David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

A Contemporary Classic: David Bowie's The Next Day

Not too many years ago David Bowie was the artist to watch. His dynamic musical career continually offered listeners something different at almost every turn. Not content to just release “yet another record,” Bowie always challenged his audience. We never knew what to expect from album to album, each as unique as the last. Every fan eagerly awaited his next move and then, after a world tour called Reality, he decided to call it quits in 2004. Afterwards, he made the occasional surprise appearance with the band Arcade Fire, or turned up at some fashion show. But the fans were still watching, just not necessarily expecting a new album any time soon.

All that changed on January 8^th, 2013, Bowie’s 66^th birthday with the surprise release of a new single called “Where Are We Now?” a moody ballad that walks us nostalgically through the streets of Berlin, circa 1977. To me it sounded like “Thursday’s Child” from the album, hours (1999). But with the release of the single and an album to follow, Bowie was clearly back in the music business once again. Foregoing any auto-tuning, Bowie’s vocal on “Where Are We Now?" is a little raw. He sounds older and I respect the fact that he’s not hiding behind the mask of Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. This is Bowie in 2013, after some health issues, quietly revealing him in the first of many songs written over the last couple of years.

Mesmerizing Motion: Interview with Louise Lecavalier

Louise Lecavalier first made her mark in 1988 as the lead member of Montreal’s internationally celebrated contemporary dance company, La La La Human Steps, executing airborne barrel rolls and other gravity-defying manoeuvres with the speed and stealth of a human torpedo. Born in Montreal in 1958, the dancer once called “a flame on legs” had originally studied classical ballet and modern dance, becoming a professional at 19 when she joined Quebec’s now defunct, Le Groupe de Nouvelle Aire. There, she met fellow dancer Édouard Lock who found in her petite but powerful physique all the inspiration he needed to become a world renowned choreographer with Lecavalier as his steady partner in creation.

Lock and Lecavalier became one of those once-in-a-lifetime dance partnerships; he tirelessly invented, and she fearlessly executed anything he threw at her, including air pirouettes and hard crashes to the ground. Together, they invented a new, and Canadian-made, theatricalized slam-dancing aesthetic that became widely imitated. But no one could replicate Lecavalier. Few had her strength or stamina. By age 32, Canada’s first contemporary dance superstar was making international headlines with her striking platinum blonde looks, powerhouse body and mesmerizing androgynous presence. In 1985, she became the first Canadian to win a prestigious Bessie Award in New York for her hyper-athletic performance in Lock’s 1983 work, Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel. She had won fans around the world dancing as part of David Bowie’s stadium rock tour in 1990, and Frank Zappa's The Yellow Shark concert series in Germany with the classical group, the Ensemble Modern, in 1992. Months after her 40th birthday, in 1999 Lecavalier quit La La La Human Steps to start a family and a new phase of her career, first as an independent dancer, and then, as of 2006, as artistic director of her own Montreal production company, Fou Glorieux, showcasing work made for and performed by her on the international stage. In 2008, Lecavalier was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and last year, she received a Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in Dance. At age 56, the force of nature (and mother of teenage twin girls) is still performing. This month, she brings her solo show, So Blue, which features her own choreography, to Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre for two shows only, May 29 and 30. In anticipation, Deirdre Kelly recently caught up with Lecavalier to find out how she keeps the creative fires burning.

A Conversation with Photographer Albert Watson

Jack Nicholson, from Albert Watson's Icons series, 1998 (All photos courtesy of the IZZY Gallery)

New York City-based celebrity photographer Albert Watson is a master of his profession. His images have appeared on more than a hundred Vogue covers and countless other publications from Rolling Stone to Time Magazine, many of them featuring now iconic portraits of rock stars, including David Bowie and Eric Clapton, in addition to Hollywood actors like jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood and other notable high-profile personalities, including Steve Jobs, Mike Tyson, Kate Moss, Sade and Christy Turlington. Exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, Watson recently made his Canadian debut at Toronto’s IZZY Gallery (106 Yorkville Ave; izzygallery.com) with a retrospective show called ARCHIVE, which closes on December 27. Aged 70 and with a career spanning 40 years, Watson is one of the few internationally acclaimed photographers still working exclusively in film, processing it himself in his dark room. All of his hand-processed images now hanging in Izzy Sulejmani’s gallery are for sale, enabling collectors as well as fans of Watson’s work to own something by one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, according to Photo District News. “Photography is quick communication,” he told critic Deirdre Kelly during a recent visit to his New York City office lined with some of the images for which Watson is celebrated. “People easily get it.” 

Here’s more of their conversation.

 

Photographer Albert Watson (Photo by Gloria Ro)

dk: These are wonderful digs you’ve got here in TriBeCa, close to the Hudson River and flooded with natural light. I am assuming this is where you work?

aw: We don’t shoot here, no. I no longer have a studio of my own. We had a huge one in the West Village from 1987 to 2008, about 26,000 square feet. But I sold it to a hedge fund guy. Now, we don’t actually have a studio. We don’t need one. About 25 or 30 years ago, light in a space was fairly important. But nowadays you can replicate the light in a studio with technology. The business has changed, which is why we moved here. We’re now much more focused on supplying work for galleries and museums – fine art work and producing prints and making platinum prints. We make all our prints in the office and rent studios when we need them. Everyone told me that I would miss having my own studio. But I’ve spent my whole life working in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Milan and other centres, including Toronto, and I’ve become quite used to photographing in other people’s studios. Where I work doesn’t have to be my own space. 

Lonely Outcasts: The Death of Lou Reed and Velvet Goldmine

The news that Lou Reed had died sent me back to his records – to his work with the Velvet Underground, which redefined the subject matter and artistic possibilities of rock music, and to personal favorites among his solo albums, from Berlin to Street Hassle to Ecstasy. But it also sent me back to the most memorable and affecting things written about Reed, especially the grappling that Lester Bangs did with him in the early seventies when Bangs was the marquee star and aesthetic and moral compass of the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem. (For the buoyant details, see Bangs’ posthumously assembled best-of collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.) Rock criticism was never more many-hued and exciting than in the late sixties and seventies that became Bangs’ heyday; it had the thrill of a field populated by young hotshot writers excited about something that was going through a metamorphosis and that hadn’t yet been written about to death.

Someone like Lou Reed, with his tear-it-down-and-start-again approach to the music and his combination of grand literary ambitions and simple diaristic writing style – what Bangs once referred to “the Lou Reed ‘I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in in’ school of lyrics”– made rock criticism necessary. It’s not just that someone needed to try to make sense of this work, but that someone needed to get the word out about it, and keep it alive until it could be properly discovered; in the case of the Velvets, the traditional ways of making sure that excellent work in popular music, such as the radio, weren’t doing their jobs. Reed, who started out as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records, seems to have had, at best, mixed feelings about being written about by people who, as he scornfully put it, were “analyzing rock and roll!”

The Cult of Rock and Roll: Six Degrees of Art, Poetry and Music

William S. Burroughs (right) with Jimmy Page, guitarist/composer of Led Zeppelin.

A writer with the incredibly apt but real name of Alexander Kafka, who frequently writes about literature for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune, penned what I’ve long felt was an ideal characterization of beat legend William S. Burroughs: “Burroughs was an ethereal intermediary between here and the fiery beyond, pausing to give us the purgatorial skinny.” That skinny was transmitted, of course, in haunting and disturbing novels such as Junky, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. However, it is through his influence on every other aspect of 20th-century culture in all media that his spectral presence as a witness was most perhaps most long-lasting.

Music for instance. What do Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa, Jim Carroll, Jerry Garcia and a few even more disparate musicians all have in common? William Burroughs. Kafka cleverly referred to them all as the writer’s amped-up apostles, and indeed they were, chiefly as a result of his outlaw status but also partly because of his unique and innovative literary techniques. All of the above musical artists, to one degree or another, were influenced by not just the Burroughs style and ethos but also the surreal potential to manufacture new and fresh meanings as the result of aleatory alignments of thought, image and text.

Music Memory: Steven Hyden's Twilight of the Gods

Author and classic rock aficionado Steven Hyden. (Photo: Uproxx)

Steven Hyden’s Twilight of The Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (Dey St./Harper Collins) is one of the best books about a life in music from a non-musician that I’ve ever read. His short volume is a blend of memoir, music history and criticism that is so full of wit that it’s hard to resist laughing to oneself on every other page. Here’s the first line: “For as long as I can remember, classic rock has been there for me.” Classic rock? Really? By revealing his love for classic rock albums and its famous performers, Hyden’s book is really a long-winded yet fascinating story about his relationship with music from his early years until the present.

Cherry Bombs: The Runaways

Given that The Runaways, a new film about the late ‘70s all-girl hard rock band, is written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, who cut her teeth doing videos for Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, Christine Aguilera and The White Stripes, it’s rather surprising that The Runaways’ music ends up so secondary to their story. Their story doesn't come to much either. Sigismondi gets so caught up in art school impressionism that she loses touch with the theme of the material. Instead of providing the propulsion needed in depicting a young rock band finding its chops, The Runaways gets lost in a haze of rock video clichés and amorphous trysts between lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and lead guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). The picture develops about as much fizz as stale ginger ale.

The Runaways were a group of underage Southern California female misfits who were molded by L.A.’s freak Svengali Kim Fowley into a pre-punk outfit that confronted their audience, in both song and image, with a provocative jail-bait allure. What they provided was a clever reversal of the male rockers’ sexual obsession with young girls that was often depicted in songs like Andre Williams’ hilarious “Jail Bait,” Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and The Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues.” These brash and provocative girls turned that prurient fascination back on the audience with trashy rock like “Cherry Bomb” (a saucy re-write of “Wild Thing”) and “You Drive Me Wild.” While clearly influenced by the polymorphous glam of David Bowie and Sweet, The Runaways also had some of the tough effrontery of The Ramones and The New York Dolls. Fronted by Cherie Currie, a blond punk chanteuse in lingerie, The Runaways had solid back-up with Joan Jett’s surly rhythm guitar, Lita Ford’s stinging lead runs and Sandy West’s kicking-over-the-trash-can drumming. Kim Fowley brought together a group of disaffected middle-class teenagers and made their disaffection part of their group identity. But, the irony is, that fierce independence was built on their total fealty towards him.

Part of this theme does get into the movie, but Sigismondi lacks the dramatic instincts to shape the material in such a way that the group – as a group – makes any sense. We don’t really get to see how the girls bond under Fowley’s sadism. She not only takes great liberties with their story (the film is based on Cherie Currie’s memoir), Sigismondi doesn’t develop that core relationship with Fowley which would ultimately lead to the band’s break-up. Sigismondi chooses instead to focus on the dynamic between Currie and Jett so that the rest of the band becomes invisible supporting players. For the first third of the picture, though, both Fanning and Stewart give credible performances. Fanning has a quiet insolence that makes her a shrewd choice to play Currie. (It’s a shame, though, that she gets stuck playing out conventionally dramatic family scenes with her jealous sister and alcoholic father.) Stewart thankfully loses some of those mannerisms that marred her starring roles in Twilight and Adventureland. She downplays Jett’s tough-girl image and illuminates instead the pleasures she gets from her impudent behaviour. Michael Shannon is on hand to play Kim Fowley and though it seems like the ideal Shannon role, he devours so much scenery that the camera has to duck. Michael Shannon is too perfect for Fowley and his abusive attributes come across more as an actor’s stunt than a true performance. (He looks like a brooding Lurch doing Max Cady out of Scorsese’s Cape Fear.)

Jesus As Heartthrob: Stratford Festival's Jesus Christ Superstar

 Paul Nolan as Jesus (centre). Photo by David Hou.

It’s not often I sit in the theatre, head bowed. But toward the end of director Des McAnuff’s powerful re-staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Stratford Festival (one of Canada's preeminent theatre companies located in Stratford, Ontario, southwest of Toronto), that’s exactly what I was doing. From that position I could see that my hands were also clasped on my lap as if in prayer. It was involuntary. I was raised Catholic – in the beleaguered Catholic enclave of Derry, Northern Ireland, no less – and so visions of Jesus hanging on the Cross move me in ways of which I’m often not aware. Faced with actor Paul Nolan suspended high above the stage, arms outstretched like the crucified Christ, instantly conjured the yearning of childhood when I used to pine for Jesus, just as the nuns taught me to do. I recalled, sitting there in the darkness of Stratford's Avon Theatre, how before I was 10, I wished for a time machine to whisk me back to Garden of Gethsemane so I could warn him to make a run for it by dawn. Jesus, in other words, was the first big love of my life, the one person I’d do anything to save for all the saving he was said to be doing of me. It’s that idea of Jesus as heartthrob that McAnuff plays up in his revival of the 1971 Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera based loosely on the Gospels’ account of the last week of Christ’s life, and it’s an idea that works miracles. This Jesus Christ Superstar is a hit. It plays at Stratford now through October.

See You At The Curtain Call: Twin Peaks – The Return (2017)

Despite my best efforts, there are a few unavoidable spoilers within. 

“'We are like the spider,' said the king. 'We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, "Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it.". This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world we have created.'"

– Thomas Egenes & Kamuda Reddy, Eternal Stories from the Upanishads

"We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?” 

– David Lynch

I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been anything on television close to what director David Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost unleashed the last few months in their 18-part serial Twin Peaks – The Return. More than being simply a sequel to the original 1990 ABC series, Twin Peaks, which focused on the murder investigation of the high school senior Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) by FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), or a mere continuation of the follow-up 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which examined the circumstances leading to that murder, Showtime's Twin Peaks – The Return was an abstract murder mystery that resisted solutions and begged even more questions. It was like finding yourself seeped in a David Lynch compendium where you experienced the full body of his work – including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – as one long amorphous trance as plot lines vanished, dramatic moments imploded, and nightmarish visions suddenly erupted and took hold. Twin Peaks – The Return was the source of much frustration because within that Lynchian theme park of devious delight were also hours of flattened-out kitschy comedy that not only tested your patience, but drew some of his worst instincts, those that had already been on display in Wild at Heart, and parts of Lost Highway. Yet the baggy unevenness of Twin Peaks – The Return wasn't simply a case of the director's intuition taking a holiday and intermittently going wrong. Lynch, who works almost entirely from his unconscious, seemed to be refusing to make any kind of conscious judgement over the material. It was as if he'd decided instead to run the table with whatever came into his mind (bad or startlingly good) to see where it might lead him – and also, of course, the viewer. Knowing that there was an audience out there both nostalgic and fiendishly curious to return to Twin Peaks after such a long hiatus, Lynch turned this epic tale into something more than a conclusion and resolution to the story. Twin Peaks – The Return was a turbulent meditation on the past, on the nature of nostalgia, on the tropes of television serial drama, and on death itself.      

Revisting the Past: Peter Gabriel's New Blood

I've never been one to see a singer/performer more than once, maybe twice in concert. I've always felt why ruin the wonderful memories of the first time, especially if the concert knocked me out. So I've only seen David Bowie, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, kd lang, Femi Kuti, Youssou N'Dour, Chicago, Sergio Mendes, Tito Puente, Santana, REM, Jethro Tull, Ultravox, Jamie Cullum and The Guess Who and others just the one time. (Okay, maybe I saw The Guess Who twice, but it was 15 years apart; and I saw N'Dour three times, but only once fronting his own concert.) The exception? Peter Gabriel. Between 1978 and 1988, I saw him in concert 5 times. Each concert was as good as the others, sometimes the next one topped the one before. The last time was during the Amnesty International tour in 1988 (that is also where I saw Sting, Springsteen, and kd lang).

Gabriel's music first captured my attention around the time he left Genesis in 1976. As the years rolled on he pushed himself by embracing world beat, reggae, jazz and, of course, rock, As his interests changed, so did mine. He introduced me to the wonders of African artists like Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keta, Thomas Mapfumo, King Sunny Ade and several others. His discoveries became my starting point for other discoveries. His concerts continued to attract me because, like his musical tastes, his presentations evolved and morphed from one idea to another. No one concert was the same as another. Eventually, as Gabriel stopped recording actively, my interests drifted away. My musical tastes began to evolve and change as I experimented with jazz, hip hop and sounds and music from countries all over the world. But, that curiosity and interest in exploring different music was first inspired by the works of Peter Gabriel.

When They Were Young: A Coming-of-Age Saga

In any category for failed films with a fascinating premise and stellar cast, 2008’s Flashbacks of a Fool deserves a spot at the top of the list. Although the title perfectly describes the narrative structure and the protagonist, it creaks with obviousness. Daniel Craig plays the fool, a British actor named Joe Scot who has destroyed his once-enviable career with booze, drugs and non-stop anonymous sex – a role model for Charlie Sheen! He lives in a sterile California mansion, where his black housekeeper, Ophelia (American rapper Eve), seems to be the only person who cares enough about him to say: “You’re a disgrace to white folks.”

When his agent drops him around the same time Joe learns that an old chum has died back in the United Kingdom, he hits bottom by getting drunk and wading into the surf off Malibu. Suicide? Apparently not. That watery sequence provides an awkward segue, as the script by writer-director Baillie Walsh suddenly lands on the English coast 25 years earlier. The Scot family – Joe’s mother Grace (Olivia Williams), his Aunt Peggy (Helen McCrory) and little sister Jessie (Mia Clifford) – lives on the beach in a sprawling, slightly funky cabin. The nearest neighbor is a cranky busybody, Mrs. Rogers (Miriam Karlin). Two doors down: the flirtatious Evelyn Adams (Jodhi May), her rarely-seen husband and their neglected daughter Jane (Jodie Tomlinson), who is about eight.

Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Dancer Claudia Moore

Claudia Moore (photo by David Hou)

By calling her latest show Escape Artist, Claudia Moore conjures an intriguing picture of herself as a kind of Houdini of the dance. Technically an illusionist, the death-defying escape artist alluded to in the title strives to be free of restraints, be they handcuffs, straitjackets or cages in a sea of sharks to name some of the claustrophobic situations these suspenseful performers have been employing since their arrival on the pop culture scene at the end of the 19th century. Moore, a seasoned dancer who is artistic director of her own MOonhORsE Dance Theatre company, obviously loves the concept. But her solo show of four commissioned works which played at Toronto’s Dancemakers Studio in the Distillery District during the last weeks of October (including a Hallowe’en performance where the audience was invited to come in costume) did not take the shackle and bust theme literally. In other words, no real chains only imagined ones.

Elephant in the Room: The Mystery of Jack White

“Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense . . . ” – George Ade

As a member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and the Rome project (with Danger Mouse, Norah Jones and Daniele Luppi), Jack White III has certainly proven himself as a songwriter, singer, performer and musician. But it's also an impressive list when you add up White’s own production work with his bands, as well as producing other stellar artists like Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, The Greenhornes, Dexter Romweber Duo, his wife Karen Elson and even his pal Conan O'Brien.

White also oversees the record label he founded, Third Man Records, where his productions are released and where occasional live concerts are captured on analog tape in the back room. But the real action has always been taking place on 8-track, 2-inch tape in his self-designed, private studio in Nashville, where he's been busy at work since September 2009 on many diverse projects, including Wanda Jackson's excellent album, The Party Ain't Over, and the launch of his publishing enterprise, Third Man Books.

Lukewarm Offering: Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore

Vanessa Paradis in Café de Flore

Unlike most of the films emanating from English Canada, French Canadian movies, or at least the ones released outside Quebec, are usually so interesting and provocative that it’s startling when a film from there, such as Xavier Dolan’s overrated 2009 debut J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), turns out to be a dud. In fact, other than Dolan’s misguided effort, and the Quebecois’ continuing and baffling appreciation of the low and crass humour of films like Les Boys and Cruising Bar, both of which have spawned sequels, pretty much everything I’ve seen from there has been worth my time at the cinema. More recently, these have included Denys Arcand's smartly satirical Oscar-winning Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (2003); Ghyslaine Côté’s Elles étaient cinq (The Five of Us) (2004), a powerful and disturbing look at the ramifications of rape on its victims; Bernard Emond’s deeply philosophical and moving 20h17 rue Darling (8:17 p.m. Darling Street) (2004), which offers much relevant and topical wisdom about Quebec’s economic underclass; Jean-Marc Vallée’s superb and highly imaginative coming-of-age masterpiece C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005); and Denis Villeneuve’s poignant, emotionally devastating family drama Incendies (Scorchers) (2011), among others. Those French-language movies have managed to be intelligent, accessible and energetic, unlike the usual English Canadian model, which is mostly comprised of stiff, restrained and dull art house fare. (That’s a dictum best exemplified by almost the complete output of Atom Egoyan (Ararat, Chloe)). They also provide proof that Canadian movies can work on many entertaining levels at the same time. That’s why Jean Marc Vallée’s third film, Café de Flore, is such a disappointment; it’s a movie whose appeal lies entirely in the director’s mind.

New Broadway Musicals: SpongeBob SquarePants & Mean Girls

Lilli Cooper, Ethan Slater, and Danny Skinner in SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway. (Photo: Youtube)

The output of musicals in the current Broadway season seems leaner than it is coming after the unusually hefty 2016-17 roster. The reason last season was so heavy was that many companies had elected to delay for a year to avoid coming up against Hamilton in the 2016 Tony Awards race. And even with more shows to choose from, I would hardly call 2016-2017 a banner year for musicals: I loved Bandstand and Come from Away, and there were several reasons to see Dear Evan Hansen if you could ignore the nonsensical book, but that was about all. This season brought the transfer of The Band’s Visit, one of the best new musical shows of recent years, from its downtown venue at the Atlantic Stage Company to a Broadway house. Having opted to skip the two new jukebox musicals, Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville and Summer (a bio of Donna Summer), I checked out the only other offerings, SpongeBob SquarePants and Mean Girls, shortly after their official openings.

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World: From Society to Screen

Politically oppressive regimes threatened by the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll are a key factor in two 2009 films set three decades and 1,500 miles apart. Christian Carion’s Farewell (originally L’Affaire Farewell) is a feature that chronicles a true 1981 cloak-and-dagger tale in Moscow, where a Russian KGB analyst’s teenage son cares more about David Bowie than Karl Marx. Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, a docudrama by Bahman Ghobadi, focuses on the many illicit indie bands dodging authoritarian rule in contemporary Tehran. Both productions make for potent cinema that transcends cultures and continents, much like music.

 The Velvet Underground helped inspire Czechoslovakia’s bloodless 1989 Velvet Revolution, apparently a designation that began to take hold among dissidents when a copy of the Andy Warhol-influenced band’s first album was smuggled into Prague 20 years earlier. In Farewell, French engineer Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet) smuggles in a cassette of Queen’s News of the World, along with a Sony Walkman, at the request of a KGB mole, Sergei Grigoriev (Emir Kusturica). In a field far from prying government eyes and ears, his alienated adolescent, Igor (Yvgenie Kharlanov), mimics Freddie Mercury’s moves to “We Will Rock You.” 

Heavy Fog: Bryan Ferry's Olympia

Bryan Ferry

I have a lot of respect for Bryan Ferry, a vocalist who's always had a flare for the glamour of the music business. He is classier than David Bowie, for instance, yet not too pretentious. Roxy Music, a band I've been fond of since the late '70s, offered music that was glam-rock, but with atmospherics thrown in for good measure. Recognizing his role as the front man, Ferry chose the high road by presenting himself without any theatrics, in spite of the pink suit he once wore when I saw the band in 1978. The band may have appeared stiff on occasion, but Ferry would soften the group with a dedicated vocal and presentation that was at once romantic and hip. Inspired by the music of Stax artists such as Sam & Dave and Otis Reddin et al, Ferry loved the notion of presenting his music as big as possible, with female back-up singers and reeds usually played by Andy MacKay. 

Cracked Mirrors, Part One: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer-Songwriter

Brian Wilson in action, 1966.

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror.” – Marcel Proust

The inimitable Elvis Costello once remarked, with his typical sarcastic bravado, that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. Now, far be it from me to contradict one of our greatest singer-songwriters, as well as one so prominently featured as a prominent Island in my own musical criticism over the years. However, some exception must be taken to the talented Mr. Costello’s observation. First of all, let’s readily admit that he is utterly correct, in so far as music, and especially the songs that it conveys to us, are both best appreciated in the temporal immediacy of the listening experience itself. But reflecting on their origins, their blueprint, so to speak, can often clarify how such songs so powerfully occupy the landscape of both our overall culture and our own personal lives. 

At the Crossroads: Sting and The Rolling Stones

Sting performing at the Dubai Jazz Festival in 2015. (Photo: Satish Kumar)

In his 2009 book of critical essays called Heroes And Villains (De Capo), music scholar David Hajdu writes, “Rock ‘n’ rollers, as they age, sometimes find themselves outgrowing a music they cannot outlive. … In the past few years, several prominent rockers of a certain age have pursued a novel solution to the problem of growing too old to rock ‘n’ roll – …. They are backdating their careers [by] repositioning themselves so as to be associated with styles of music that preceded
rock. .… Each of these efforts represents not just a detour from rock but also a claim to higher ground.” Hajdu goes on to cite Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Sting as artists who’ve released albums of music dedicated to “the higher ground.”

Two recent releases by the aforementioned Sting, now 65 years old, and the septuagenarian Rolling Stones are a return to the crossroads: a pilgrimage, if you will, to the once fertile soil of their musical roots. On December 2nd, The Rolling Stones released their all-blues album called Blue & Lonesome (Polydor). Last month, Sting released his new “rock” album called 57th & 9th (A&M). Billed as his first rock album in 13 years, the album’s title comes from his favourite intersection in New York, the corner of 57th and 9th, not far from Columbus Circle, in what’s commonly known as Hell’s Kitchen. It’s in this location, as he told Stephen Colbert, where he meditates while waiting for the light to change at the busy crossroads. As he says in the liner notes, “I do most of my thinking while walking … so walking and the conjuring of stories were intrinsically bound together for me.” The result of Sting’s thoughtful walks is his new album of rock songs, but like the terrain of New York City, it’s an uneven journey with very little “newness” to it.