Friday Random Ten Again

I actually almost lost track of the days for a second there.


Or at least, I woke up believing it was Thursday again for some reason. Lucas Krech's (Not So) Random Ten confused me, then reminded me. Jeez, have to get back to see INLAND EMPIRE again before it closes.


Still stuck on a slow dial-up connection, frustrated. Here's ten from iTunes this morning:


1. "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" - Bobby Whitlock - In Their Own Words

Lovely a capella version of the gospel standard performed by Whitlock at the Bottom Line from when they did their live series of songwriters playing and talking about their work. Builds nicely as the other songwriters onstage and then the audience join in.


2. "Big Black Mariah" - Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Sounds so basic and stripped down now -- when this album first came out this sounded so strange and "experimental." Well, it was the 80s, and nothing exactly sounded like this, especially if you'd missed Waits' transition to this style with Swordfishtrombones and it came out of nowhere (my father got me into this album; he had heard "Clap Hands" on the radio and thought, "What the hell is Beefheart doing now?").


3. "Baloo's Blues" - Phil Harris - The Jungle Book

Cut song not used in the Disney animated film, performed by one of America's favorite TV alcoholics of the 50s and 60s. Really nice swinging vocal on this -- really too actually "bluesy" to belong in the film; also, it would have stopped the film dead, pacewise.


4. "Missione Morte Molo 83 (alternate version)" - Piero Piccioni - Cinematica - Italian Soundtracks from the 60's and 70's

Short pleasant library cue. Almost doesn't sound like Italian scoring, really. When it started and I wasn't looking to see what it was, I thought it was some Pye, Deram, or Joe Meek single from England in the 60s, and I expected a weedy singer to start up. Instead I got Italian strings and had to look. Poppy, peppy, and short.


5. "I Got to You" - Sapphire Thinkers - From Within

One more obscure/forgotten pop-folk-psychedelic band of the late 60s that I was collecting for a bit there as I worked on Temptation. Someday I'll weed out the worst songs of all of those groups; there are SO many bad ones still on here. This is a pretty, pleasant one though. It'll stay. Mamas & Papas harmonies over a "heavier" backing.


6. "Dave the Butcher" - Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones

Okay, iTunes, whatcha fuckin' with me for? Just had another Waits and mentioned this album, and you bring this Beefheart meets Weill instrumental up? It's like the sweetness of the last song needed an antidote.


7. "Comfortably Numb" - Pink Floyd - The Wall

Whoa. Forgot this teen-angst classic was in here. Ah, memories. Still love this one.

Lot more going on in the arrangement than I'd even noticed before, and I've listened to this more times than I can count (and on headphones). All kinds of strings and woodwinds over in the left channel during the verse. Hell, I can make out a specific oboe there, never caught that before. Ah, Bob Ezrin production/arrangement, nothing like it -- he's also responsible for the sound of The Most Depressing Record Ever Made, Lou Reed's Berlin, and he's in NYC leading the orchestra/chorus on the live version Reed's doing at St. Ann's Warehouse this weekend. Wish I could see that.

Ezrin's the guy who, when he needed children crying and screaming on Reed's song "The Kids," brought his two small kids into the studio and told them their Mommy was dead. Yeah, Berlin's a fun album. (I now see that, according the the Wikipedia entry on the album, Ezrin has said this is a myth -- but he's been perpetuating it more recently too, so who knows . . .)

Ah, that great guitar solo finale . . . always makes me think of Michael Mann films, as he's had his composers knock off this section to go behind bits of Thief and Manhunter. Probably used it as a temp track and asked the composers to stay close to it.


8. "On Lover's Hill" - John Leyton - Best of John Leyton

Ah, HERE's the weedy-singered 60s Brit pop song! Pretty and sweet. I dunno why, but I dig the kitschy 60s Britpop. I think this is Leyton post-Joe Meek; the production doesn't sound as idiosyncratic as Meek's bedroom productions.


9. "I Wanna Be a Boss" - Stan Ridgway - Partyball

A favorite song from a favorite songwriter (though his last couple albums were a bit of a disappointment), formerly of the band Wall of Voodoo. I used to play and sing this a lot myself for fun (it's good for hitting an acoustic guitar real hard on the chorus and bellowing the title). Favorite lines:


Now if I find a product I like
I'll buy up the whole company
And shave my face and grin and smile
And then I'll sell it on TV
And everyone will know me
I'll be more famous than Howard Hughes
I'll grow a long beard
And watch Ice Station Zebra in the nude!


10. "Wah-Wah" - George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

Song I like a lot and never think of. Not Phil Spector's best production -- as my old friend Johnny Dresden liked to say, by the point the Wall of Sound was becoming a Wall of Sludge, just a mass of undifferentiated tuned noise. This is from the original CD issue, and I've heard the reissue from a couple years ago is a LOT better, but it's not worth it to me to upgrade this one. It sounds like I remember the vinyl always sounding (I was REALLY into this album as a child).


I've been gradually fixing up the production photos from my shows and loading them into my Flickr stream, planning to share them here from time to time. So, a propos of nothing, a picture from my production of Richard Foreman's Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, from February:





Here, The Radio Star (Alyssa Simon) is "comforted" by The Owner of The Radio Station (Moira Stone) after her vision of The False God (Bryan Enk), actually the Master Zookeeper in disguise.


Which reminds me, Bryan has a show at The Brick that Berit is running and helped design lights on -- the third in his series of adaptations of The Crow for the stage, this one in three sequential monologues. From what I heard, it sounded pretty good. Here's some info:


THE MURDER OF CROWS


Inspired by the work of James O'Barr
Written and Directed by Bryan Enk


Performed by
ADAM SWIDERSKI
BRITTON LAFIELD
and
JESSICA SAVAGE


Friday, December 15th at 10:30PM
Saturday, December 16th at 10:30PM
Wednesday, December 20th at 8PM
$5
Running time: 70 min.


The Brick Theater
575 Metropolitan Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
L to Lorimer/G to Metropolitan


http://www.thirdlows.com/murderofcrows/

INLAND EMPIRE, briefly

Brief email "conversation" from a short time ago:


from Edward Einhorn:


By the way, tell me if you're heading back to INLAND EMPIRE. I really want to see that before it leaves town. What did you think?


my response (rewritten and edited from the email):


I loved it, but I need to see it again.

It's something new, that's for sure. It's recognizably Lynch, but he's playing with structure and imagery in even more complex ways.

Berit and I agree with one reviewer who felt, to paraphrase, that he "got" Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, and understood everything in them (as Berit and I did and do, pretty much), and entered INLAND EMPIRE feeling cocky, having mastered the "algebra" of Lynch.

And this is calculus.

Now, I know you don't have to "get" Drive and Highway to like them, necessarily, but they are puzzles that can be worked out. Everything DOES make sense, or at least CAN. It annoys Berit and I when people take the attitude that there is no "sense" to these films, that they're just Lynch being "weird." I'll give you Wild at Heart as an example of that, but Highway and Drive make sense. Even if you don't want to work out what is "really" going on," the fact that you can makes the experience something more than just "weird."

I'm sure EMPIRE is a puzzle too, but with this one I'm REALLY not sure if it should be "figured out" at all. I know there's a logic underneath, but it is SO unimportant to the experience that it might actually hurt it (I don't feel that working out Drive or Highway hurts the experience of watching them at all).

It is more like a dream, REALLY, than any movie I've seen. Not like movie "dream sequences," it IS a dream, and unlike the other two films, there is really NO indication of even who the "real" dreamer is.

Anyway, I may try to even see if I can get Berit up to see it this afternoon. I'll let you know.


INLAND EMPIRE appears to close at the IFC Center on Tuesday (not Sunday, as I thought). Berit and I are seeing it again this afternoon at 5.20 pm, if anyone's around and wants to join us. You might want to order tickets in advance through www.ifccenter.com.

Another photo from Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, really a staged publicity shot, as this doesn't happen in the show quite this way:



Ian Hill, The Last Filmmaker in the World (played by Peter Bean), sits under the looming projected head of Radio Richard (Ian W. Hill), guarded by the two fascist Zookeepers (Amy Caitlin Carr, Carrie Johnson).

Friday Cat Blogging with Terrible Color

To reiterate, I'm stuck on dial up at a computer with a terrible monitor, with massively incorrect color and contrast. So I have no idea how these photos actually look, but they're on this hard drive, and I can't move them anywhere else anyway, so I might as well use them.


First, another sensitive shot of sensitive Simone:





And here, once again, Hooker makes his feelings apparent to me as regards his importance vs. what I'm trying to read (in this case, the morning paper):





And finally, a shot that for some reason always makes me think of them starring in a kitty Godot (Hooker as Estragon, Moni as Vladimir):