Good Intentions: Herbie Hancock's The Imagine Project

Herbie Hancock is one of my musical heroes because he’s constantly trying new things and takes none of his talent for playing, writing and arranging for granted. His latest effort is The Imagine Project which is, as he describes it, “an effort to show the power and beauty of global collaboration as a golden path to peace.” This is a well-intentioned album with some successes and failures.

The opening track is John Lennon’s iconic song adapted to a world - beat arrangement, but the vocal track fails to be inspiring let alone take you to that idyllic place that Lennon wrote about back in 1971. Some songs never work well when they’re re-configured; this is one of them. Interestingly, a Beatles song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is also included. Performed by Dave Matthews, with the requisite phased-vocal track, I wondered why this song was chosen in the first place. "T.N.K." never had the notion of a “path to peace” for me; more of quiet trip to another, other worldly place after death. (The lyrics are taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.)

Reporting For Battle: A Rolling Stone Coup

As a child, Michael Hastings dreamed of becoming a war correspondent.  “I remember drawing a map of the Middle East and watching CNN nightly with my dad,” he recalls, referring to his fifth-grade interest in the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict. “One day, I even asked my teacher if I could skip gym class to hear a speech by General Norman Schwarzkopf.“

But it’s his Rolling Stone profile of another general in another war -- Stanley McChrystal, until last week the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan -- that has provided Hastings with the scoop of a lifetime. Even before the magazine hit newsstands Friday, the online version had pundits across America correctly predicting that the military leader was toast. The story quoted him and his staff dissing President Barack Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden and several other members of the administration. For Hastings, only 30, this All the President’s Generals moment came while he was back in Afghanistan. I’ll call him Michael, since we’ve known each other for many years and he hails from my town (Burlington, Vermont). That’s why I’ve done several interviews with him, including one last Tuesday when his name suddenly became a household word.

Fighting Nostalgia - Two Views on the Jethro Tull/Procol Harum concert: Molson Ampitheatre, June 18/10

I've never been one for the nostalgia musical acts that hit the road every summer (The Monkees, Crosby Stills & Nash, REO Speedwagon, Styx, The Who, to name but a few) because there's too much new music 'capturing my ears' (such as The Killers, Drake, Broken Social Scene, Metric, Cale Sampson, Femi Kuti, Eminem, Jamie Cullum, etc.) for me to wallow too much in the musical acts of the past. That doesn't mean I don't still listen to the music of these performers on CD/MP3, but I just don't have the need to see these acts perform well past their 'best before dates.' The first exception to this rule was two years ago when I got tickets to see Chicago. Now, ironically, I wasn't even a fan, but the tickets were free and the seats were great, so... I came away impressed by the still expert musicianship of the performers, even if the music, with a few exceptions, was really not my style.

Recently, I broke my rule again when I, along with a group of friends (including my Critics At Large colleague Kevin Courrier - see his review of the same show below) got tickets to see Jethro Tull with Procol Harum as opening act. I've always enjoyed the early music of Tull (the last album I bought was 1978's Heavy Horses), so when the opportunity came to see them live I was willing enough to enjoy an evening of, as one of my friends said, "Klassic Rawk!"

Every Road Leads Home: Toy Story 3

When I was extremely young my parents gave me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure for my birthday. My friends and I would get together and create these fantastical situations with all of our toys and face the wrath and ridicule of our siblings in the process. My Ninja Turtle would woo the Barbies and join forces with the Ghostbusters to vanquish evildoers which existed solely in our overly imaginative minds. As time faded, Leonardo lost his plastic katanas and the paint on his body began to scuff and peel. Before long I had simply outgrown him. When the time came I tossed him away in a box with the rest of my plastic memories without remorse. His blue bandana was frayed, his legs and arms were scratched and my name written in permanent marker along his bottom foot had all but worn off.

American Conscience: John Mellencamp's On the Rural Route 7609

A colleague of mine, who didn’t know John Mellencamp, asked me what he would be remembered for in music. I said, the song “Cherry Bomb” one of Mellencamp’s biggest pop songs now part of the musical currency of formatted radio. It remains a catchy track with just enough edge to stand out on any “soft-rock” radio station. I suspect that I have better ears than most, if I may be so bold to say, because there’s something explicitly “American” about John Mellencamp. His songs have continuously featured stories of farmers, the working class, rodeos, county fairs, etc. This new 4-CD box set which looks like a relic from your grandfather’s collection of 78s, seems intended to depict Mellencamp in a particular way. Quotes from Tennessee Williams bracket the collection with an essay by Anthony DeCurtis, music critic for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. If nothing else, this set is intended to re-imagine the songwriter in a less commercial way.

Five Cancelled TV Shows You Should Watch

Gone are the days of television producers holding out for that mythical 100th episode in order to guarantee a syndicated afterlife following cancellation. With DVD rentals, Netflix and Hulu.com, On-demand services from your cable provider, and entire cable channels devoted to running and rerunning every old TV show ever produced, no TV show is ever truly gone.

Even so-called failed shows, shows with no ratings and a single season (or half season) run, can have real impact, often years after airing only a few episodes on broadcast TV. Shows like Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, or Joss Whedon’s Firefly can meet untimely ends, but still stick around long enough to find their audiences, sometimes 10 years after their cancellation. Some of these shows were ahead of their time, some were just too idiosyncratic to find their audiences, many were ambitious and brilliant but flawed, and others just aired in the wrong timeslot or on the wrong channel.

Today I’m looking at 5 recent additions to the list of my favourite ‘failed’ shows. I’ll be sticking with shows of 1-hour length, and leave the sitcoms to a future post.

Tom Cruise’s Film Career: Nice Try But No Cigar

Knight and Day, Tom Cruise’s latest movie, which opens today, is a reminder, once again, of how he simply can’t hold up his end of the bargain when it comes to creating a charismatic, gripping character on screen. Up against a talented actress like Cameron Diaz he is particularly lost. Cruise, in fact, is the Energizer Bunny of Hollywood. You admire his efforts to act, but it becomes quickly apparent he’s really not getting anywhere acting.

Treme on Hiatus: The Devil's in the Details

The first-season finale of Treme on June 20 was titled “I’ll Fly Away,” and the 1929 gospel song about loss and redemption is performed at a funeral that ends the episode. Some of the lyrics (“Like a bird thrown/ driven by the storm...”) certainly apply to Katrina, which has taken place six months before the fictional TV saga begins. But, with oil now befouling the Gulf of Mexico, an untold number of those birds cannot fly at all. If only the HBO series -- which is scheduled to resume production this fall -- could fast-forward to 2010 and address this Louisiana double whammy

Produced and Abandoned: The Whole Wide World (1996)

The Whole Wide World, based on the 1986 memoir One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis, is a small gem. Set in the early ‘30s, the picture tells the story of the turbulent relationship between pulp writer Robert E. Howard (Vincent D’Onofrio), who created Conan the Barbarian, and Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), a young Texas schoolteacher who had aspirations to be a writer. Director Dan Ireland provides a probing and touching appraisal of the gulf between the genders and how these two innocents attempt to bridge it. Where Price craves experience and is deeply drawn to Howard’s fervid imagination; Howard, who can only live in the world of his imagination, is initially drawn to Novalyne’s passionate desire to take in the whole wide world.

Indefensible Film: From Paris with Love (2010)

Many years ago, a friend of mine had an evening of movies that he called "indefensible," basically films he liked for reasons that he could not justify. His films that night: Henry Winkler’s Memories of Me (1988 - starring Allan King and Billy Crystal) and Leni Riefenshahl's Triumph of the Will (1935 - starring Adolph Hitler). After watching both of these films, I concluded only one of them was indefensible, and it wasn't the one featuring the psychopathic Austrian (Riefenstahl's film is a divider for obvious reasons, yet the power of her images and her editing technique cannot be argued with - in fact, I submit that if anybody had really paid attention in 1935 to this awful/brilliant film, perhaps we would have refused to appease the monster and shortened the war by several years or prevented it entirely). On the other hand, Winkler's maudlin melodrama is terrible on many levels, but I guess everybody's entitled to enjoying a film that is nearly universally loathed.

I've got one of my own now that was just released on DVD: Pierre Morel's From Paris With Love (2010). The film is the latest from French filmmaker/producer Luc Besson's factory of gonzo action/adventure films. It's gloriously politically incorrect, outrageously violent, delightfully vulgar, probably sexist and utterly ridiculous on almost every level, and yet I found it refreshingly entertaining because it just doesn't bend to anybody's idea of taste. And who holds this thing all together? John Travolta. More about him in a sec, but first the plot.

The Champion of Pleasantries: Jack Johnson's To the Sea

Jack Johnson has always been a songwriter who’s comfortable in his own skin. With the release of his fifth studio album, To The Sea, we find the former champion surfer back in Hawaii with his band-mates putting words to music in a most positive way without leaving the comforts of home.

This record, dedicated to his late father, is not as dark as 2008’s Sleep Through The Static; it’s a groove-laced album full of mid-tempo tunes aimed to please the ear and the heart. One of my favourites, "When I Look Up." is less than a minute long, yet it pulled me in immediately. “From the Clouds,” a great love song full of idealism, follows this short tune. Even when Johnson writes a tougher song like “Turn Your Love,” the feeling isn’t wrought with pain or angst; it’s more of a request for emotional balance from his partner in a most polite way.

Toy Story 3: Once Too Often To The Well

I wish I could say that Pixar’s Toy Story 3 is up to the high standards of most of their previous films. But it’s not and it also suggests something of a continuing slippage in quality control in the company’s output.

I’m actually not sure why the folks at Pixar felt the need to revisit Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang of toys, after the previous two excellent movies in the series, released in 1995 and 1999, respectively. Did Disney, which owns Pixar, pressure them to go with something familiar for Pixar’s second foray into 3-D, after Up? (Toy Story 3 is also being released in 2-D.) That’s possible because the film simply doesn’t do much that’s fresh with its likable and diverse characters and the film’s 3-D effects, fine as they are, seem to be driving the story instead of serving the needs of the screenplay, which was written by four writers, Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, who also directed the film.(Four writers on one film is two writers too many.)

Revolutionary Rastaman: An Encounter with Bob Marley

Bob Marley cannot seem to rest in peace. In 2008 director Martin Scorsese was working on a documentary about the reggae singer, who died of cancer in 1981, but dropped out last year due to scheduling conflicts. Jonathan Demme signed on, with blessings from the Jamaican performer’s family. The plan was to screen the finished work in February 2010, coinciding with what would have been Marley’s 65th birthday. When the rough cut displeased billionaire real-estate heir Steve Bing, the chief investor, Demme also exited the project. Somewhere in Rasta heaven, Marley must be jamming. As a prolific songwriter who regularly excoriated wealthy capitalists, perhaps he’s even referencing a line from “Stiff Necked Fools” to sum up his feelings on this cinematic stalemate: ”Yes, you have got the wrong interpretation/ Mixed up with vain imagination...”

Finding the World In One City: FIFA World Cup 2010

Okay, let's not delude ourselves. It's going to be at least two World Cups before Canada gets back to The Show (our last appearance was 1986 where we failed to even score a goal). Yet Canada, or at least Toronto, is embroiled in a wonderful every-four-year frenzy that is probably more exciting (for some) than the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup (two years at least, probably more, before they contend, so relax).

If the Olympics in Vancouver got Canada to puff out its chest with pride (see my blog on the CTV 2010 Vancouver Olympics DVDs on June 12th), the FIFA World Cup in South Africa gets us -- at least in the big cities across Canada where there are significant ethnic communities -- to embrace our heritage, but thankfully not at the expense of our Canadianness. People display their ethnic backgrounds during this time by proudly flying flags of their home countries featured in the World Cup that began on June 11 (and ends on July 11). If there is a victory, a spontaneous street party will break out, especially in ethnic communities with large population bases (the Italians, the Portuguese, the Koreans, etc.). It also gets us to open up to each other, especially in cold-hearted Toronto where you never EVER look at each other as you pass on the street, let alone dare talking to complete strangers. Yet, so far this week, I've started a brief conversation with a woman carrying a British St. George's flag. The flag became the signifier that said "it's okay to talk to me as long as it's about football." We discussed England's chances (she was convinced they'd do fine, but I'm not convinced, though I wasn't rude enough to say so). Then I bid her good luck and continued on my way.

Enduring Simplicity: Keith Jarrett's Jasmine

Recorded in March 2007, with Charlie Haden on acoustic bass, pianist Keith Jarrett captured the enduring quality of music in a timely way. In spite of the delay from ECM, this is an album of simplicity and there’s beauty in that simplicity. Jasmine as Jarrett writes in the liner notes, “is a night blooming flower with a beautiful fragrance.” The real reason for the delay, however, was the number of songs Jarrett and Haden had recorded and their trying to decide what to do with them.

The process of weeding through the music was a challenge because they didn’t want to release anything “over-played”: again beauty in simplicity. I don’t know who first said it, but the most difficult thing to create is something simple, something unpretentious and so it is with this music. “Where Can I Go Without You,” by Victor Young and originally sung by Peggy Lee is an exquisite example of simplicity. The playing also has nuance since the musicians articulate the lyrics without vocalizing them. But just when you thought the album would slumber under the weight of that sad tune, the duo comes back with an up tempo version of “No Moon At All,” a Redd Evans/David Mann once sung by the likes of Julie London, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. But it isn’t all standards from a bygone era. Jarrett and Haden provide a sweet version of Joe Sample’s tune called, “One Day I’ll Fly Away,” recorded by Sample with Lalah Hathaway in 1999. Again, the R&B flavoured ballad is slowed to a more introspective tempo under the hands of Jarrett and Haden whose sensitive touch to their respective instruments creates the delicate mood of the piece; it’s textured in a detailed way like fine silk lace.

True Blood #2: Fear And Trembling On The Bayou

Last night, HBO’s True Blood returned from its long sleep. In September 2009, the show about vampires in a small Louisiana town ended its second season on a high, firmly establishing itself as HBO’s most watched series since The Sopranos. The series, Alan Ball’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed and much beloved Six Feet Under (also on HBO), certainly owes some of its popular success to the recent pop cultural vampire phenomenon, but make no mistake: these are not your daughter’s vampires. The show is unabashedly sexual and graphically violent, often at the same time. Everything about it is excessive, and as a result, despite its ratings success, it tends to divide audience and critics alike.

Set in fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana, the series is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries, a book series by Charlaine Harris. It’s been a couple of years since vampires have “come out of the coffin” so to speak, and they are struggling as a community with issues of bigotry and integration. Though placing it in the South brought to the fore much of the allegorical weight of those themes, the first season played out mainly like a supernatural whodunit, as the town hunts a serial killer in its midst. Along with the growing mystery, we met our main players: Sookie Stackhouse, a mind-reading bar waitress, played by Anna Paquin; Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a Civil War-era vampire returning to his home town after over a century; Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten), Sookie’s randy but slow-witted brother; and Sam Merlotte, the owner of the bar, with thinly-concealed feelings for Sookie and a secret of his own, played by Sam Trammell.

When the show premiered in 2008, I watched the first several episodes largely as a guilty pleasure. Though invariably fun and playfully shocking, it initially suffered poorly in comparison to both the exquisiteness of Ball’s Six Feet Under and to the more emotionally and narratively ambitious TV vampire fare like Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But by the end of the first season, the show had successfully found itself on its own terms, and its second season played out with renewed focus.

True Blood #1: Complex Vampires, Stock Christians and Uneasy Comparisons

Alan Ball, the creator of HBO’s True Blood, which begins its third season tonight, has generally failed to match the quality of his previous show, Six Feet Under. That HBO series, which dealt with a family of funeral directors in Los Angeles, was a smartly written, superbly acted and directed show, which raised challenging questions about life, death, family, love and all the other big questions which have galvanized humanity since the beginning of time. True Blood, a vampire series about creatures that rarely if ever die, while not without merit, isn’t nearly as smart about the issues that matter to us all.

Based on Charlaine Harris’ series of novels, True Blood centres around a world where vampires -- having come of the coffin just a few years ago -- are agitating for equal rights as the latest put-upon minority in the United States. True Blood sticks reasonably close to the books, which I admit I have only been able to skim (they’re pulpy and not all that well written). Its main character is Sookie Stackhouse (The Piano’s Anna Paquin, now grown up) -- a virginal Southern lass, who can read minds. The show is set in Bon Temps, a small town in rural Louisiana, where Sookie has lived her entire life and where she works in the local bar, Merlotte’s, owned by Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), who has a power of his own. Her eventual lover Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), is an undead Civil War veteran, who’s the gentleman caller of the vampire world. He’d rather not kill humans, or even drink their blood, and he doesn’t regard us as prey that exist simply for his community’s predations. Because a Japanese scientist has invented 'Tru Blood,' an artificial blood substitute that can meet the vampires’ nutritional requirements, Bill and his compatriots don’t have to drink the real thing anymore. That invention is also the reason that the vampire community has decided to reveal itself to humanity. Unfortunately, not all the undead want to live in peace with their human hosts.

Canadian Swagger: CTV Vancouver 2010 Olympics DVD

Back in February as Canadians went on to win more Gold Medals ever as host country in a Winter Olympics, we all walked around with our chests (somewhat) puffed out, strutting our stuff, the cock of the walk. And yet, even within that braggart moment, we managed to maintain the legendary (mythical?) Canadian niceness. Want proof? Take a saunter through CTV's five-disc DVD of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics that recently arrived in my mailbox (it was promised to arrive six weeks after the Games - in other words mid-April, but in fact came out last week of May/first week of June).

I've not managed to make my way through all five discs (one disc alone on the hockey takes up four hours of Disc 2), but what I have watched -- the intro documentary, the recap of the early rounds of the men's hockey, the final minutes of the Canada-US men's final, men's skeleton, women's and men's short-track speed skating and men's half pike snowboard finals -- is beautifully presented. Except for the recap docs, most of it is just commercial-free, pristine versions of what was broadcast, broken up by the occasional (but generally not intrusive) set-up commentary by principle host Brian Williams. And that's okay, because what this is all about is a memory piece that tries to allow us to recapture the feeling of pride and excitement we had during those ten days of competition.

Some of it works really well:

Roads Not Taken: The Tug of Broken Bells

Every now and then, a song gets up in my head. Lately, that empty space has been reserved for “The High Road,” an ethereal and esoteric ballad by Broken Bells. Before an invasion of the brain snatchers, I was only marginally familiar with Danger Mouse, a multi-instrumentalist producer who reverts to his given name of Brian Burton for the collaboration with James Mercer, lead singer-songwriter of the Shins -- previously not on my limited musical radar. This cut from the new band’s eponymous debut album is literally mesmerizing; I feel compelled to close my eyes and let it carry me away every time. Maybe I’ve got some sort of zen thing going: An experience beyond rational thought; a universal spirit that can zip through each of us, bringing enlightenment.

I wish somebody would enlighten me about the meaning of “The High Road.” On the material plane, the lyrics seem to obliquely address the post-traumatic stress disorder plaguing many veterans, a form of psychological damage that was once called battle fatigue. There are several specific military references: “This army has so many heads/ to analyze...” and “A solider is bailing out/ His lips curled on the barrel...,” for example. Apart from that, however, the imagery is beautifully elusive. The minimalist music video features co-composers Burton and Mercer walking at night down a forlorn two-lane blacktop with flashlights in their hands. They encounter random apparitions -- a traffic accident, a child with a remote-controlled toy car, a burlesque dancer in what appears to be a one-woman girlie show -- but no symbols suggesting the armed forces. The words do not batter a listener with messages. Yet, a sense of foreboding seeps in thanks to lines such as “I don’t know if I’m dead or not/ to anyone...”

Getting it Wrong, Getting it Right: Beyond the Sea and Ray

Whenever Hollywood produces a film biography of a famous figure it’s seldom about the nature of their genius. More often than not, it’s a redemption story. Ron Howard’s Academy Award-winning A Beautiful Mind (2001), for example, contained little of the John Nash one found in Sylvia Nasar’s intelligently absorbing 1998 biography. Where she thoughtfully examined how the schizophrenia of this mathematical genius became permanently intertwined with his gift, the movie is about how John Nash gets redeemed by love. Often an assumption gets made by producers that audiences won’t respond to the unique gifts of the film’s subject so they conceive a concept perceived as accessible to a mass audience – a concept that ensures box office success and potential awards. The irony, of course, is that without the special gifts of a John Nash there wouldn’t be a movie about him in the first place. Back in 2004, there were two radically different movies made about two great American musical figures (Bobby Darin and Ray Charles) that attempted to get at what made these artists fixtures in American popular culture – but only one of those films got there.