In fact, the saxes in the latter composition hardly stir let alone blow hard. In all, a languid release and not what one would expect from such a large ensemble.

 DeLeon’s Tremor Fantasma is more properly a world music/rock release than jazz, though there are jazzy riffs throughout–as well as smatterings of many other things. Multiple influences are precisely what one would expect from a group specializing in Sephardic music. Unlike Musaner, DeLeon front man Dan Saks freely mixes the musical influences of peripatetic Jews. “Barminian,” for example, is a Turkish folk song redone in mariachi style. If you can picture a group of Turks with accordions and oversized guitars singing in Ladino in a Oaxaca plaza, that’s the effect! Saks repeats this throughout, with Greek and Spanish songs given a Latin flavor in Mexico, where he went to make this record. But it’s not really “Mexican” either; a song such as “Buena Semana” sounds like it should be, but only if we call it Mexico by way of Jamaica. DeLeon use an unorthodox combination of instruments: banjos and guitars, but also trumpets, glockenspiel, and “junk” drums, the latter basically anything that can be thumped, banged, clapped, or crashed together. It is often compared to Balkan Beat Box or Gogol Bordello, not because it’s a sound-alike, but because the ensemble is often irreverent, innovative, and delightfully unpretentious. Check out “Ya Ribon Alam,” which is haunting in the way that a pop anthem set in an echoing cathedral might be. It also has more life in its first 30 seconds than in the entire of Musaner’s latest. Tremor Fantasma makes the earth move. 

Mario Testino Exhibit at MFA Misfires

Bold, or clichéd? 

Mario Testino Photographs

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

Through June 16

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is a national treasure. It’s less pretentious and more accessible than the Met, the Getty, or the Smithsonian; yet more cerebral than peers in cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia. I adore the MFA, am an active member, and have been attending exhibits there for over 30 years. But even the greats misfire. I will not mince words: the current exhibit featuring the work of Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino is the single worst thing I’ve ever seen at the MFA.

Testino made his reputation doing glamour shots for magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as filming in official capacity for some of the highest profile designers on the planet. Like many fashion photographers his stock-in-trade is the high contrast glossy, especially those oozing attitude. Testino is a first-rate technician who occasionally snaps a stunning image, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. Frankly, I’m not sure why subjects are anxious to have their images captured by Testino unless they are more interested in notoriety than flattery.

I liken most of Testino’s photos to the more unwatchable films of Quentin Tarantino. In each case there is a sense of failed ironic detachment–we’re supposed to be looking at something else, but what we really see is the creator enamored of his own supposed cleverness. Testino seeks to shock, but we see the contrivance in each pose. Quite a few of his images are soft porn, the grabbed crotch being a favorite ploy. There is often a lot of flesh exposed in his shots, but mostly in a slutty “white trash” sort of way. Put another way, he’s no Robert Mapplethorpe! He’s no better in manipulating fear. The MFA choice–for obvious reasons­–was to spotlight an image of Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady exchanging toothy snarls with a Doberman pincher. Does this horrify? Does it impress as unique? Is there an older contrivance in all of journalism than the man-bites-dog trope? He’s also been the go-to shutterbug for Brady’s supermodel wife, Giselle Bundchen, whom he alternatively presents as akin to a high-priced hooker, or as an anatomical freak whose legs attach in unnatural ways. Both, of course, are forms of objectification.    

One might call the MFA show the beautiful and the damned. The latter category is reserved for his portraits of British royalty. Were she alive, I’m sure that Queen Victoria would proclaim, “We are not amused.” In his royalty shots Testino feminizes most of men and masculinizes the women. Prince William looks like the biggest toff in British history–quite a statement, but not the kind the Windsors are likely to sanction. Ten minutes in this gallery will make you wonder why on the earth the British public countenance the use of public monies to pump up these pimps; fifteen will make you think guillotine!

Testino’s photos are ultimately a form of self-serving decadence–devoid of content and, more distressing still, utterly without character. In fact, they are not even about their subjects; they are look-at-me images that focus on the man behind the lens, not who’s in front of it. Ego and art are a delicate balance. Andy Warhol, for instance, was also a pompous twit, but he knew when to draw attention away from himself–even if he had to bore us in order to do so. (Think some of Warhol’s tedious films, or his endless reproduction of iconic images such as Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup.) Would that Testino could fake detachment as well as Warhol.

Those planning a trip to the MFA should skip this exhibit and head instead for the delightful exhibit titled “The Age of the Postcard.” It is a dizzying display in miniature of 400 cards (mostly from Europe) spanning the years 1890 to 1930. That’s where you’ll find unalloyed whimsy, the protean rhythms of daily life, and intriguing caricatures of famous people. It also possesses a quality sorely missing in Testino’s photographs: humanity.

-Rob Weir

            

American Rust a Tough But Honest Read

AMERICAN RUST (2009)

By Philipp Meyer

Random House 978-0385527521

* * * *

In 1980, Emily and I drove through the British Midlands, making our way through the jobless devastation of Birmingham, Leeds, Wolverhampton, Stoke-upon-Trent, and other non-garden spots.  It was mile upon relentless mile of wasteland: abandoned mills, dire housing developments, decay, decadence, drugs, and hooliganism. It also occurred to me, and I said so at the time, that I was glimpsing America’s future. That wasn’t prescient, merely observant–deindustrialization had already begun to exact its toll, especially in places such as our birth-state of Pennsylvania. Although the term is older, the Associated Press began referring to the “Rust Belt” in 1982, and it was soon part of the everyday lexicon.

The fictional town of Buell, Pennsylvania–modeled loosely Charleroi, located on the Monongahela River 20 miles south of Pittsburgh–is the setting for Philipp Meyer’s debut novel American Rust. Although his book is character-driven, he does for the Rust Belt what Steinbeck did for the Dust Bowl. Meyer presents the “Mon Valley” as the corroded resting place of the American Dream. The Mon Valley has its wooded charms, but it’s never been synonymous with the adjective “bucolic.” But at least its towns and cities once hummed with life, courtesy of the smokestack industries (steel, coal, glass, railroads) that pumped black ash into the air and greenbacks into workers’ pockets. By the late 1980s, though, the Mon Valley looked like the British Midlands only worse. (In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not much of a social ‘safety-net’ in the USA.)

Meyer takes us inside dying blue-collar towns, the shabby streets, vacant lots, and empty red brick factories. They are places where there’s more short-fuse anger than long-term prospects. The Mon Valley is where teens huff glue, bums camp out before hopping the next freight train, and where ex-steelworkers hold down several jobs and jack deer out of season to keep food on the table. And, as several characters remark, it’s a constant reminder that this is not the way America was supposed to be.

Meyer tells his story through the eyes of six main characters. The least developed of these is Henry English, though he is a metaphor for what went wrong. Henry bought into the American Dream–literally–by buying a large house in Buell for his wife and two kids. His job disappeared and Henry went off to Ohio to keep up his payments, until that job dried up as well and an industrial accident left him an invalid. His wife died, but at least his libidinous daughter Lee got to Yale and married a rich man/boy. Left behind to tend to Henry is his son Isaac, a slight, brilliant lad of 20 who belongs in college but has few realistic chances of attending. He’s so unsophisticated that his grand life plan involves stealing cash from his old man and hopping a train to Berkeley, where he will just waltz into the University of California. His best friend, Billy Poe, is a handsome hulk and former high school jock who should have fled the Mon Valley on a football scholarship. Instead, he lives in a house trailer with his mother, Grace, and each daydream of fanciful escapes and opportunities squandered. Grace–still attractive in her 40s but weathered–is estranged from her no-account husband and has occasional flings with Harris, the local police chief and a decent guy.

The drama unfolds when Isaac decides to flee and takes Billy along with him–just for the first leg of the journey to the outskirts of town. But this is no On the Road, rather a harrowing tale involving an accidental death that looks like murder, an insider’s look at the brutality of American prisons, bouts of unrequited love and realized lust, peeks into small-town corruption, and a trip to nowhere.  American Rust is not a feel-good story, but it is one of the most brutally honest books on the shelf. It’s marked “fiction,” but tap into a few oral histories and you could change the label to “sociology.” Other than size, Buell isn’t that different from scores of other places in America: Flint, Detroit, Gary, East St. Louis, Watts, Buffalo, Allentown, Holyoke, Oakland….

Meyer isn’t always a great stylist–his depictions of intimacy seem particularly clumsy–but he’s an excellent storyteller and American Rust, for all its grit, is a surprisingly quick book to consume. It’s not easy to digest, though; it doesn’t just reveal, it rubs your face in what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett called the “hidden injuries of class.” Meyer utterly demolishes the myth of America as a middle-class society and calls into question bourgeois assumptions. Many Americans think it’s fine that dirty jobs like those of the Mon Valley went away. No, it’s not. Not when there’s nothing to fill the void. Not when a kid like Billy is trapped on a dead-end street and one such as Isaac stands a better chance of being adducted by aliens than seeing the inside of a UCal classroom. Not when the black ash and greenbacks flee at the same time. Money can’t buy you happiness, but its absence sure does purchase a lot of misery.

American Rust is a tough book, but one every American should read. If America is not supposed to be this way, who made it such? Until there is culpability there is no justice, and where there is no justice, there is no hope.  --Rob Weir

Hat Check Girl Releases Spooky Gem

HAT CHECK GIRL

Road to Red Point

Waterbug 110

* * * *

If your idea of female/male country collaboration courses toward the overwrought lyrics and contrived drama of Lady Antebellum, steer clear of Hat Check Girl; Road to Red Point is something moodier, rootsier, and more ominous. When Annie Gallup and Peter Gallway label their songs, they drag out adjectives such as “spooky” and “haunting,” and they’re not kidding. This album has quite a few songs about drifters, desperados, losers, and hard-luck folks who, as they do in “The Other Road,” tend to relive regret rather than moving on. The title track also evokes memory, but check out its crunchy bass-driven lines that evoke swamp rock and make you think that maybe an alligator or two will appear to no good end. This dark little gem of an album serves gall along with the whiskey. In “Under Those Trees” Gallway sings: “I never took to the Bible but the words ring true/It’s a hell of a story when you’re lonely or blue/Life is a hard road to travel but we struggle and try/And will sleep in comfort when we die.” How about a love song in which the lady of desire stepping from the shower is compared to Scarlett O’Hara?  As you may recall, she was a romantic figure, but also a tragic one. “Remember” is also a love song, but the kind an outlaw might write. You want a nice ending? You’ll find it “Up in the Country” where “it’s colder than Satan,” and he isn’t the worst thing encountered on the road to redemption.

Gallup and Gallway gives us scorched earth country–literally in the case of “Texas is Burning,” a piece that’s a cross between chronicle, music, and Beat poetry. The entire album evokes the sort of thing Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer might have done after a weekend of reading Nietzsche. So why would anyone want to hear this? Because it’s a sonic wonderment enveloping lyrics of poetic honesty rather than canned emotion. Give this one a little time. At first, it’s quiet and creepy, but the more you listen, the more it gets under your skin and you begin to see tiny rays that pierce the darkness with hope. My hat’s off to Hat Check Girl for a bold, unconventional album. Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a potent brew nonetheless.--Rob Weir

Here's the only decent YouTube video of Hat Check Girl. This song is on the new album.