The Sound(s) of Silence: Comparing Notes

Author, professor, and musicologist Adam Ockelford. (Photo: Getty)

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." – Elvis Costello

Guilty as charged. Yep, I guess I’m definitely one of those Declan grumbled about who attempts to dance about architecture. The same quote has often been attributed to the artist/comedian Martin Mull, but since the subject is using language to try and define or describe sounds, let’s leave it in Costello’s sarcastic hands for now. It somehow just feels right coming from him.

In Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music, a captivating new book by Adam Ockelford, newly published by WW Norton and distributed by Penguin/Random House, a noted musicologist asks some thought-provoking questions. How does music work? Indeed, what is (or isn’t) music? We are all instinctively musical (not so sure about that one) but how and why? There would seem to be two kinds of books about music -- maybe more but at least two: those that try to describe music in a certain context and those that try to define music in all contexts. I suppose I’m even more guilty of Costello’s criticism, since often I not only write about music itself (as in my recent Amy Winehouse or Sharon Jones books) but I go so far as to write about people who write about music. Thus, writing about writing about sounds: a double offense as far as Costello’s credo goes.

Juliet, Naked: Getting it Right

Rose Byrne and Chris O'Dowd in Juliet, Naked. (Photo: IMDB)

Nick Hornby’s 2009 novel Juliet, Naked has an irresistible premise. Its heroine, Annie, lives in an English seaside town, working at the local museum. Her long-time live-in boyfriend, Duncan, teaches university classes in film and TV but his obsession is an indie musician named Tucker Crowe who mysteriously disappeared from the rock scene years ago after releasing a heartbreak album called "Juliet", stirred into existence by a high-profile break-up with a beautiful model. Duncan and other Tucker Crowe fanatics gather on a website, spending hours dissecting his lyrics and speculating about his life. When Crowe’s old recording company releases an album of Juliet demos called "Juliet, Naked", and sends Duncan a pre-release copy, he goes into fandom overdrive, penning a review that proclaims it a masterpiece, Annie, who is feeling increasingly remote from Duncan, publishes her own critique for the website under a pseudonym, declaring it dreary and half-baked without the sophisticated musicianship that distinguishes the album it was just a preparation for – and Tucker Crowe himself e-mails her from America to second her opinion. Unexpectedly, these two, both at loose ends in their vastly different lives, become (e-mail) pen pals, and then circumstances bring him to England, where they finally meet.

Against All Odds: Into the Breach

Into the Breach by Subset Games was released on Nintendo Switch on August 28 2018. (Photo: Gamespot)

Historically, I’m terrible at strategy games. I can grasp the rules of chess, but I’m never able to think ahead and avoid my king’s inevitable demise. I rule over my fiefdoms in Risk with the same short-sighted bluster as the worst despots in history, charging into conquests that end with me fleeing back to Australia with my tail between my legs. I love the story and graphics and atmosphere of StarCraft, but I can barely complete the main campaign without cheat codes (never mind compete against other players online). So it was a rather big surprise to find myself sinking hours and hours into Subset Games’s Into the Breach, which is one of the toughest strategy games I’ve ever played.

Accurate Sounds – Robert Hilburn's Paul Simon: The Life

Paul Simon in a promotional photo for his 2018 farewell tour. (Photo: KeyArena)

With his farewell tour ending September 22 in Queens, NY and a new album coming out this Friday, Paul Simon remains current. To coincide with the tour, Simon granted L.A. Times music writer Robert Hilburn more than 100 hours of interviews for a new biography released last May, according to the press release from Simon & Schuster. But rather than hook a new album and a farewell tour to a book for commercial purposes, Hilburn goes much deeper by writing a balanced study of his subject. His focus, and it’s a good one, is to identify and explain the driving impulses behind Simon’s creativity. Naturally that’s an easier task with the co-operation of the person you’re writing about.

Neglected Gem: Blunt Force Trauma (2015)

Ryan Kwanten in Blunt Force Trauma (2015). (Photo: IMDB)

Two people stand at opposite ends of an arena in designated spots. They wear Kevlar vests and belts with pistols stuck into them, sometimes in a holster, mostly not. A referee hovers somewhere above, and at a predetermined signal, the two open fire on each other. The first to leave their spot loses.

In the world of Blunt Force Trauma (2015), the American-Colombian coproduction helmed by Ken Sanzel, these underground dueling sessions, organized like MMA fights, can be found across the American South and Latin America, in empty factories, abandoned train depots, and isolated underground parking garages. Contenders duel not for honor, but for money and, if they’re good, for fame. The best of them, Zorringer (Mickey Rourke), is so high up there that he lives on a Colombian mountain and has an associate pick his opponents from all over and drive them to him. John (Ryan Kwanten) is a promising hotshot who wants a duel with Zorringer, and to get it he goes from place to place dueling, winning, and hoping to get The Invite. At one place, he meets (but doesn’t duel) Colt (Freida Pinto), a fiery duelist who doesn’t wait for her opponent to stagger away but keeps firing till they drop out. Colt is seeking the Red Wolf, a legendary duelist who killed her brother, and she hitches a ride with John. They head south, following reports of the Red Wolf’s duels.

Unfollowed: Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Bo Burnham's debut feature Eighth Grade. (Photo: IMDB)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Joe Mader, to our group.

Bo Burnham’s first feature Eighth Grade has been celebrated as an empathetic, heart-felt look at female adolescence in the age of social media. Credit for his seeming success has gone to the performance of Elsie Fisher as his heroine Kayla. Her face is almost never offscreen during the 93-minute running time, and Burnham’s script is successful at capturing the awfulness, awkwardness, and daily humiliations eighth-graders, and girls in particular, are subject to. But despite the digital morass of posts and likes and follows and heart emojis, and up-to-date scenarios such as active-shooter drills, the movie doesn’t bring much new to past portrayals of tortured teenhood such as John Hughes comedies or even Rebel Without a Cause.

Podcast: Interview with Judith Marcuse (1982)

Photo by  David Cooper.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian choreographer and dancer Judith Marcuse.

At the time of our conversation, Judith Marcuse's dance program Playgrounds was premiering in Toronto. Marcuse's career as a dancer began 20 years earlier at London's Royal Ballet School, but she would soon return to her native Montreal with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. In 1972, she turned primarily to choreography, and over the decades has created over 100 original works, many addressing a variety of social issues (e.g., the environment, teen suicide, bullying and homophobia). In 2007, she founded, and still co-directs, the International Centre of Art for Social Change in association with Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. 

 – Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Judith Marcuse as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

After A.A. Milne: Christopher Robin

Pooh (Jim Cummings) and Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor). (Photo: IMDB)

I’m not much of a fan of the director Marc Forster (Monsters' Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner), and except for Johnny Depp’s intimate, impassioned pressed-violet portrayal of James M. Barrie I find his 2004 Finding Neverland, about Barrie’s relationship with the widow Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her four sons (one of whom inspired the creation of Peter Pan), fudged and sentimentalized. So I was caught off guard by his new movie, Christopher Robin, which is also linked to a children’s literary classic. It imagines a grown-up version of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), returned from the Second World War and so focused on his banal office life – a life of drudgery and enslavement to a lazy, tyrannical boss (Mark Gatiss) who takes credit for Christopher’s ideas – that he has no time for his wife Evelyn (a quietly affecting Hayley Atwell) or their somber, intent little girl Madeline (played by a talented young actress with a marvelous name, Bronte Carmichael). Christopher is in dire trouble but doesn’t realize it, so he gets a visit from his childhood companion Winnie the Pooh (voiced by Jim Cummings) and finds himself back in the woods with Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Owl (Toby Jones), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and Baby Roo (Sara Sheen). I know; it sounds awful. In fact, it sounds like Steven Spielberg’s disastrous 1991 Hook, where it’s the adult Peter Pan (Robin Williams) has turned into a corporate type who needs to be rescued from a values-blind, dead-ended existence. Yet somehow Christopher Robin turns out to be lovely – sweet, not treacly, and understated.

The Politics of Acting: Argentina’s Norma Aleandro in Conversation

Norma Aleandro in The Official Story (La historia oficial, 1985).

When the junta took over Argentina in 1976, it ate away at the heart of this South American nation, slowly obliterating all who stood in its way. Among the terrorized who have lived to tell the tale is the celebrated Argentinian actress, Norma Aleandro, now 82. I first learned of her plight from the 1985 Luis Puenzo film, The Official Story, a powerful exposé of the desaparecidos, the missing ones, who disappeared, never to be found again, during the "dirty war" waged by those opposed to the military dictatorship. Aleandro had come to Toronto for the gala screening and agreed to sit down with me for an interview.

Neglected Gem: A Great Day in Harlem

Art Kane's famous 1958 photo for Esquire Magazine. (Photo: Getty)

Jean Bach’s A Great Day in Harlem centers on a legendary photo that appeared in Esquire Magazine, in a special 1958 issue on jazz, the brainchild of the new graphics editor (and future director and screenwriter) Robert Benton. A young art director named Art Kane came up with the idea of gathering every jazz musician who could be rounded up in front of a Harlem brownstone, underneath the 125th Street railroad station, and pitched it successfully to Benton. And somehow, at ten a.m., an hour when most respectable jazzmen are fast asleep, dozens of them showed up, huddling in groups, happy for the chance to socialize with their buddies. The only trick, relate Kane and his assistant, Steve Frankfurt, was to get them to shut up and look at the camera.

Her Majesty: The Soul of Aretha

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll – the way the hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty. American history wells up when Aretha sings. Because she captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and also the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation and transcendence.” – Barack Obama, Kennedy Center, 2015

Somehow, in a way that might forever remain inexplicable, Aretha Franklin managed to alter the landscape of soul music by transforming herself into both a rock icon and a pop goddess. For me, there were three key hinges to her remarkable swinging stylistic door. The first was synthesis: she was the perfect corporate merger between sacred gospel music and secular blues music. Next was reconciliation: she was the ideal reconciliation between and rhythm and blues music and rock and roll music. And finally, transcendence: she was the unexpected redemption of spiritual soul music by perfectly pure pop music.

Wachowskis Unbound: The Simulacra of Speed Racer (2008)

Emile Hirsch as Speed Racer. (Photo: IMDB)

In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich wrote, “Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements.” While the first film this brings to mind may be The Matrix (1999), the Keanu Reeves-narrated documentary Side by Side (2012) explains how every film is now digital, and shows how every single element is fundamentally manipulable. Non-documentary cinema (and even some forms of documentary) has lost its grounding in to the real, in form and therefore in substance, something that most cinephiles lament – witness the loathing of TV motion smoothing. But what if a film were to celebrate its (oxymoronic) simulacral nature? What if, instead of trying to pass as realistic, a film embraced its artificiality? Well, then we might get Speed Racer (2008).

Durang Double Bill: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You & The Actor's Nightmare

Harriet Harris as the titular Sister Mary Ignatius in Durang's Berkshire revival. (Photo: Emma Rothenberg-Ware)

When I taught Christopher Durang’s one-act Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You my first year at College of the Holy Cross, more than thirty years ago, several of my students clamored, with competitive fervor, to tell anecdotes about the fearsome nuns whose reigns of terror they’d suffered through. The play, first performed in 1979, is absurdist, and the titular sister’s intolerance for anything less than the most pure, doctrinal (and bloodthirsty) vision of the universe is ultimately psychotic, but my students recognized her immediately. And indeed, even in Durang’s most outrageous work, there’s always a tinge of realism mixed in with the lunacy.

Podcast: Interview with Margie Gillis (1987)

Margie Gillis dancing to Tom Waits's "Waltzing Matilda" in 1978. (Photo: Jack Udashkin)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian dancer and choreographer Margie Gillis.

At the time of our conversation, Margie Gillis was already an international name in modern dance and choreography. We spoke of her show, New Dreams, which was premiering in Toronto, and about the new demands of balancing her fame with her artistic ambitions. In 2011, Gillis was awarded the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award from the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and, in 2013 became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

 – Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Margie Gillis as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Counterbalance: The Clarity of Costas Picadas

"Hyperbola 3", from the Hyperbola series by photographic artist Costas Picadas. (Photo: Odon Wagner Gallery)

“The photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

Welcome to the future history of photography: a utopia of pure images, a somewhat surreal realm in which our presumed yet arbitrary borderlines between the real and the imagined are deftly erased by the aesthetic prowess and technical skill of the artist. These splendidly pale gems are chromogenic prints, colloquially known as c-prints, but they are digital c-prints, where the image content is exposed through lasers rather than chemicals. Created in limited editions of five, with variable scales, and face-mounted to plexiglas, they are also invitations to a fresh kind of visual experience consisting of crystal-clear clarity. What Arbus did for faces and figures the Greek-born and New York-based Picadas seems to do for places and buildings: he reveals their inner essence by scratching gently at their surfaces to unearth their architectural facades, either their secret countenance or their psychic landscape. His dream-like vistas, with portions either fading into or out of optical focus, offer the viewer a whole new and vastly expansive dimension of hidden significance. They are retinal balms that soothe the weary eyes of our digital age, and yet they too are digital gifts, pulling us into the otherworldly architectonic realm of the everyday world we inhabit.

Neglected Gem: Ma Saison Préférée (1993)

Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil in Ma Saison Préférée. (Photo: IMDB)

The family dynamics in André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée (My Favorite Season) are messy, complicated, and utterly plausible. Émilie (Catherine Deneuve) is married to her law partner, Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier); their kids, Anne (Ciara Mastroianni) and Lucien (Anthony Prada), who’s adopted, are grown, though still in residence. The marriage has become perfunctory, and when Émilie’s estranged younger brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a neurologist in another town, comes back into the picture, he initiates an argument between them that provokes a separation. Antoine has a habit of inciting arguments. He and Émilie have a close, eruptive relationship; at this point they haven’t spoken in three years, but when their mother (Marthe Villalonga) has a stroke and comes to stay with Émilie and Bruno, Émilie seeks Antoine out. The thinking among the members of Émilie’s family is that he’s crazy, and that he gets her acting crazy too; Bruno can’t abide him. So she lies to Bruno that she happened to run into him on the street and invited him to dinner to patch things up between them. Antoine tries to act like the perfect guest and not stir the waters, but he slips and exposes the lie. Bruno’s fury provokes Émilie; she’s so fed up with his disapproval that she says the worst things she can think of to hurt his feelings – she tell him that he suffocates and exhausts her, that she tells him lies to give herself a break from him. It isn’t true, but it does the trick.

Neglected Gem: David Lynch's Dune (1984)

Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Muad'dib in Dune. (Photo: IMDB)

In any list of the worst book-to-film adaptations, you’ll find David Lynch’s Dune somewhere near the top – universally acknowledged as a shallow, baffling, unsatisfying adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel, which suffered from an infamously tortured production process. In fact, to even call it “David Lynch’s Dune” is to invoke the spectre of this troubled development, which left Lynch so disgruntled that he hid behind the “Alan Smithee” pseudonym and even modified his writing credit to read “Judas Booth” (a mash-up of Judas Escariot and John Wilkes Booth) in subsequent cuts of the film. Pointing the finger at studio interference and a lack of creative control – including being denied final cut – Lynch seemed to respond to Dune’s critical and financial failings by dodging the issue of quality within the material itself and instead focusing on the ways in which he had been stifled. Dune remains a strange black mark on his filmography, frequently cited as his worst film and a disaster from top to bottom – which I think does a tremendous disservice to the things that make it not just a worthy addition to the Lynch canon, but to the epic fantasy genre as a whole.

Larger Than Life: The Big Note by Charles Ulrich

Frank Zappa, whose legacy is catalogued in Charles Ulrich's The Big Note. (Photo: IMDB)

This coming December 4th marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Frank Zappa. Just before he died of cancer at the age of 52, he was interviewed by NBC Today Show correspondent Jaime Gangel, who asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “It’s not important to be remembered” was his direct reply. Nevertheless, when you’re dead, you have no more say in the matter. The Big Note (New Star) by Charles Ulrich could be described as the final say in the matter of Frank Zappa’s music, a scholarly 800-page encyclopedia of all things Zappa.

To Seek and Be Called: Nostalghia (1983)

Oleg Yankovskiy in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. (Photo: Getty)

Nostalghia (1983) is often considered, along with Ivan’s Childhood (1962), to be a minor Tarkovsky, the latter due to its relative conventionality, the former because of how far it goes in the other direction. Written by Andrei Tarkovsky with famous Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, this film is a mood piece in the strictest sense of the term, in that its core theme is the feeling of “nostalghia,” which alludes to a Russian emigrant longing for the fatherland, and in the fact that every cinematic element is either sacrificed for this theme or indentured into its service. What results is a work of devastating beauty just ripe for the GIFing.

Fanny Brice: Brains and Talent

Fanny Brice, born Fania Borach, pictured in 1928. (Photo: Getty Archives)

In William Wyler’s 1968 Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand gives one of the two or three greatest musical-comedy performances ever put on film as Fanny Brice, the Brooklyn burlesque comic who became a Broadway star when Florenz Ziegfeld tapped her to appear in his Follies in 1910. But Streisand’s is a reimagined Brice – more crafted, funny in a more modern mode, and more of a camera creation (even though Streisand had originated the role on stage and this was only her first picture). The real Fanny Brice, who can be glimpsed in only a handful of movies – Hollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with her, so when she retired from the stage in the 1930s she wound up on radio, where she played Baby Snooks for years – and heard in a couple of dozen recordings. (Jasmine Records has collected them all, including a couple of Baby Snooks routines, on Fanny Brice: The Rose of Washington Square. The song “Rose of Washington Square,” which she performed in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic in 1920, is not, alas, among them.)