Man it's Dylan Time

Instead of trying to say what should be said about the great Dylan documentary by Martin Scorsese, here's a tribute to the Man. It may seem parodic or downright lame -- but hey -- he's Dylan the Pretender always. So here's a song written in the spirit of Dylan -- more spirit than genius definitely. The structure is a dead rip-off "Desolation Row" -- a song that I've never paid much attention to until I saw the documentary with the ghostly face of Dylan performing it live. The tune's a combination of "Desolation Row" and "Every Grain of Sand (?)".

Here's the song ...

And the lyrics given my garbled singing and less than Dylanesque voice:

"Live Forever", says the Preacher
His voice echoes through the hall,
And the rich red carpets keeping running
From doorway to the wall.
In a spotlight stands a Prophet
He's much too blind to see
The collar creeping up his neck
As he dances in ecstasy:
And I'm waiting for that final hour
Beyong all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind

"Those paragraphs need correcting"
Is the teacher's angry boast
Write to convince your audience
Not to converse with Ghosts
And blieve instead in the powerful myth
That my ideas are best
A sentence is only good enough
If it puts commas to their deaths
So my students wait for that final workd
Beyond all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind

"I Love This City" the T-Shirt says
It's heart beating blood red,
As lovers walk in paired attire
Beneath the Penny Arcade
And in burnt out corners the iron rails
Of subway lines still run
Hoping to roll out meaning where
The Fall dares to meet the Sun
And I'm travelling in no direction
Beyond all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

Here's the time for a poet's license
Before the Courts of Law
When money speaks for everyman
Wagging it's tongue sore
And throats are clogged with jealousy
Coughs and threats are loud-
The clown is dancing without his mask
The Jester's got his shroud
And I'm singing a strange melody
Trespassing space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

Goodbye to all that Rubbish
That swims about gleefully
Like Rodents drinking poisoned deaths
And flies that never flee
The Plague, he paid a visit
Not so long ago
Hawking his wares to the highest bidder
Desperate for his soul
And I'm buying with my final coin
A place beyond all time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

New Directions

After a long bout of silence on this blog, I'm finally going to commit myself to writing about some of the music that I've been into for the past two to three years. Briefly, I haven't written about films for a bit because I haven't watched any in the past few weeks. Apart from being really occupied with taking me mommy around the city (and some further regions I might add), I've also been studying for these big exams (ok BIG in my world view ... they're not like national exams or anything) affectionately called "the Comps". They're another hurdle that I need to get over (or hoop to jump through) and because it's been a while since I've had to sit down and write essays for an entire day (the exam is from 9 to 5 with an hour's lunch break ...) I've been trying to be conscientious in preparing for it. But, I guess I've jumped through enough of these exam hoops to be kinda cynical about the point of taking exams such as these so I've been telling myself not to kill myself over exam prep ...

Anyway, the music that I want to write about is Jazz. I know those Jazz aficionados out there who know a whole lot about the stuff would probably scoff at what I've just called it -- "Jazz". After all, no one really writes about Jazz. Unless you're writing a history of the subject, a serious writer of Jazz is going to pick from the very specific manifestations of a very varied musical movement and deal with those. Jazz after all, since it's "origins" in the blues and New Orleans Big Band has a most interesting and plural arc of development. So, short of giving a run-down about what I've discovered about Jazz and its history, I think I'll write about an album that I'vce been listening to a bit.

Hang on, before I go on. Everyone has a Jazz controversy. I think some people think that I'm snooty (or damn poseur) because I've been exploring this Jazz stuff. I guess people think that it's either obscure or unfamiliar and its strange sounds defy understanding or appreciation. Now, the tricky thing here is that I don't have specialized knowledge about the music. I can follow a few of explanations of how chords are substituted in Jazz or the varying harmonic landscapes in the different styles but I can't play the stuff. So while I claim to enjoy the music, I most certainly am an "outsider" in terms of appreciating its fine points. Another thing. Jazz has a colorful history with very interesting personalities whose careers stretch over styles and periods. It's another aspect of jazz that I enjoy and learning about this "background" to the music does go some way in helping the appreciation of it.

More on difficulties with Jazz. I think a lot of Jazz seems difficult to understand or follow because of its improvisational nature. A typical "jazz" piece starts out by stating the theme (or the melody line), what is often called the "head" then wanders off into exploring possible variations on this theme. Now I use "variations" cautiously, because unlike the strict mathematical variations of someone like Bach, the variations I'm talking about here have to do with "playing the changes", making up and creating a solo that works with the harmonic (chordal) movements of the piece. Actually this happens all the time in pop and rock music, most guitar solos actually play over the chords of the verse and lead into the big restatement of the chorus ... But the "problem" with Jazz is that this improvisation takes up the bulk of the performance. In a sense, the melody is an "excuse" to get to the improvisation. So a challenge when listening to jazz is to try to track the way the soloist is developing the improv that he's working on, even as he works it out. Now, without the firm grasp on the technicalities of the music, this DOES indeed pose a problem, even for the most intent of listeners. Therein, I think, lies the problem with jazz.

More "jazz" related thingys. Ok, this one bugs me a bit and stating it makes me sound snobbish and elitist. But since I'm already steep'd in blood. I hate it when people do the jazz thing because it appears chic. There I've said it. These would be the yuppy types who are INTO jazz because they think ALL of jazz is like Norah Jones and Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr (who are excellent musicians) and "It's a Wonderful World" , who like the "atmosphere" of Jazz bars BUT who don't commit themselves to LISTENING to the music (they sit and bloody talk through the performance I tell you ...) or finding out more. It's not like I'm saying Jazz should be the property of a select few -- come on, there are millions of jazz lovers -- but if you want to talk through a performance do it quietly or sit in the FAR BACK. And it isn't that I'm an exclusive JazzHead. I listen to a variety of things (I'll even admit that I have the Black Eyed Peas and Gwen Stefani on my MP3 player ...) but I do believe that, like a poem by TS Eliot or a novel by James Joyce or a Pinter play, some attention and effort should be put into listening and researching about Jazz, more IS got out of the experience that way.

Ok, moving back to the music. The album I want to write briefly about is John Coltrane's "Live at the Village Vanguard". John Coltrane is one of those high priests of Jazz, and he not only participated in some of the greatest bands, he revolutionized Jazz with his amazing commitment to pushing the limits of what WAS music and his dedication to his art. I'll start at the middle of the album, with a great track, "Chasin' the Trane". It's a blues, so it's entirely improvised around the 12 bar form. What one hears is a probing music. He plays clusters of notes, then high and low notes alternating, as if in conversation with himself. There is no other harmonic support except of the bass so Coltrane is free to move in all sorts of directions. Then after about 3 minutes, he starts to probe the higher registers, with a tentative squeek, grounded by a flurry of earthy notes. Repetitions come in. He tries out a sequence, then repeats it with changes. The thing keeps moving forward, though it doesn't seem to have a place to go, almost pure intensity of movement and shifting perspectives on the saxaphone. He plays high again, sometimes the notes are barely audible, cracking into sound and they remind me of Billie Holliday's voice cracked up by years of substance abuse. He returns to the security of note clusters. And gets more rythmic, a groove develops for a while then fades into scale flurries. And in all this, he quotes from I don't know what but there's a little ditty thrown in, ironically. Another squeal then a low sqwark. Now he's screaming on the horn. The music groans and grows. How many times can the same note be played differently, how many times the patterns with subtle variation? He speaks in multiple voice. The carefree melodic high register gets admonished by the baser low tones as they try towards melody. And over all, the strange high screeching. I can't keep up with the raw strength of the sound. There's too much that is strange and wonderful.

Yeah -- so my grand ambitions to talk about a whole album have been cut short by a lack of stamina (oh the album's still playing) and my pressing exams. If you've never explored jazz, check the music out: WBGO

xvi

Capturing the Friedmans

I watched this today, sort of marking the end of the Latin ordeal that the past six weeks has been. I've been meaning to watch this for some time -- it played during a Film Fest back home one year but I didn't get tickets for it. It was a most thought provoking film, exposing thoroughly, the weaknesses of law enforcement procedures, both at the level of detective work and in the whole plea-bargaining process. But more deeply, it showed how mixed up and gray humans are.
Briefly, Arnold Friedman, his wife and three sons life a middle-class American life. This life starts to unravel when Arnold Friedman gets caught with possession of child pornography, then gets accused of sexually abusing young boys (his students). The whole affair, while happened in the late 1980s, is considered by some as symptomatic of the witch-hunt by homophobic conservatives. As the film demonstrates, there were serious problems with the police work and the way the detectives badgered the young boys into making accusations. But making the film even more intriguing is the fact that the Friedmans were real home video buffs and so the documentary is supplemented with lots of footage from their own personal home videos. They even have material from AFTER the arrests, from the night before their father is going to be put away for life. Some amazing stuff. One really needs to watch this.


And a great Village Voice article on the film and whole affair

xv

The Apostle -- Robert Duvall

Watched this on the IFC today on a whim. Was genuinely moved by it. Lots of people have many things to say about it on the Amazon website -- and a lot of them are spot on. I found myself singing along with it -- those old time gospel hymns of my youth -- and responding in at a most emotional level to it. So -- a wonderful film about how flawed, but how magnificent too, we all are and can be.

xiv

After meaning to for a long while I finally watched 2046. I found it pretty awesome, with delicious allusions to all the man's previous films. Some people told me it was painfully slow and hard to sit through. I found it gorgeous and thought it should have gone on at least an hour more. Then again, I watch it in strange circumstances, in the midst of unconjugated Latin verbs and poorly cooked lamb chops, without Ms Tan around, strange circumstances.

I found the film extremely coherent with all the female leads stunning (especially Gong Li -- oh for an hour more of that story ... and Faye Wong ... I remember Quentin Tarantino speaking at light speed about how he can't get her out of his head everytime he hears that Cranberries' song** after watching her performance in Chungking Express and saying WHO WOULDN'T have a crush on her...) Loved the interiors and watching through doorways and listening through, sometimes even passing the materiality of words through, cardboard walls.

**Just been alerted to the fact that the song should be "California Dreaming" Faye Wong sings a cantonese version of a Cranberries' song (a separate fact mentioned by Tarantino, I believe)

xiii

War at a distance has become the essential feature for all of us who live in comfortable first-world nation states. We read about the daily tragedies of Iraq, are reminded of the genocides in Africa, try to untangle the recent histories of the Central Europe and reflect on what things would be like if war came home. I've always been struck by that: "What if war came home?" One of the things I most vividly remember was when I was 8 and saw something in the paper about either the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge and being seized with an immediate anxiety. What if I got caught in a war? War at a distance but always already an unchanging reality.

Hearts and Minds is a war film. A war documentary shot in the 1975 just when the Vietnam War was winding down. It features a relatively small number of persons and key-players who are interviewed and in comparison to Stanley Karnow's epic documentary, Vietnam: A Television History (side note -- THIS is available in its entirety in the Singapore NLB system --apparently it runs slightly over 11 hours long but it certainly doesn't seem that long when one gets immersed in the tapes), its scope is definitely limited. Also, its format seems rather straight forward, edit talking heads with shots of the war and you have a take on Vietnam. However, Hearts and Minds certainly is a lot more personal in its approach. Interviewing Vietnamese farmers who have just gotten their homes blown apart, who have lost children; an American deserter who has decided to return because he can't go on living "underground"; Daniel Ellsberg who breaks down as he recounts the shooting of RFK; the American GI who is with a Vietnamese girl, who says into the camera, "If my girl back home could see me now ...": the war geographically, distant, is brought home.

And the war distant in time is brought into the present as well. One of the ex-soldiers being interviewed, a funny jive talking, quick-witted, filthy-mouthed Afro-American with a 'Fro, who talks about his experiences. Who can joke about using a dead comrade as a shield when American planes napalm HIS position. Who can joke about running through his napalmed position without his pants on because they get burned up, "How do you fight a war without your drawers!" Who lives with the war everyday, because as the camera pulls away from the stream of his commentary, we realize he doesn't have an arm anymore, doesn't have a leg. The destruction of war, lingers, is always with us.

xii - 2 and 3

Two truths are told ...

Finished watching the first Ingmar Bergman trilogy which starts with Through a Glass Darkly today. The next two installments are Winter Light and The Silence. It's not a trilogy in the same way that we think of Star Wars as a trilogy or the Terminator movies being related to each other sequentially. It doesn't even make the loose connections that Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" films make, with their strange "interconnectedness" and with, of course, Jay and Silent Bob ... But it's a trilogy at that deep level of existential questioning, on the level of "where is God in all this"? And perhaps that is where ALL connections, if we believe in connections, find some basis, in some kind of movement toward or away Presence and Being.

The second film in the trilogy, Winter Light, is the most overtly "christian" or religious of the three. It centers on a pastor of a small village being himself unable to work out any firm belief in his God. He has a strained relationship with his mistress (or maybe we should call her his girlfriend since his wife IS dead ... but do pastors have mistresses or girlfriends ?) and is unable to provide counsel to a parishoner in distress. All this in the bleak northern Swedish winter. All this in the cramped confines of a tiny parish church with it's oppressive low ceilings and uncomfortable wooden pews.

But the open landscape provides no relief either. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, when the pastor has to attend to a death, the setting is without respite. The roaring river muffling out any sounds of human interaction and activity; relations are reduced to a mimed sequence of polite gesturing. But it isn't because these characters have nothing to say. No, instead, WE are just never positioned to hear it. Like a distant God, who sees moving mumbling lips in prayer, trembling tired knees, strained necks and bowed heads, but never hearing humanity.

The Silence was, in my opinion, the most artistically complex of the three. A consistent choice in staging these films -- the pared down cast with only about four characters interacting with each other. The Slience takes this further by putting a young boy, his mother and his aunt in hotel, surrounded by complete strangers, who don't speak the same language as they do. In fact, Bergman was playing a strange game with this one. I don't think it's even a REAL language that the rest of the people in the film speak -- even the shots of the newspaper isn't in any recognizable European language. So a little boy wandering about the ornate interiors, playing make believe games to entertain himself, while his mother has affairs and his aunt wastes away. A strained silence, engulfs the film because there is so little dialogue.

The Silence was beautifully shot, with amazing lighting effects and camera angles. With mirrors playing off each other, smoke filled sillouettes, lone figures starkly placed against thick rich interiors, impossible closeups, partial objects -- fingers, glass, table top, water -- mingling. Atmosphere, creating a terrible nauseating implosion. Very much like Last Year at Marienbad but looser.




All this was heavy stuff. Maybe I'll take a break from Bergman tommorrow and watch something else.

xii What's past's Prelude

I'll admit that the viewing I've been doing the past couple of days has been leading up to my proposed project-- to get acquainted with Ingmar Bergman's films.

Till today, the only Bergman film that I've watched (and owned, this being my second DVD purchase, Farewell to my Concubine being the first) was The Seventh Seal. I've always liked it. It's harsh cinematography -- stylized symbolic moments -- against other relatively naturalistic episodes. A true mingling of high and low in the dance of death.

So I began today, to explore Bergman, to know him better. And I thought I'd look at something from around the same time as The Seventh Seal.

What strikes a dweller of the tropics is the strange eternal daylight of Through a Glass Darkly. It's supposed to be night but these are the Northernmost lattitudes, where it is almost always sun in the summer. The austere setting -- a scenic rocky coast where a lone rural holiday retreat -- evokes that realm of the outside. Outside what? An exteriority, sky and sea reflecting clouds, that cannot be placed within. In this "outside" of surfaces, Bergman delves into the heart of existential angst -- Where is God?

It might seem silly for a film to so overtly deal with an agnostic nightmare. Afterall, it was/is post-45 and God is Dead. But IS God Dead? The question must be asked both ways. We often think of the consequences of a Dead God. But what if God is not Dead, what if he is alive and well, and waiting to judge, waiting, like a spider (and this is the protagonist's conclusion) to enter one's body but then to not enter. To see the Face of God and then to realize one's God is not the God you grew up struggling with. A summer retreat. A writer, his two children, his son-in-law. One of his children, afflicted with a mental illness. The hypocrisy that emerges from the best of intentions. Yet all drawn together wondering Where IS God? A writer who WILL use the degeneration of his daughter's mind as fodder for his next novel. A husband unable to penetrate the decaying mind of his wife.

A younger brother -- and this isn't clear but I think it happens -- who finds himself incestuously involved with his sister, in the moment of her mania. Where is God in this?

To the cannibalized daughter, the impenetrable wife, the desiring sister, God is in the slit behind the wallpaper in the mildewed room on the top floor of the house. The voices draw her there and there she sees the face of God. God is a spider.

And this is a beginning. It's part of a trilogy that Bergman put out in which he thinks about God. And it's supposed to be the affirmative beginning ...

xi

Friday: Another double feature day
I should actually state, for the record that the place I've been renting these videos from is called "Kim's". They've got a store right outside Columbia, at about 114th Street, next to the NYPL. They've also got a stores down in the East Village and West Village. Anyway, I really like the store cause it has everything strange and avant garde, as well as commercial box office successes. I could spend an entire year borrowing stuff that I want to watch everyday and there would still be more. Anyway, I also like the fact that it's relatively cheap - a buck twenty five if you borrow and return on the same day, and only a buck if what you want to watch happens to be a "pick". This of course, can't compare to one of the best things that ever happened to Singapore -- the Library at the Esplanade-- where lots of great stuff can be got for a low low annual fee.

Which brings me to Friday's selections. The first thing I watched was The Dark Crystal. It was a "staff pick" so I decided to get it. Some background: I've got fond memories of this film because 1. It was the only thing I'd watch over and over whenever I went to my Dad's place, while growing up, 2. The new Agey thing about Evil-Good being part of the same plane of existence always intrigued me as a powerful narrative trick. And of course 3. I've always like the Muppets and Jim Henson and Frank Oz go all out in this one.

Watching it after what must be about 15 years (?), I realized how much one's tastes and opinions are shaped by the specific mode of consumption. Not that I have particularly fond memories of hanging out at my Dad's place. There was nothing to do except to take in the extremely neat living room and lounge on the fresh Ikea furniture. Nothing to do except bemoan the fact that he didn't own books, had only one other silly video -- Victor/Victoria -- and a bunch of Witney Houston CDs. Nothing to do by play Donkey Kong Jr. on an old Nitendo handheld -- the only game that I've managed to run the scores right round the hundreds and back to zero. So The Dark Crystal was something to watch. Watching it yesterday was painful. It's really slow: it doesn't help that it's life-sized puppets or men in suits playing to roles (making them clumsy and awkward), it's also about a dying planent, making things deliberately slow. I guess I've been spoilt by jump cut editing and a brisk storyline.

The other thing I borrowed in my trip "down amnesia lane", was Amadeus. I've had fond memories of the film ever since I watched it as a kid. It was made in 1984 so I must have seen it around the same time as I was stuck with The Dark Crystal. I even had a pirated copy of the soundtrack on tape. Must have watched its irreverance on the cusp of telling my psychotic piano teacher that enough was enough and not touching the piano for the next 5 years. Anyway, this trip was much more rewarding. Tom Hulce and F Murray Abraham were just brilliant in counterpoint and it's so brilliantly campy I started to wonder what I saw in it as an eleven year old. There IS a tremendous amount of dialogue that I find wickedly funny now that I couldn't possibly have appreciated then. I guess the fact of the genius that never gets his due because he can't play the politics of court and the tremendously insecurity of Salieri in the face of Mozart's raw musical genius was what drew me in. So -- 1 out of 2 is not bad when one reaches back to a strange time.

Don't you just love those old movie posters that used to be hand painted ...

x

Another Movie Day but the review is a hang over from what I didn't get to yesterday.
Along with Rashomon, I watched the first three parts of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 10-part "Decalogue". What first attracted me to checking him out was a strange faint memory of watching "Blue", part of the "Three Colors" trilogy made for France's Bi-centennial celebrations -- a polish man making French films ... -- and the fact that each story in the "Decalogue" revolves around each of the Ten-Commandments.
But only obliquely. The story that I enjoyed most yesterday, though enjoyment should perhaps be replaced with appreciated, because of emotional resonance, was the second one, "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain". A old old doctor and his relationship with his patient's wife. A complicated affair but he swears, and lies and his patient's condition, tangling up the lady's motives and plans, and heartaches. Everything austere, as I like my films, everything concrete in Polish HDBs. Every film with a scene where the stove must be lit, with matches, without which there would be no hot water, for a bath, for a tea, for coffee.
Today, two more films. I first watched "The Last Temptation of Christ". I must admit I watched it because i) Scorsese can do no wrong ii) it's a been banned from my viewing most of my life and I vividly remember having a conversation about this -- why it was banned -- on a school bus just as we passed by the Bishop's house ... Anyway -- Scorsese is better with the grit of streets than the dusty deserts of Palestine and having not yet watched Mel Gibson's ultra-catholic "The Passion", I guess I can't say anything about "realism". But the dream sequences and the strange way that the camera stays on faces much too long, in a disconcerting manner, made it worth watching. I did think it portrayed Christ's humanity very powerfully. William Dafoe made an unlikely Christ but Harvey Kietel's Judas was excellent. And the nice thing about DVD is that the extras confirm certain intuitions -- the shots of Golgatha and the march up the Via Dolorosa, were modelled on Italian / Flemish paintings.

The other film, was Edna's pick. The Grave of the Fireflies [?], a Studio Ghibli Anime. Pretty moving for a cartoon, I guess. Yikes, what lack of commitment in responding to a film!