Too Rich To Ignore: Randy Newman's Live in London

Quite a few artists have been revisiting their catalogues lately with new recordings, either in studio or live. Ray Davies recorded some oldies with a local choir, then redid some of the same tunes with special guest stars including Mumford and Sons and Bruce Springsteen. Guy Clark’s latest album is the all live Songs and Stories. And Randy Newman, who is neither dead, nor retired (more on that later) has recorded two volumes of new studio versions of classic tunes, and now presents us with Live in London (Nonesuch, 2011). a multimedia extravaganza of epic proportion. Okay, that may be hyperbole, but let’s call it irony since Mr. Newman is quite familiar with that.

The new set from Nonesuch Records includes a DVD of a live broadcast done for BBC television in June 2008, and a CD of the same show. The recording is beautifully done and the performance enhanced by the presence of the BBC Concert Orchestra under the direction of Robert Zeigler. Newman says he has worked with bad conductors (including himself) and good conductors, and that Zeigler is one of the good ones. The charts are sympathetic with Randy’s solo piano accompaniment, and watching him in shirtsleeves in front of the orchestra (all dressed in black) provides most of the video excitement in the programme.

A Pleasant Shock to the Senses: Randy Newman's Born Again (1979)

In August 1979, Bob Dylan had just confounded his fans with Slow Train Coming, a full-blown announcement of his coming out as a born-again Christian. That same month, another Jewish performer would also be born again – only not as a Christian. Born Again was the title of a Randy Newman album which might have gone just as far as Dylan's had in alienating his most loyal fans except that it vanished before a whisper of debate could be stirred. Where Dylan has always been an omnipresent figure, an ever-changing undefinable force in the world, Newman is largely invisible to mass culture (except as the guy who writes music for Pixar movies). Dylan is also a performer who is the sum of the masks he wears, where a hidden history lurks behind each face, and behind every recorded album. Newman wears a collection of masks, too, but they are a different set of disguises than Dylan's. Newman's masks (like Woody Allen's) suggest more the harmless invisibility of the nebbish, but they act instead as a veil for the clever satirist. Newman has always been an outsider who with his trojan horse quietly slipped inside.

With a collection of tunes that might be defined as misanthropic 'comedy songs,' Newman took the popular song on Born Again to the edges of cruelty, as if to test the audience's ability to listen to them. Once again using the voice of the untrustworthy narrator, as he had in previous records like Sail Away (1972) and Good Old Boys (1974), Randy Newman (like Dylan) worked against the grain of mass audience approval. But (unlike Dylan), Newman really had no mass audience to reject him – except that a year earlier, he briefly found one with a notorious hit single called "Short People." Kicking off his otherwise lacklustre Little Criminals (1977) record, "Short People" is a harmless ditty, but it ended up epitomizing Newman's brand of satire and working against it. An obvious broadside attack on the absurdity of prejudice, few, in the end, read this catchy little number that way. Besides his small legion of fans, a whole new audience came to Newman because of "Short People" – and they made him briefly a household name for all the wrong reasons. (As with Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl," the audience responded as if it were a naughty novelty song.) But if his new listeners were enthralled with the narrow-minded protagonist of "Short People," a bigot who begins his ridiculous manifesto over a galloping piano ("Short People got no reason to live"), others were severely pissed off with what they heard. Who else but Newman could write a song about a guy expressing paranoia about tiny folks? The film Freaks did so unintentionally back in 1932, but that movie was hardly a satire; there was a weird sentimentality in the way the movie played on our sympathies for circus dwarfs and pinheads. "Short People" was at the other end of the spectrum. The character Newman created here was pathetic, much like the stalker in his "Suzanne," or the voyeur in "You Can Leave Your Hat On."

Incongruous Encounter: Frank Sinatra Meets Randy Newman

There have been some naturally skeptical reactions to the notion of Bob Dylan doing a cover album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. With a voice that is more a rough in the diamond than the reverse, his about to be released Shadows in the Night stands to prove an interesting challenge that hopefully will yield better results than his crooning of Christmas carols a few years back. But Shadows in the Night got me thinking about another incongruous encounter between Sinatra and another unlikely performer long before he died.

I think it's safe to assume that when Frank Sinatra created Reprise Records in 1960, he didn't envision a line-up that would eventually include Tiny Tim, Jimi Hendrix, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Neil Young, The Fugs and Randy Newman. However, by 1970, there they were, not to mention a host of others just like them – and here was Frank Sinatra situated among them. Curiously, at the time, Sinatra was also in need of a hit song. So he turned to an unlikely collaborator from his label: Randy Newman.

Frank Sinatra has been a best-selling artist for Capitol Records since 1953 after a long string of sensational albums. Sinatra possessed the kind of dreamy, forlorn voice that could reach down to the very essence of tenderness in a sad song. When he interpreted such indelibly sorrowful tunes as "I Can't Get Started," on No One Cares (1959), or "Willow Weep for Me," on Frank Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely (1958), he would embody the song's anguish so effortlessly it was if the compositions were singing him. Sinatra had perfected a distinctly romantic style, a sexiness born of both heartbreak and despair. He played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.

The Trouble With Paradise: Randy Newman's "Something to Sing About" and "I Love L.A."

Before singer/songwriter Randy Newman began work on his 1983 album, Trouble in Paradise, he was spending more time sitting around watching television and lounging by the pool than he was writing songs. "The gardener had contempt for me," he told Arthur Lubow of People Magazine. "He had to water around me." His inactivity was also having a strange effect on his family. "What made me really bad in those days is the kids would go off to school in the morning and I'd say, 'So long kids, you know, work hard and stuff,' and I just didn't do anything. [My son] Eric didn't know what I did. He thought I got paid for my tan." To solve his own trouble in paradise, Newman rented a room in Los Angeles with a piano and no telephone to disturb him.

Rolling With the Punches: Randy Newman's Land of Dreams (1988)

For many years, as a singer-songwriter, Randy Newman had avoided writing songs about himself. In the Eighties, he was also chiefly occupying his time composing scores for motion pictures, as his uncles had decades earlier. But, by 1988, Newman hadn't released a new album of pop songs since Born Again in 1979. What prompted the return to songwriting? Perhaps it was the innocuous Hollywood scores he was doing, music that faded with the pictures they accompanied. Or perhaps it was a need for a passionate reply to the conclusion of the Reagan era. In general, the Reagan years were a reaction to the dissipated idealism of the Sixties, which had given way to recession, Watergate and the Iran hostages in 1979. Ronald Reagan offered a quick remedy to America's sinking morale with eight years of cheap nostalgia. Public discourse couldn't have been more glib, poisoned by a new cynicism and cheap B-movie style dialogue that turned politics into an ugly game polarizing the saved from the damned. It was a spiritually unpleasant time concealed by a cheerful portrait of a false America that never was, and maybe never should be.

So, in 1988, after years of writing incongruently funny songs about the kind of country Reagan preferred to ignore, Newman constructed Land of Dreams, a new body about the America he himself was part of. Only this time, his real face began to peer through the veil of ambiguity he'd created for songs like "Sail Away" and "It's Money That I Love." For most of Randy Newman's career, we were used to hearing songs about a variety of American archetypal figures, but we rarely heard songs about him. The initial shock of Land of Dreams was that we were no longer hearing outrageous tales about slave traders, stalkers, Southern racists or demagogues. The album caught us up in Newman's own story by looking back to his birth in Los Angeles, the years later in New Orleans with his mother waiting for his father to return from the Second World War, and his problems at school. On the album, Newman draws on his own early life to address the prevailing themes of contemporary American culture – including racism, disenfranchisement and assimilation. What also changed was his voice, now less masked by his standard drawl. Newman sang in a cadence that was direct while simultaneously making the humour in some of the songs more cutting. There was less distance between the singer and his material. But Newman wasn't baring his soul in the way many pop singer-songwriters do, revealing their innermost traumas and longings. Land of Dreams instead implies a connection between the personal dreams of the artist, the dreams of the characters in his songs and the dreams of his country. The title didn't just refer to the American Dream, but more specifically to New Orleans, where Newman had spent his early childhood. Even the album cover, featuring a photo of Newman as a young child in his full Roy Rogers cowboy regalia, with two toy six-shooters in his hands, seems to be posing a challenge to that other cowboy in the White House who was taking the country through Death Valley Days.

A Drama of History: The 40th Anniversary of Randy Newman's Good Old Boys

"It's hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language," D.H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature (1924). "We just don't listen." Lawrence wasn't just talking about something as basic as the fear of something new. New ideas, as he later suggested, can always be pigeon-holed. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence explained. "It can't pigeon-hole a real experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves." Lawrence was addressing here the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. A panoramic and illuminating study, the polemic examines how a number of gifted writers were coming to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. For an artist who has barely registered on the public's consciousness, except in his movie music and his songs for Pixar pictures, singer/songwriter Randy Newman could be one of Lawrence's great dodgers – an Artful Dodger – and one who deliberately creates paradoxical narratives in his songs. And his music, like the writers of the previous century, has also been on a comparable sojourn. For almost half a century now, the country he depicts with both love and devotion is also riddled with broken promises, violence, paranoia, superstition and arrogance.

Obama's Subway Dream: Randy Newman's "Sail Away"

Back on June 2nd, Paul McCartney performed at the White House for President Obama, the First Lady, Michelle and their two kids. The occasion was McCartney receiving the third Gershwin Prize For Popular Song from the President. As well as accepting the award, McCartney played a whole selection of songs. With Stevie Wonder, he reprised "Ebony and Ivory." He serenaded the First Lady with the obvious choice of "Michelle," plus had other invited guests cover his material. In top form, Jack White turned "Mother Nature's Son" (morphing it with "That Would Be Something") into something strange out of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Dave Grohl amped up "Band on the Run," Emmylou Harris brought a plaintive mournfulness to "For No One," and Elvis Costello revisited the shimmering "Penny Lane." The Jonas Brothers (no doubt brought in for the kids) surprised all with their dynamic rendition of "Drive My Car." Later, President Obama praised McCartney saying that he had "helped to lay the soundtrack for an entire generation."

Randy Newman.

But what if, with the success of that evening still ringing in his ears, Obama decided to celebrate an American performer who was equally worthy of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song - say, Randy Newman. The evening might go like this: Newman turns up looking rather surprised to have been asked to perform (for the first time) in the White House. President Obama assures Newman that his kids loved his songs in Toy Story while Newman quietly suggests another more appropriate song. The President graciously tells Randy that it's his concert and in the new democratic spirit of the land he should play what he wants. Newman then takes his place at the piano which is situated under the photos of George Washington and his wife Martha. He begins nervously by introducing the number. "Years ago, I wrote this sea shanty for a short film that was ultimately never made," he began. "It was in the Nixon years so there wasn't very much money for this kind of thing." The audience laughs quietly in recognition of a time that had long passed. "But it's an Irish kind of tune, you know, like 'The Ballad of Pat O'Reilly.'" Everyone looks a little puzzled - especially the kids - since nobody knows the song. "Anyway, it's about a sea voyage that begins in Africa and it kind of goes like this."

Invisible Men

Ralph Ellison

In 1952, black American author Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man, a novel that addressed many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early part of the twentieth century. The book, which Ellison began in the summer of 1945 in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont, while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine, became a passionate, angry declaration of independence. (Ellison had already asserted a bold independence when he wouldn't serve in the segregated army, but chose merchant marine service over the draft.) But Ellison's rage wasn't just directed towards the racist society that had rendered him invisible, but also his disillusionment with the Communist Party he had joined and supported in the mid-Thirties.

Ellison felt betrayed by Party leaders who he felt had treated the black civil rights struggle as merely an expedient symbol, a means to an end in the Marxist class struggle against capitalism. Culture critic Robert Warshow would accurately address this phenomenon, the Stalinist corruption of American intellectual life, a couple of years later in The Nation. "[I]n the '30s radicalism entered upon an age of organized disingenuousness, when every act and every idea had behind it some 'larger consideration' which destroyed its honesty and meaning," he wrote. "Everyone became a professional politician, acting within a framework of 'realism' that tended to make political activity an end in itself. The half-truth was elevated to the position of a principle, and in the end the half-truth, in itself, became more desirable than the whole-truth." For Ellison, this couldn't have been true when considering the non-aggression pact that was signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Allegories and Prophesies in Song: "The Beehive State" and "The Devil Came From Kansas"

Singer/Songwriter Randy Newman, in 1971 (Photo by Charles Seton)

Historian Constance Rourke once observed that Americans are "a people unacquainted with themselves, strange to the land, unshaped as a nation." That particular kind of estrangement is rarely taken up in song, but listening the other day to Randy Newman's deceptively obscure "The Beehive State," from his 1968 debut album Something New Under the Sun, I caught some of the intriguing aloofness in the mystery she poses of what it means to actually be an American. "The Beehive State" begins with a delegate from Kansas taking the Senate floor, where he is asked to describe what his state is all about. But we don't find out very much from him. First, we discover that Kansas is for the farmer and "the little man." The representative then, with a persistence that suggests a declaration of war, tells the senators gathered that they all they need is a firehouse in Topeka. Hardly worth the trouble. Next, the senate calls to the floor a delegate from Utah. He steps forward with a desperate plea that is also rather opaque: he insists Utah needs water to irrigate their desert, but mostly he just urges everyone to tell this country about his state. Why? "'Cause nobody seems to know." But how much do we really know when the song – which is barely two minutes in length – is over? With a relentless staccato rhythm that he builds on the piano, Newman tells this story so swiftly that he barely gives you time to absorb what the song is actually saying (which could be nothing so urgent as a laundry list). But he gives the song all the immediacy of prophesied fact and portentous calamity. "It should be longer," Newman once told an interviewer. "But I couldn't think of more to say." So is less truly more?

Wake of the Flood: Louisiana,1927

Louisiana, 1927

Before the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the worst flood of the Mississippi River took place on Good Friday, April 15, 1927. When the levee broke, just above Clarksdale, water inundated the state. New Orleans in particular was hit with 14 inches of rain in 24 hours, although the city itself survived. What was most significant about the calamity was the transformative effect it had on the culture of Louisiana.

Blunt: Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave

During an interview with American composer Randy Newman on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition in the fall of 2003, host Bob Edwards questioned Newman's motivation for composing "Sail Away," a sweeping and majestic track about the slave trade told from the point of view of the slave trader. In the song, Newman not only steps inside the skin of this flesh merchant, he introduces his African captives to an idea of freedom which turns out to hold the fruits of every horror they will later face as black Americans. But the orchestral arrangement is so majestic, it arouses an eagerness to jump on board in spite of the words you're hearing. Shocked that Newman could write such a beautiful song about such a shocking subject, Edwards pressed on. "What am I supposed to say," Newman replied, "'Slavery is bad?' It's like falling out of an airplane and hitting the ground. It's just too easy. And it has no effect."

Newman could just as easily be describing Steve McQueen's new and highly acclaimed film 12 Years a Slave. If McQueen's first picture, Hunger (2008), boiled a complex situation down to a blunt portrait of one man starving himself to death out of political principle; and his second, Shame (2011), reduced a character's sexual obsession to a prurient judgment of his pathology, 12 Years a Slave, a true story about a free Northern black man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sold into slavery, repeatedly tells us – with the impact of a blunt instrument – that 'slavery is bad.' This approach may be too easy, but (judging by the enthusiastic reviews and huge box office) it has apparently been highly effective. McQueen achieves this acclaim by opting for endless scenes of pictorial abasement to whip up the audience's outrage rather than dramatically engaging us in Northup's fate. McQueen's glacial temperament and his freeze-dried painterly style (literally, with its nods here to Goya) treats melodrama as a formal exercise.

Dusty Sings Newman: "I've Been Wrong Before"

Music critic Rob Hoerburger, in his illuminating liner notes for The Dusty Springfield Anthology (1997), described the husky-voiced artist's impact on popular music in this way: "Dionne Warwick was more polished and Diana Ross sexier and Martha Reeves tougher and Aretha, well, Aretha. But Dusty Springfield, the beehived Brit, was always the smartest, the most literate, the wisest." In a career that spanned more than 35 years, she was also one of the finest white soul singers to emerge in the Sixties. Springfield covered, in the most significant and delicate ways, the gamut of soul, yet she also extended herself to perform lushly orchestrated pop and disco. Dusty Springfield not only could mine the emotions buried within a song, she would sometimes find emotions that weren't even planted there. Like Jackie DeShannon, Springfield's roots actually began in folk music. The trio she began with her brother, called The Springfields, made an early success of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" in 1962. But Dusty left the band early in 1963 to pursue a solo career. It wasn't long before she quickly climbed the charts with the exquisite "I Only Want to Be With You" in 1964, quickly followed by the majestic "Wishin' and Hopin'."

When she was recording her album, Everything's Coming Up Dusty (retitled You Don't Have to Say You Love Me in the U.S. after the title song became a huge hit) in 1966, which was sumptuously seeped in R&B, Springfield made a decision to include tracks by the great pop practitioners Burt Bacharach ("Long After Tonight is Over"), Goffin/King ("I Can't Hear You," "Oh No! Not My Baby"), and a new song by a West Coast songwriter named Randy Newman. (We were still a few years away from hearing the sly and subversive satirist of "Sail Away" and "Rednecks.") Since the mid-Sixties, Newman had been a songwriter-for-hire at Metric Music (the West Coast equivalent of the Brill Building in New York) churning out conventional pop tunes for just about anyone who'd sing them. But the Newman song Dusty Springfield chose to perform, "I've Been Wrong Before," turned out to be arguably his strongest, most memorable of those numbers.

The Masculine Ideal

Paul Newman and Sally Field in Absence of Malice (1981).

During the Christmas season, back in 1981, while visiting some friends of mine in rural Caledon, Ontario, I suggested going to neighbouring Orangeville to see a movie. The theatre in town was a duoplex with Sydney Pollack's legal drama, Absence of Malice, in one, and Burt Reynolds' adaptation of William Diehl's pulp potboiler, Sharky's Machine, in the other. But rather than making a quick choice on arrival, we ended up hitting a great divide. A huge argument broke out that almost sent us back home. The women were keen on Absence of Malice, where Paul Newman played a Miami liquor wholesaler, the son of a deceased mobster, who suddenly became a suspect in a front-page story about the possible murder of a union official. The men were primed and determined to see Burt Reynolds as an Atlanta narcotics sergeant working a drug case who gets demoted when, in pursuit of a drug dealer, he accidentally shoots a bus driver. We ultimately decided to split up and see our respective films before we ended up seeing nothing. (Full disclosure: I went with the women.)

Melville's Trickster: Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man

“Melville is not a civilized, European writer,” film critic Pauline Kael once wrote in praising Peter Ustinov’s 1962 film adaptation of Billy Budd. “He is our greatest writer because he is the American primitive struggling to say more than he knows how to say, struggling to say more than he knows.” In 1857, Melville’s particular struggle took the form of his very strange and experimental novel, The Confidence-Man.

The Confidence-Man, published on the eve of the American Civil War, caused quite the uproar. Perhaps Americans saw the novel as inappropriate, or even an affront to the unsettling issues the nation was then confronting. A swift and satirical discourse on a variety of moral and political concerns, The Confidence-Man was an oddly structured comic allegory about a shape-changing grifter who boards a Mississippi riverboat on (of all occasions) April Fool’s Day. The grifter victimizes an assortment of passengers in a series of scams on a trip that takes them from St. Louis to New Orleans. Once he wins his marks’ trust, he cons them with promises of charity and virtue. But even as the con man’s charm tests their resolve on a number of subjects, his ultimate goal is to reveal his fellow passengers’ deeper (and often contrary) desires. Melville introduces characters who change identities so rapidly that the reader is confronted with a portrait of the American frontier as perceived through a series of disguises. The novel operates on so many levels, with Melville playing clever games with both fact and fiction; it’s no surprise some readers become so dizzy that they desperately wanted off the boat.

Newman, Kronos and Presley: Americana On Both Sides

“Welcome, welcome, welcome . . . ," sings Randy Newman like a midway barker inviting us into his tent for a little sermon on the current state of mankind. Dark Matter (Nonesuch) is Newman’s 11th studio album of original songs and one of his most musically ambitious. The record opens with “The Great Debate,” an elaborate piece featuring a cast of characters in a musical battle among climate change, evolution and dark matter. The song is full of Newman’s sarcastic wit about scientists and religious fanatics juxtaposed with the power of gospel music, and, like much of this new album, it swings. By the end of "The Great Debate,” he settles for divine providence -- “Someone is watching me . . . " -- as the angels applaud. Dark Matter isn’t a concept album per se; it’s simply a set of interesting topical songs reflecting Newman’s current observations. Yet even a song about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis featuring John and Robert Kennedy, called “Brothers,” only seems out of place until we realize that the president is more interested in saving Celia Cruz than in a Russian blockade. And speaking of Russians, “Putin” stomps in with Newman’s acid tongue in full force, only to be calmed by the beautiful orchestration behind “Lost Without You.” On this record, one of his best in years, we get a fair share of satire, mockery and beauty all soaked in Newman’s unique sense of Americana, a gumbo of jazz, gospel and revivalist choirs.

Remembering Kevin Courrier: A Friendship Cemented Through Music

Kevin Courrier passed away on October 12. He would have turned 64 years old today.

I was already very interested in movies when I became friends with Kevin Courrier, the late co-founder of Critics At Large, in the late eighties/early nineties, not long after I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto and began reviewing films professionally on a freelance basis. We bonded over our affinity for American filmmakers Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, who were disdained by many of our colleagues, and shared a love of other directors, such as Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy) and Louis Malle (Lacombe, Lucien, Vanya on 42nd Street). But I think I learnt more about music from Kevin than from anyone else. As much as Kevin knew cinema, and he certainly did, I’d say he knew music even better.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XX

Andrew Lincoln in AMC's The Walking Dead.

I've grown to trust fan culture less and less as the years go on. There's a perfectly good reason: decent criticism ends up invalid in the face of it. Dedicated zealots will criticize a popular television show, but only within the confines the series provides – which means viewers will complain if a character they like dies in a manner they don't approve of, or if the arc takes an unpopular turn – but they don't think outside the confines of the show to examine what it is actually doing and why. This is what separates criticism (which asks why this and why now) from consumer reporting (which tells you what's cool to see and what's not). One form invites you to think and the other tells you what to think. And, if you haven't noticed, consumer reporters today find themselves more often employed than actual critics. (That's what makes marketing folks happy and many editors and producers relieved.)

A perfect example of fan culture criticism is AMC's popular zombie apocalypse series, The Walking Dead, which over the last six seasons has grown fascinated with splattering zombie brains each week (therefore trivializing death by endlessly numbing us to its gore). It even has an after-show gabfest, Talking Dead, where fans get to have their own variety show and the zombie is reduced to a lifeless commodity consumed to boost viewership and ratings. If people were fighting for their humanity in something like Night of the Living Dead, today people appear to identify more with the undead, as if true human feeling had already been gobbled up. The post-modern age has done much to chisel the tombstone of a more romantic and passionate response to death and destruction. In its place lies a comforting cool cynicism where folks distrust any form of rebellion against the norm. We're so inured to shock now that it's rare that a work of art even has the ability to cause a riot, or even perhaps stoke passionate debate. Until a couple of weeks ago.

When the latest uber-villain, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and his barbed-wire baseball bat, brutally and vividly bashed in the brains of two of the more popular living characters on the show, The Walking Dead suddenly prompted a number of its fans to walk away. (Talking Dead characteristically celebrated the season opener by screening it - without a whisper of intended irony - in a Los Angeles cemetery where the cast and fans could be wistful together and then jubilantly bring in a new season.) When it comes to the subject of death, The Walking Dead has long developed its own dramatic somnambulism. (Sometimes the corpses seem to be moving – and thinking – faster than the living.) But in the season opener, the creators pulled the cheapest trick of exploitation by prolonging the tension so that the audience would also get bashed over the head. (The most shameful bit of manipulation made the audience wait for an eternity to see if the hero, Rick, played by Andrew Lincoln, would cut off his son's arm with an axe to demonstrate his loyalty to Negan.) Where fan criticism might complain about the necessity of the gruesome violence, or bemoan the death of an adored character, a critic examines the larger issues. For instance, James Hibbert tweeted, "That The Walking Dead censors Negan swearing & won’t show nudity, but airs THAT feels like [a perfect] example of upside down puritanism." The Walking Dead is an ample example of "upside down puritanism."

Long May You Run: Vanishing Point (1971)

Barry Newman in Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971)

The movie director Richard C. Sarafian, who died last week, was a fascinating, immensely likable man with a long, mostly unlucky career. In the late 1950s, after bumming around New York University (where, as a lark, he took a screenwriting course while flaming out as a pre-med/pre-law student) and the army, he wound up in Kansas City, where he met Robert Altman. The two became drinking buddies and worked together in the theater and on industrial films, and for a while Sarafian was married to Altman’s sister. While still in Kansas City, he directed a shoestring first feature, Terror at Black Falls, and in the early ‘60s, he followed Altman out to the west coast in search of TV work.

In 1965, he got the chance to make another feature, Andy – a low-budget, Neo-realist-style character study about a middle-aged, mentally disabled man that he shot on the streets of New York, using money he received as part of a program by Universal to encourage new talent. The movie won some praise at Cannes, but Universal was apparently so unimpressed with it that, decades later, they turned down a request to allow it to be aired on Turner Classic Movies. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sarafian devoted most of his energies doing the best he could with various hopeless action-movie projects, including The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, The Next Man, the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Sunburn, and Eye of the Tiger (his final feature). The 1990 Solar Crisis, was officially credited to the notorious (and nonexistent) Alan Smithee. In the last twenty or so years of his career, he probably gave audiences most pleasure in his occasional acting appearances in other directors’ films. (His side career began in earnest when he played Willie Nelson’s brazenly crooked manager, Rodeo Rocky, who dresses like a stardust cowboy and talks like Brooklyn, in Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter. He also played the gangster whose violent degradation serves as an aphrodisiac to Warren Beatty and Annette Bening in Bugsy.)

Sarafian did make one classic, though –  the “existential,” “psychedelic,” and generally weird road movie Vanishing Point (1971), a film that the white-trash singer-songwriter Mojo Nixon once proclaimed would be on permanent display, as part of a continuous triple bill with Thunder Road and Two-Lane Blacktop, at “the amusement park in my mind.” Febrile, rapturously beautiful to look at, and cheerfully disreputable, it is a movie spawned by a remarkable confluence of talents: the screenplay is credited to “Guillermo Cain,” who was actually the great Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante. The film was shot by John A. Alonzo, who later shot Sounder, Conrack, and Chinatown. (He and Sarafian went way back; Alonzo had an acting role in Terror at Black Falls.) 

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part III

The Rolling Stones often had great B-sides on their singles ("Sad Day," "Long Long While," "Who's Driving Your Plane?"). "Child of the Moon," which backed "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is a particular favourite. It was their last bit of psychedelia before heading into the harder rock and country blues of Beggars Banquet. A contemporary band, Radon Daughters, have done the song justice by turning its acid tinged balladry into a tough piece of baroque pop.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIV

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (photo by Mary Ellen Matthews)

I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. But for the last 40 years, Petty and The Heartbreakers helped keep some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” a plaintive ballad like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played. I think critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine nailed Petty’s appeal and longevity perfectly when he said that he and The Heartbreakers "didn’t break from tradition the way their punk contemporaries did. Instead, they celebrated it, culling the best parts of The British Invasion, American garage rock, and Dylanesque singer/songwriters to create a distinctly American hybrid that recalled the past without being indebted to it.”