My Back Pages: Commemorating Gerde's Folk City

Today’s adolescents swoon for Justin Bieber. My genre of choice as a teen was acoustic and dominated by geezers, like the already middle-aged Pete Seeger. Until April 5, 1961. That’s when a new kid in town stole my heart after a friend at New York University brought me to a gathering of the school’s folk music society to hear a fledgling singer from Minnesota.

Musicians we admired in those days generally had a smooth delivery -- or aspired to -- but Bob Dylan’s voice was appealingly rough around the edges. “He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch,” critic Robert Shelton wrote in the New York Times a few months later. “All that ‘husk and bark’ are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs.”

There Will Be Blood: Ed Sanders' The Family

author Ed Sanders.

There have been a number of books on the Manson murders and how they (along with the violence at the 1969 Altamont rock festival) brought the utopian hopes of the ‘60s to a bloody conclusion. But there are none more chilling, observant, and chock full of insights than Ed Sanders’ The Family. Originally written in 1971, Sanders had been an active participant in the ‘60s counter-culture through his poetry and involvement in the satirical folk band, The Fugs. His book explains with shocking clarity how a psychopathic petty criminal, who had spent many years in San Quentin, could organize a group of middle-class disciples to commit horrific acts of violence. In The Family, Manson is portrayed as the shadow Maharishi Yogi, living out the darker implications of the communal lifestyle being celebrated in the hippie communities. When he justified his crimes by saying that they were inspired by certain songs on The Beatles’ White Album, it wasn’t just the psychotic ravings of a paranoid. The White Album did have its shadow side. There were elements of the music that reflected both the beginnings of the break-up of The Beatles, a band that had nurtured the utopian hopes of the hippies, as well as the violent upheavals happening around the world when the record came out in the fall of 1968.

The Beat of the Meter: Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep

Adapting poems to music is a tricky thing. You have the poet’s intentions regarding meaning and rhythm juxtaposed with the composer’s ideas for music to words that didn’t require them in the first place. At least that’s what a poet might think.

Natalie Merchant has released 26 tracks on 2 CDs adapting poems written for children that is absolutely remarkable for its originality by putting, not only musical notes to words, but styles, genres and diverse time signatures to each one. These songs come in the form of traditional folk music ballads ("Calico Pie") to Klezmer music ("The Dancing Bear"). "The Man in the Wilderness" written by Mother Goose is adapted as a Parisian folk tune. It’s a gorgeous example of how imaginative Merchant is as a composer. Sure the natural meter of the poem can suggest a beat for the music, but to take a children’s poem from the nursery to a French café requires a particular talent rarely heard in contemporary pop music. The Fairfield Four make a couple of appearances on this album ("The Peppery Man" and "Calico Cat"). "The Blind Men and the Elephant" also has just enough Southern feel to send you to heaven-on-earth. Five years in the making, Merchant’s time was well spent creating an album that is thoughtful, funny and eclectic. The package includes an excellent book with the poems and a short biography of the poets. A single CD version of Leave Your Sleep is available, but I highly recommend investing in this deluxe edition.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

Mortality Lurking: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Buy For Me the Rain

Back when I was a kid in Pickering, there used to be a drug store up at our shopping plaza that sold deleted 45s. They cost about ten cents each and occassionally I'd grab things that changed the temperature in the room. I found singles that never hit AM radio in Toronto like - believe it or not - Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," The Byrds' "Eight Miles High," and a trippy track called "Tomorrow's Ship" by The Sparrow. Who are The Sparrow, you ask? They were nobody in 1966 -- but, within two years, they became Steppenwolf.

One day in 1967, just before we moved to Oshawa, I found this song called "Buy For Me the Rain" by a group called The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I never heard of it (or them). But I liked the band name (did they come equipped with brooms?) and besides there was nothing else of interest at the drug store that day. When I took it home, I was immediately struck by the simple elegance of the track and the urgency of the singing on it. "Buy For Me the Rain" was like listening to the Kingston Trio with strings (but good strings). This was a love song, but like most traditional folk music, mortality lurked in the grooves. The opening melody, which is established on what sounds like a harpsichord, was doubled by a banjo and it provided a cheerful ambient bed for the urgent pining of the lyrics.

Screw's Loose: The Dubious Credibility of Loose Change

Note: News that a group of so-called leading American deniers, who impute an inside government job as being responsible for 9/11, are touring several Canadian universities, where their legions of believers are most manifest, prompted Critics at Large to weigh in on Loose Change, the ridiculous movie that has become the cinematic bible of those in the movement. Here are some thoughts on the film by David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and Kevin Courrier:

Loose Change (An American Coup), the latest version (2009) of the 'documentary' that claims to prove 9/11 was an inside job, is so easy to dismiss it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Beyond the fact this thing is dull as dishwater (I almost fell asleep watching it), it is poorly researched. If you look at what it does say, it's despicable. The film's creators claim the levelling of the two towers and WTC 7 (the smaller, nearby building) were all brought down by controlled demolition. On September 11, 2001, my wife was working at an engineering firm. Like many that day, the staff huddled around TVs watching the footage. When the towers came down, several of the structural engineers said "it's pancaking." They went on to tell my wife that in the event of a catastrophic event (such as super-hot heat from a fire that would cripple the building's core, causing it to collapse - heat generated by something like a load of jet fuel exploding), these buildings were designed to come down like that so that they would do as little damage as possible to the surrounding area. Granted, several other buildings were damaged and had to be destroyed, but if not for the original design the destruction would have been even worse. And if this was a 'controlled demolition,' it is probably one of the biggest botches of all time. A real controlled demo should not damage any surrounding buildings.

Proudly Presenting The End Of The World: Joe Dante's Matinee

Joe Dante's love and admiration for monster movies is fairly obvious. Look no further than The Howling (1981) or Gremlins (1984). Evidence can even be caught in The 'Burbs (1989). What's fascinating about Matinee (1993) is that it is both an endearing homage to the director's influences and an evaluation of how we've come to love being scared.

Dante's love letter to late '50s and early '60s creature features has some interesting notions up its sleeve. When director Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) premieres his newest film MANT (a film within the film) to mass hysteria in a small Florida town, Dante appears to be having the time of his life. While Dante finds humor in the monster movies that once frightened a nation he never neglects their cultural significance. The black and white homage he's crafted has an absurdly comedic premise and hilarious dialogue which is all unmistakably played for laughs. But Dante also gives his tribute a historical context and allows for us to understand why people would be afraid of something we find so funny in retrospect. Fifty years ago, audiences weren't really horrified simply because they saw fifty foot beasts running amuck in major metropolitan areas. They screamed with terror because many of these flicks acted as cautionary tales for a country on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.

The Power of Positive Swing: Rob McConnell 1935-2010

As the soaring alto sax solo of P. J. Perry pours over me, I remember Rob McConnell with great affection for his drive to swing and his sense of humour. In the liner notes to the first Tentet album on Justin Time [Just 150-2], McConnell writes of the arrangement "Two Bass Hit," "This chart has evolved into our major saxophone feature (wanker)." McConnell always took life on the lighter side. Alas, the darker side, liver cancer, took his life on May 1, 2010.

Born on Valentine's Day in London, Ontario, Canada during the Great Depression, McConnell took up the valve trombone in high school. Unlike the classic slide instrument, it's an instrument you have to muscle your way through just to stay in tune. The valves allow you to sound just like a trombone without hurting yourself or anybody in front of you. McConnell formed the superlative Boss Brass in 1968, a band that did not feature saxophones for the first two years. McConnell wanted to focus on arrangements in order to create a bold new sound for the late 1960s. It was a time in Canadian music when rock and roll controlled the airwaves and small group jazz was sequestered to clubs with little radio airplay. To form a big band at that time took some artistic and financial courage. But the name caught on and with the help of Ted O'Reilly, one of Canada's best jazz ambassadors, the band became a staple in the national scene, later touring the world with its unique presentation.

Band of Brothers 2: The Pacific

The HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers (2001), is one of the finest depictions of men in combat I've ever seen, so when executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks announced they were doing a sequel of sorts about the conflict in the Pacific (to be called, not surprisingly, The Pacific), I was simultaneously intrigued and concerned. Intrigued because the Pacific conflict is a much more ill-defined war featuring much more hand-to-hand bloodshed. I know far less about it than I do about the European theatre of war. The war in the Pacific was a series of horrifically violent conflicts where both sides did some nasty things. Most of it was fought on islands and atolls nobody in North America had heard of back then, and most of us would still have trouble pinpointing them on a map today. I was concerned because sequels (even if it really wasn't one) are usually inferior. Lightning rarely strikes twice.

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.

Contemporary Nostalgia: Christian Scott's Yesterday You Said Tomorrow

At 26, New Orleans’ musician Christian Scott seems older than his years, if not in a first-rate technique, in attitude and focus. His new release entitled Yesterday You Said Tomorrow is a very mature record. To my ears it sounds remarkably contemporary and nostalgic at the same time. In jazz, this blend is often a creative mistake or coincidence. For Christian Scott it is intentional: “I wanted to create a record that has all the qualities of the documents of that era (The 1960s) as they relate to our time.” For Scott, this era was a time of musical and socio-political commentary in the best tradition, as it were, of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. For me, as a Canadian, that’s less important to me as a citizen. What matters is the music: how it’s written, played and recorded. For Scott the genius of the 1960s jazz recordings of this era is Rudy Van Gelder whose studios in New Jersey housed the greats of Modern Jazz from Miles Davis to Thelonious Monk, with frequent visits from Mingus and Coltrane. The album opens with a modal groove and a tune called “K.K.P.D.” It sets up the mood of the album with an improvised guitar introduction by Matthew Stevens. Scott doesn’t come in until the middle of the song thus waiting for his turn in this collective effort. Stevens takes an emotional solo during “The Last Broken Heart (Prop 8)” that is in keeping with the slow theme expressed by Scott’s muted trumpet. That track is followed up with an up-tempo, funk groove from the young rhythm section led by drummer Jamire Williams. It’s refreshing to hear such great playing unsoiled by ego or technique. The keeper is a cover of Thom Yorke’s “The Eraser” from his first solo album from 2006. This sprite instrumental captures Yorke’s yearning vocal. Recorded over 4 days last April 2009, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow is one of the best jazz albums of 2010.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

Quick Cut and Fade to Black: The Passing of Dede Allen

I just read about the death of an American moviemaking titan most of the world has never heard of. But without her, many of the films between 1961 and 2000 that are now considered classics may not be remembered today. Her name was Dede Allen (1923-2010) and she was one of the most skilled film editors to ever pick up a pair of scissors.

Here's a brief list of the films she worked her magic on (and her abilities were magical): Bonnie and Clyde, The Hustler, Slaughterhouse-Five, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Night Moves, Slap Shot, Reds, The Breakfast Club, Henry and June and Wonder Boys. Hers was a singular skill, she brought a passion and a vision to her craft that is only matched by very few editors in the modern era (Thelma Schoonmaker comes to mind). Without her, it could be argued that Bonnie and Clyde would not have the impact it has. Mixing reaction shot, slow motion and cutaways, her decisions helped that film's finale become the legend it is. Even the slow-moving Reds has a visual rhythm that would not have existed without her. Considering how incredibly talented she was, it's quite amazing she worked on so few films (according to IMBD, 31 titles from 1958 to 2008, plus her first credit in 1948). Perhaps too many directors were intimidated by her abilities and therefore she was not given the amount of work she deserved. But when she worked, even if you didn't know her name, you knew you were in the hands of a master. Even something as relatively innocuous as The Breakfast Club "moves" because her hands were in the editing suite (and it is to John Hughes' credit that he hired her because of her work on Dog Day Afternoon, a very talky movie of another sort). The greatest crime of all is that, though nominated three times (Dog Day Afternoon, Reds and Wonder Boys, but not, unbelievably, for Bonnie and Clyde), she never won an Oscar. Maybe it wasn't just directors who were afraid of her, maybe so were her fellow editors.

Too many of today's films seem to be cut to ribbons, thrown into the air and stitched back together again (I'm looking at you, The Dark Knight). The ability to build story through cutting rhythm is increasingly a lost art, and with the death of Allen there's one fewer genius out there.

-- David Churchill is a film critic and author. He is putting the finishing touches on his first novel, The Empire of Death.

The Two Costellos: Elvis Costello Live at the El Mocambo & Live at Hollywood High

What a difference three months makes! The two recorded 1978 Elvis Costello shows – Live at the El Mocambo and Live at Hollywood High – are completely different from each other in tone, attitude and musicianship but, more importantly, they mark the coming of age and the maturation of Costello as a significant presence on the musical scene.

Costello, coming off a derided show in New York, landed in Toronto for a late night set, scheduled for March 6 at the city’s fabled El Mocambo club. The concert was to be broadcast live on radio; when news got out, the city erupted into a frenzy. People began lining up almost half a day before the 11:30 pm show, in the generally vain hope of scoring one of the 300 tickets available (minus those going to industry and record folk, of course).

By the time Costello hit the stage, expectations were remarkably high. To say he exceeded them was an understatement. Live at the El Mocambo, all 49 minutes of it (not including the encores which were not broadcast or recorded), is one of the best live shows ever put to disc, right up there with the 1971 Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East. As with that show, you can only wish you’d been there when you listen to it.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #5

My colleagues [Susan, Kevin, David & Shlomo] have previously and majestically destroyed Andrew O' Hehir's ignorant article "Film Critics: Shut up already!" I support them and their opinions whole heartedly. But I feel as if my position on the subject would be trite, so I'm shifting the looking glass from film criticism to the film industry's impact on it. Here are some disparate observations.

Beg, Scream & Shout!: The Flirtations' Nothing But a Heartache

When I was a kid, I treasured my transistor radio. Tuning into the local rock stations, I always found myself eagerly waiting to hear some song I fell in love with days earlier. Unlike today's Mp3 and IPad generation, where you can pick your tunes from a vast library you program on your player, there was an element of surprise to radio listening. You never knew when that favourite song would turn up. Sometimes you left your transistor on - with the ear-plug close by - just in case the DJ slipped in the tune, a track that changed the way you walked that day.

In 1969, one song that barely got any airplay (but certainly changed the way I walked) was The Flirtations' pop masterpiece "Nothing But a Heartache." The Flirtations were a black American all-female R&B band from South Carolina, but they actually made it big in England. They did it with a sound, too, that echoed the exuberance of the very best of Motown. "Nothing But a Heartache" was an indelible part of what was termed England's Northern Soul genre. In the late sixties, Northern Soul had emerged out of the British Mod scene. The music consisted of a particular style of black American soul based on a heavy backbeat combined with the quick tempo of Detroit's pop sound. But one of the key ingredients of Northern Soul was the manner in which the singers would convey heartbreak. It wasn't by expressing despair, but instead, by providing leaps of pure exhilaration.

Les Bon Temps: The Post-Katrina Angst of "Treme"

Most northerners are familiar with the French Quarter and the Garden District, historically popular New Orleans tourism destinations. But we probably have had limited knowledge about Faubourg Treme, a section of the Big Easy with a heroic legacy. Under 18th-century French and Spanish colonial rule, slaves had Sundays off, allowing them to gather in Congo Square to sing and dance. Many wore makeshift costumes with an indigenous flair -- the origins of contemporary Mardi Gras, in which elaborately dressed “tribes” parade through the Crescent City.

The Borrower: The Egregious Oeuvre of James Cameron

For the sake of the blog, I finally broke down and watched James Cameron's Avatar on DVD. Let me get this out of the way right off the top: It's a better movie than Titanic. That’s not saying much since I think that 1997 disaster flick is one of the worst films to ever win the Best Picture Oscar. In Avatar, Sigourney Weaver seems to be having fun in her tough-broad scientist role, and there's a couple of scenes here and there that at least got a chuckle out of me, but that was between long bouts of boredom while I watched cartoon characters (because this film, except for the sequences at the military base, is a computer-generated cartoon) frolicking around hippie-dippie landscapes. And don't get me started on the teeth-grinding dialogue or the stupid shoot 'em up at the end.

Book: I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and Nobody Can Pay

One of my favourite subjects in high school was economics because I was curious about how banking, high finance and political budgets work within Canada. (One of the favourite books explained government spending using guns and butter.) I took a course in my first year of university as well that was larger in scope by looking at political economic systems in Russia, China and the United Kingdom. While the details bogged me down, greatly affecting my grades, the macro-economic picture was much less illusory. These courses helped me understand the economic forces in the world and I applied that knowledge to a better understanding of “the big picture.”

But when the so-called “financial crisis” of 2008 occurred, I struggled to understand how the mechanics of the financial system were breaking down, literally on a weekly basis. Suddenly everything I learned in school didn’t fit the current economic malaise. It was a blend of investment bank failure, the collapsing automotive industry and the housing market in complete turmoil mostly in the United States with trillions of dollars at stake. So reading the stories and hearing about which bank failed, what government bailout was going to help which company and how the burst of the housing bubble was leaving people homeless, it left me numb. I didn’t know what to think or who to believe; I was simply struggling to understand what it meant to the world economic system and therefore what it meant to me. Something had changed systematically and my fundamental knowledge of economics wasn’t enough.

The Killing Joke: Censorship in South Park

On April 21th, 2010 Matt Parker and Trey Stone were boldly unable to go where they've gone before. A week earlier, they had celebrated their 200th episode with a plot revolving around the Muslim prophet Muhammad's invincibility from ridicule and the town's desire to harness similar powers within South Park. The episode, inoffensively named "200," directly asked us if whether they were portraying Muhammad in an offensive manner or not. They placed him in a U-Haul van, in a mascot's outfit, behind a black bar labeled "censored." He does remain silent. They asked us if we would be offended hearing him speak or if we could allow ourselves to see his legs move. They weren't mocking Muhammad. They were mocking how we've come to censor our thoughts and ideas, not out of respect for the subjects brought up, but instead because of fear.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #4

Andrew O'Hehir's recent Salon piece on film criticism has understandably struck a nerve with my colleagues on this site. I agree with both Susan and Kevin that critics losing their long-time jobs on major newspapers, magazines and trade publications is tragic, but I’m not sure it matters all that much. The new generation of film critics coming up the ranks just aren't worthy to inherit the mantle of the relatively few good film critics and film writers we still have.

Long gone are the days when a talented critic like Pauline Kael could tub thump for a favourite movie, like Barry Levinson’s wonderful comedy Diner (1982), and actually turn that film, which was dumped by its studio, into something of a hit. Siskel and Ebert did the same for Carl Franklin’s terrific thriller One False Move (1992), which had been under the radar until they shone a light on it. These days, critics are only taken seriously as negative factors. In fact, some movies are now not even press screened in hopes that the movie can get a decent weekend box office before the reviewers take a whack at it. But since those movies are generally bad, they likely would have been financially unsuccessful regardless of whether the critics were able to pan the movie in advance of its opening.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #3

I wasn't going to weigh into this issue for a couple of reasons. First, both Susan and Kevin had done such a good job here taking the mickey out of Andrew O'Hehir's ridiculous Salon column "Movie Critics: Shut Up Already." Secondly, I've not been a film critic for over 20 years, so I didn't think what I had to say would be timely. But then I read Kevin's piece and it brought to mind why I decided to quit film criticism as a profession in 1989. I guess I saw the writing on the wall for both what the profession was becoming and what I was becoming within that profession -- neither of which I particularly liked.

It all began with a long-forgotten Weird Al Yankovic flick called UHF (1989). Never saw it; never wanted to. One afternoon, I was attending a concert at the Ontario Place Forum (now the Molson Amphitheatre), when a film-critic acquaintance of mine sat down beside me. He will remain nameless to protect the guilty. We shot the breeze about what we were up to for a bit and then he told me a story. He was working for a free newspaper (it no longer exists) writing film reviews. He'd been assigned the aforementioned Yankovic 'classic' which he told me he hated, and wrote a review that basically indicated same. After he handed the assignment in he got a phone call from his editor. It seemed the film's production company was buying a big ad for this film in that week's paper. The editor asked this critic if he'd mind changing his review to something "more positive". And he did.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #2

It’s pretty clear from Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir’s article, with its Alfred E Neuman What-Me-Worry attitude, that he really has no grasp of the bigger picture at stake here – as Susan so aptly put it yesterday. But why should he? What’s becoming increasingly obvious today is the manner in which careerism has infected journalism, so much so that O’Hehir (as a critic paid to ask questions) refuses to examine why certain film critics are no longer considered employable while others are.

I’ve been somewhat fortunate that I came into the profession in 1981 just as the line started to blur between critical and consumer-friendly journalism. Looking back, I think I've had a pretty satisfying career and accomplished things on terms that I found agreeable. That’s partly because there was a time when you could distinguish yourself from puffery by, to quote one sharp radio producer, treating the audience as voyeurs rather than consumers. In those days, if your goal was to be smart, articulate and informative, it could get you hired. It’s almost the opposite now. I’ve lost three jobs as a film critic in the last few years not because I wasn’t doing my job, or forgot how to write, or talk, or had nothing of interest to say. I was relieved of my duties because I held to the same standards I originally brought to my work -- and those standards in the business have now radically changed.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #1

Dorothy Parker

Film critic Andrew O’Hehir in Salon recently lamented the end of film criticism with the idea that even if it is on its death bed, and critics are losing their jobs, quit griping about it. Write about movies, he says, instead of your wounded pride.

There are a few of us at Critics at Large who have been at the short end of that ugly stick and we don't feel quite as glib about heading to the dustbin as Mr. O'Hehir does (it's also a lot easier to take that stand when you actually still have your paying job as a film critic). But let's digress no further.

Let's hear instead from Susan Green:

Jeezum Crow! That’s a traditional term used by old-time native Vermonters, a disappearing breed, to express anger but avoid blasphemy. Last week a piece by Andrew O’Hehir on Salon.com targeted another disappearing breed, film journalists whose work appears in print. His point seems to be that critics who have lost jobs -- such as Todd McCarthy, recently fired by Variety after 31 years -- or are concerned that could happen in the near future should stop discussing this trend.

Creepin' Under Your Skin: Jakob Dylan's Women and Country

This album creeps in under your skin from first note to last. Starting with a great song called “Nothing But the Whole Wide World,” Jakob Dylan is heading for the vast expanse of the American West, but not out of nostalgia, but rather like taking an opportunity, or a chance, at self-discovery. Women + Country contains songs that are mature, honest and unpretentious. On the track, “Everybody’s Hurting,” one gets right into the dirt and grime of labour-intensive work in the fields. Dylan works the land of relationships on “Smile When You Call Me That” presenting a story of a tough breakup: "I’m drunk and you’re insane/I can’t quit and you won’t change." But the storyteller accepts full responsibility for his actions and cries out for her return. The 11 tracks on Dylan’s second solo album create an exquisite journey through space and time; stories of relationships with women, nature and God. It’s a confidant, thoughtful record beautifully produced by T-Bone Burnett whose sublime touch has done wonders for Dylan’s compositions. Clearly, Burnett has made a difference by creating sonic textures appropriate for both the song and the singer. Jakob Dylan deserves no less.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

Back From Oblivion: The T.A.M.I. Show

A couple of weeks back, in my piece on the declining art of the film poster, I wrote about "Captain" George Henderson and his wonderfully ramshackle film poster shop, Memory Lane. It was while visiting George's shop in 1980 or so that I first encountered James Brown's performance on the T.A.M.I. Show. (The acronym translates as Teenage Awards Music International.) George used to smoke cigarette after cigarette and watch videotapes of movies or TV shows as you plowed through his goods. Taking a break from one fruitful dig, I talked to George for a couple of minutes and then turned to look at what he was watching. Playing on his small TV set was a Betamax tape of the T.A.M.I. Show. What I watched was a revelation as James Brown sang, shimmied and shook his way through four outstanding, mesmerizing songs. The piece de resistance being, of course, "Please Please Please." In the song, as Brown begged his now-absent girl to take him back, he fell hard to his knees in despair. One of his Fabulous Flames back-up singers rushed to his side, patted him repeatedly on his back and helped the slumped and exhausted singer to his feet. Brown's capeman, Danny Ray, came up behind him and placed an elaborate cape over his shoulders as the two men helped Brown off stage. During all this, the band and back-up singers kept going. Before he could be led off, Brown stopped, screamed, threw off the cape and stumbled back to the mic. He did this four times with the same scenario played out each time. He didn't break character until well after the song finished. George turned to me and said "that is a man possessed." Though George was referring to the story being told aurally and visually in the song, I also took it to mean that Brown would do anything to make all that he did on stage memorable (he was called The Hardest Working Man In Show Business for a reason). I didn't see who came next (that in a moment) as I had to leave, but that was my first encounter with the legendary 1964 T.A.M.I. Show.

The Body: Revisiting Deliverance

Poet and author James Dickey was once asked by TV host Dick Cavett what his novel Deliverance was about. “It’s about why decent men kill,” he answered dryly. That’s certainly the plot of both the 1970 novel and John Boorman’s feature film (1972). But it’s also like saying Macbeth is about why kings get ambitious. The power of Deliverance actually lies somewhere beyond the plot and into something more mysterious and fragile like the body. The story is about four Atlanta businessmen – the macho wilderness man Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the beefy, insecure insurance salesman Bobby (Ned Beatty), the affable musician Drew (Ronny Cox) and the thoughtful Ed (Jon Voight) – who decide to canoe down the (fictional) Cahulawassee River in Georgia in order to “commune” with nature before the river valley gets flooded and displaces the mountain locals. With the exception of Lewis, who is a man’s-man like the deerslayer of James Fenimore Cooper (or De Niro’s Michael in The Deer Hunter), and Ed (who has joined Lewis on a few expeditions); the other men are complete innocents. The locals they encounter are also deeply reserved folks isolated from the world these suburban males inhabit and some – like the young boy who duets with Drew on the famous “Duelling Banjos” – are part of inbred families. Lewis and friends, feeling their own false sense of superiority over the inhabitants, still take on the river as if to tame the body of water. What they discover along the way, however, is that nature can’t be tamed and the body is a vulnerable entity.

Political Music: When They Don't Know Or Understand What They're Singing About!

As irritating as actors like Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson can be when they mouth off about political issues they don’t understand, I think musicians and singers are even worse. That’s because they can shove any ignorant messages they want to into their songs and then immediately record them. Actors have to wait for the right film or play to come along that reflects their views and sometimes that never happens.

I was reminded of this while listening to a new Starbucks CD entitled World Is India, a compilation featuring Indian music spanning the last 45 years or so, including tracks from Ravi Shankar, R. D. Burman and Asha Bhosle. But it was a song, "Mother India," from a group I didn’t know named Fun-Da-Mental that caught my attention. The disc’s liner notes indicate that the group is a highly politicized (read left-wing) England-based group which was created to address the issues surrounding the Asian communities in Britain. "Mother India," which was recorded in 1995, is supposed to be a paean to the strong Indian women behind the country’s great men, so imagine my surprise when I overheard a reference to Palestine and on closer listen heard the group praise "Leila Khaled, freedom fighter of Palestine."

How an Arab terrorist who was involved in two major airline hijackings, fortunately without any attendant loss of innocent life (but not for lack of trying), finds her way into a song about India is odd. However, upon further research I discovered that the group, which is led by Aki Nawas, who is Muslim, takes many of its cues from the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and has released albums with tasty titles such as Why America Will Go To Hell and All Is War (The Benefits of G-Had). They’ve also compared Osama Bin Laden to Che Guevara, which makes sense only if you recognize that the two men are both terrorists and not the heroes Fun-Da-Mental makes them out to be.

#100

As a way to celebrate our 100th blog on Critics at Large, we've assembled samples of some of our favourite pieces over the last few months:

Books: Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir

Many years ago, when I was trying to come up with a good idea for a novel, I hit upon the notion of setting a murder mystery in Nazi Germany before or during the war - I don't quite remember which. I thought of having the hero work as a private detective in Berlin. I mentioned this idea to a friend of mine who said, "Oh, you mean like Omar Sharif in Night of the Generals?"

Yeah, uh, just like that. I dropped the idea, but Philip Kerr didn't. He went on to write an acclaimed series of novels about Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin cop who worked as a private investigator in Nazi Germany. The novels, now numbering six that go under the broader title of Berlin Noir, are set before or after the war, but not during. Now, I have no illusions that if I'd stuck with the idea that I'd ever come up with anything nearly as fantastic as Kerr has. His six books do many things well. First, they are well-structured murder/political mysteries, they’re exceptional character pieces, and third (and probably most importantly), his series of books has given me a far greater understanding of everyday life in Nazi Germany than most histories I've read. None of the books shy away from the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. In fact, in the early books, Gunther's clients are frequently Jewish asking him to look into the disappearance of a loved one. A Quiet Flame, the fifth book, even raises many disquieting questions regarding Argentina's anti-Jewish policies after the war.

Lo-Fi Love: Really the Blues? A Blues History Compiled by Allen Lowe: Volume One (1893-1929)

In the case of this extensive history of the blues, the first of 4 volumes, the whole is definitely the sum of the parts. Allen Lowe, who compiled the set of 9 CDS, has carefully articulated the larger musical picture of blues by assembling spirituals, folk songs and jazz tunes that have been identified as blues-based compositions be the artist white or black. The sound of these old, lo-fi, monophonic 78s and cylinder recordings is as clean and clear as I’ve ever heard from a major label. But getting past the sound fidelity is the whole point here because it’s the music, the voices and the spirit of real performances that has been effectively captured. The remarkable musical and historical journey on disc is aided by Lowe’s companion essay on a CD-ROM. Highlights include “Viola Lee Blues” by Cannon’s Jug Stompers and “Crucifixion” by pianist, Arizona Dranes. The set also includes inspired performances by Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds and Lonnie Johnson. These artists are mixed into a collection that includes early Minstrelsy, Appalachian Folk songs, Gospel and New Orleans Street bands.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

Sounds of Yearning: Coachella Music Festival

Before “Kandi” captivated me a few months ago, I had never heard of One EskimO, British indie-rockers who’ve been on the scene for six years. The four-minute song is a cut from their eponymous 2009 album woven around a much older number by Candi Staton that’s actually titled “He Called Me Baby.” My affection for the tune includes what I’ve since learned about her life story: From an Alabama farming family, as a child she picked cotton and sang in church before forming a gospel group with a sister in the 1950s. A decade later, her genre was soul, followed by disco in the mid-1970s and eventually what’s now known as Christian music. Along the way, there were about two dozen albums, four husbands (some of them abusive), five children and a bout with alcoholism.

Listen to the Lion: Greil Marcus's When That Rough God Goes Riding

When That Rough God Goes Riding, the new book by critic Greil Marcus (Mystery Train, The Shape of Things to Come) opens a lot of doors. It does so by going through the process of randomly dipping into the fascinating and turbulent music of singer/songwriter Van Morrison. Marcus isn't writing a biography here of this perplexing pop figure; nor is he setting out to draw a chronological study of his many albums, from the masterpieces (Astral Weeks), the vastly underrated (Veedon Fleece), the deeply satisfying (Saint Dominic’s Preview, Into the Music), or the failures (Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, Poetic Champions Compose); this book instead is about articulating how listening to Van Morrison is a rich and complex experience.

Morrison began life in East Belfast forming one of the hardest rock groups in the sixties called Them. Their hit song “Gloria” was a blast of teenage lust that left The Rolling Stones sounding mannered by comparison. His solo career, which began with the conventional 1967 pop hit “Brown Eyed-Girl,” turned mystical in the seventies where within his best music you could hear Morrison speaking in tongues and conjuring the foreboding voices of Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and John Lee Hooker, as if he were inviting these ghosts to a poker game where they could all happily collect their winnings.

When That Rough God Goes Riding (named after the kick-off track for his sublimely unsettling 1997 CD The Healing Game) isn't trying to make any one point about Van Morrison’s music, rather Marcus takes us inside the meaning of Morrison's singular voice, a voice that can reveal unspoken truths when he sings. Therefore, there’s no summation of Morrison’s career, a career that’s both satisfying and desultory. Marcus delves instead inside the grooves of songs, albums and lost tracks, in order to map out what he calls a quest for “moments of disruption, when effects can seem to have no cause, when the sense of an unrepeatable event is present, when what is taking place in a song seems to go beyond the limits of respectable speech.” Marcus’s own writing in When That Rough God Goes Riding also goes beyond the respectable speech of conventional criticism and reveals the hidden impulses and pleasures that great artists call up in a critic who is drawn to their work.

David's Punk Poem Send-Off: R.I.P Malcolm McLaren

"NOOOOO Future.....NOOOOO future......NOOOO Future FOR YOU!"

-- Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen.

Malcolm McLaren dead.
Dead as a dodo.
Pining for the fjords,
Left this mortal coil.

The Truth is Out There: Frederick Wiseman's La Danse

These days, documentaries that tend to get commercial release are usually one of three kinds. There are the docs that feature the director as star, notably the films of Michael Moore (Capitalism: A Love Story, Sicko) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?). There are the documentaries that really prove that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (Capturing the Friedmans, Crazy Love, Grizzly Man). There are the docs that are tied into current societal concerns and issues (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., The Cove). And then there’s Frederick Wiseman.

Ironic Groove: Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3's Propellor Time

I’ve always found Robyn Hitchcock’s music to be mystical, but not in the LSD sense of the word. His albums create a world that is ethereal and often filled with sadness. As a songwriter, he always succeeds in blending melancholy lyrics with uplifting music. On his new release with his current touring group, the Venus 3 (Peter Buck, guitar, Scott McCaughey, bass and Bill Rieflin, drums), Hitchcock sounds inspired and positive. Recorded in 2006, Propellor Time has a similar feel to Goodnight Oslo (2009) and Ole Tarantula (2007) a steady, consistent groove with great harmonies and ironic lyrics. The album opens with a trip to the "Star of Venus," a song about love and its ideals: “You must have seen it coming, a long long time ago, the ship of all your feelings, shipwrecked in one go.” The title track has a Syd Barrett-like delivery, a song so dreamy that you’re caught up in its 'psychedelic' despair. The last track, "Evolove," is a deliberate shot at creationists, done with humour and great phrasing. But the most positive song is "The Afterlife" where “everyone is made of meat/They’re full of life and life is sweet.” Hitchcock’s mystical world comes full circle on Propellor Time.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

An Equally Important Performer: S Epatha Merkerson Departs Law & Order

She has outlasted four district attorneys, six prosecutors and eight pairs of detectives, but Lieutenant Anita Van Buren will soon follow in their footsteps when she departs from her Manhattan NYPD job. What’s not known is if that exit might come in the form of a resignation or death, since the longtime Law & Order character has been battling cancer in the most poignant subplot of this NBC show’s twentieth season.

Feel free to insert that familiar scene-separating electronic interlude here: Cha-chung!

Actress S. Epatha Merkerson, 57, who has portrayed Van Buren since 1993, recently announced her decision to quit the series after 16 years. But she actually goes further back than that with the program, having appeared as the mother of a very young victim in “Mushrooms,” about a cruel mistake that leads to a child’s murder. Written by Robert Palm, this stunning first-season episode reveals illiteracy as a culprit in the case of an adolescent who shoots an infant; unable to read, the boy went to the wrong place when a drug lord hired him to assassinate someone at another address written on a scrap of paper.

The Mozart of Mayhem: Spike Jones and His City Slickers

While re-watching The Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) last week on TCM, I was trying to think of who might possibly be their musical equivalent. (Of course, The Marx Brothers had their own fair share of musical absurdity in their comedies.) Ultimately, I didn’t have to look too much farther than Spike Jones and His City Slickers. From the early forties to the mid-fifties, Spike Jones and his group tore into the pomposity of high culture with a savage intent. Jones implemented a storehouse of rude sounds that made composer Erik Satie’s experiments in Parade (1916) seem polite.

Jones turned musical history into a broadly satirical farce. He made a mockery of honoured classics like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which he recast as a ridiculously hysterical horse race. The unbearably dippy standard “Love in Bloom” was torn to shreds in much the same manner that The Marx Brothers laid waste to Il Travatore in A Night at the Opera (1935). Johann Strauss’ delicate Blue Danube waltz was transformed into a drunken brawl (in contrast to the lame reverence shown by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In their assault on Bizet’s Carmen, the group’s “messy-soprano” Eileen Gallagher is heard frightening off three bulls with the mere shriek of her opening aria. Michael “Cub” Coda, of The Brownsville Station (who once sang about "Smoking in the Boy's Room"), remembers his father seeing Spike Jones at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit back in 1945. “They were crazy,” he recalled his dad telling him. “The stage went black and all these sirens and gunshots started going off. Then the stage lit up and it was Spike Jones and His City Slickers…They had a guy playing a toilet seat with strings on it, people onstage wearing wigs and crazy outfits – oh geez, they were nuts.” This nutty group spent their career blowing raspberries at High Art. And they did it with an all-American gusto.

Spike Jones & His City Slickers

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Jones first put together a college dance band that he patterned after Red Nichols’ Five Pennies. But performing standards bored him to pieces. When he met the multi-talented Del Porter, who played xylophone, violin, sax, and clarinet, and had hung out with the great impressionist Mel Blanc, Jones saw the possibility for integrating a little mayhem into the mix. They began as the Feather Merchants, but by the end of the thirties, they became Spike Jones and His City Slickers and their distinct lunacy caught the attention of RCA Records. By this time, the group included violinist Carl Greyson, whose tenor vocal style displayed a twisted grin in songs like “Cocktails For Two”; Red Ingle, who mutilated the sentimental weepie “Chloe,” turning it into a beautiful act of desperate desecration; Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, a former comedian who created the droll voice of the race-track announcer on the William Tell Overture; Freddie Morgan, a goofy-faced, mad banjo player; “Babyface” George David Rock, a trumpet player with the sweet kid voice in “All I Want For Christmas”; and Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath (a.k.a. Purves Pullen) who contributed mightily to the massacre of “Love in Bloom.” Sir Frederick Gas (a.k.a. Earl Bennett) provided ample demonstrations of his peculiar emissions on songs like “Happy New Year” and “Knock Knock.” The City Slickers dressed like inebriated renegades out of a Preston Sturges comedy, with loud clothes and goofy hats. Their stage presence was a dada explosion from Dogpatch.

Casablanca's Dark Angel: Confidential Agent (1945)

Sixty-eight years after its release, Casablanca (1942) still continues to justifiably enthrall audiences. Born out of difficult casting (George Raft and Hedy Lamar was one scenario; Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan was supposedly another) and a catastrophic screenplay that had no ending, Casablanca has gone on to become a film that many consider one of America's finest ever made. However, the other night, I stumbled across a film on TCM (thank God for Turner Classic Movies) that I had never heard of, but after seeing it I think it should have become a dark companion piece to Casablanca (or perhaps Casablanca's dark angel). It's called Confidential Agent (1945) and it was pretty damn good - but I understand why it's not remembered, even though it's a pity it isn't. Based on a book by Graham Greene and starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall, it told the story of Luis Denard (Boyer) a representative (confidential agent) of the Spanish republican government who in 1937 came on a desperate mission to England to buy millions of £ in coal that his government would then use to create munitions. All of this was done in an attempt to defeat the fascists led by Francisco Franco and Hitler's air force. At every turn, he was either looked at with suspicion by the naive Brits because he was a "foreigner," or he was threatened by fascist agents who had followed him to - or resided in - England.

Chloe Sevigny's True Confessions: More On Big Love's Worst Season

Chloe Sevigny’s recent candid comments on how bad this past season Chloe Sevigny's recent candid comments on how bad this past season of HBO’s Big Love was confirms what I wrote recently about the sad decline of the series. (See Big Love: Or the (Sometime) Tyranny of the Cable Networks from Thursday, March 11/10 on Critics at Large.) I was wrong only about the reasons for the show being handed a short slate of nine episodes instead of the ten it got last season (and the 12 each for seasons one and two). I had speculated that HBO was trying to jazz up the show and insisting its creators cram more storylines into the series - from Bill Henrickson running for political office to a gothic incest / artificial insemination plot - to make it move faster. But Sevigny, when asked on the A.V. Club website why it was so over the top this year, had this to say:

21st Century Be-Bop: Dave Holland Octet's Pathways

Dave Holland’s latest album is a triumph of ensemble playing and composition. But this statement could have been written about his last 4 recordings either with his Big Band or Quintet. This album, recorded live at New York’s Birdland club over 4 nights in January 2009, is the first featuring an Octet. The title track written by Holland is built upon a driving rhythm that sets the tone for the entire record. Gary Smulyan gets the first solo on baritone sax and it’s an earthly delight. Holland’s funky bass line on “How’s Never?” sets a pattern and the band plays against the pulse for the duration. But like most of the music written by Holland, the path is never smooth or straight. There’s variety in the musical journey that’s full of surprises which is why Holland and his first-rate groups are so great to hear. It’s music written to make you lean forward in your chair - or turn up the volume on your iPod. This is particularly true on a composition called, “Ebb and Flow”, which is nicely arranged to accommodate the ensemble and soloists, Kevin Eubanks [trombone] and Chris Potter [tenor]. The album closes with “Shadow Dance” which works a steady, slow groove before jumping into hard-bop drive. Pathways is Be Bop for the 21st Century.

--John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.