Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Happy Halloween. We celebrated it like we usually do, at home waiting for trick or treaters who never come and watching Francis Ford Coppola's Film Of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

On the first point: in Boston, and now in Eugene, every year that we're in America for Halloween, we buy a bowlful of candy (mini candy bars, because that's what I most loved to get when I was a kid) and hope we'll get trick or treaters. Mrs. Sgt. T, being Japanese, has never had the experience of giving out candy to trick or treaters. It's one of those American things she's always wanted to do, see all the kids in their cute costumes, hearing them say thank you when you toss candy in their orange plastic pumpkins.

But we never get any trick or treaters. Is it because we live in an apartment? When I was a kid we used to love trick or treating apartment buildings - lots of candy in a short time, very efficient. But then again we were always a little nervous, going inside a strange building, where the porch-light-equals-candy code was inoperable. Do today's kids avoid apartment buildings? Or maybe nobody trick or treats anymore at all? Is the world too dangerous for parents to feel safe sending their kids out to knock on strangers' doors? Anyway, this is one more year when we have a bowlful of Almond Joys left at the end of the night. Like we need the sugar.

On the second point: we love Coppola's Dracula, and we make no apologies for it. Yes, Keanu Reeves can't act. Yes, it has an early-'90s big hair vibe. Yes, it goes way over the top. But... Actually, not "but" on that last point. Going over the top is an aesthetic we like, and it certainly helps this film. The operatic love story, the Jesus pretentions of this view of Dracula, the unsubtle Victorian-modernity subtext, the rococo editing techniques... It's all wonderful. It's Coppola's detailed visual genius at its finest.

Two favorite moments:

Dracula chasing Mina around the cinematheque, then he catches her. She faces him, he reaches out to her, and over his shoulder you can see what looks like one of the Lumiere films, a train barreling down the tracks toward the viewer - toward Mina.

And: every scene with Sadie Frost in it as Lucy Westenra. Coppola's version of the story really ramps up the eroticism, in keeping with our current understanding of the vampire mythos, and Frost represents that part of repressed Victorian-modern sexuality that just can't wait to be liberated by the Count. She's on fire with it.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 17: "Belonging"

At long last we know the full background of one of the Dolls: how she came to be a doll, and why (I’m not convinced we know Caroline’s full story yet). And the surprising thing is, that wasn’t even the most exciting thing about this episode.

It was welcome, though. That tantalizing scene we got between Sierra and Nolan in Episode 8 (“Needs”): we get everything it promised us. Nolan was using the Dollhouse as a date-rape drug; also as revenge, and sick entertainment. We get closure on him; in Priya’s desperate plea to be cleansed of the memory of what she did to him, we also get a hint of why some of the other dolls might have agreed to their contracts. Memories (like Victor’s: is he there to “recover” from post-traumatic stress disorder?), guilts (November, and now Sierra), they’d do anything rather than have to live with (which is it for Echo?). Notice the view we get of Priya right after she kills Nolan? She stands up, and we see her in silhouette against her old painting of the bird. It turns out that it’s not Nolan who’s the big black shadow threatening her avian freedom: it’s she herself.

We also get the answer to the real question Episode 8 left us with, which is: how much did DeWitt and Topher knew about Nolan and Sierra? The answer is, not much. They thought she was crazy, and under his care: they thought they were helping her. When they realize they were wrong, they’re horrified.

It’s a well-named episode, because this is the one where everybody has to answer the old labor movement question: which side are you on? (And of course one way to read Dollhouse is as a metaphor for capitalism: we’ve got owners and workers, management and labor, exploiters and exploited. Somebody among the workers has awakened to their plight, and is going to try to organize them.)

It’s all about belonging: deciding which side you belong to, or trying to make others your possessions. Nolan uses his connections with the Dollhouse, and his knowledge of neurochemistry, to try to make Priya belong to him. When his plot is exposed, Topher tries to free Priya; but in the end, her attempt to assert her autonomy results in her signing herself over to the Dollhouse, some parts of her permanently. She belongs to the Dollhouse in a deeper way than she did before.

Topher and Adelle have to choose sides, too. Adelle thinks this house belongs to her, and that she can run it as she sees fit. The Rossum corporation makes it clear to her that she’s wrong: she belongs to them. Either she toes the line or she goes to the Attic. She, in turn, tries to make Topher play ball, saying he has no choice: she even reminds him that he’s in this job because he has no morals, and therefore belongs in/to the Dollhouse. He chooses differently, but his choice goes so wrong that, like Priya/Sierra, his dependence on the Dollhouse is only strengthened. Rossum’s grip tightens, and our characters begin to feel it: they can choose to accept it, like Adelle, or be made to accept it, like Topher, but either way, they’re owned.

Adelle thinks everybody in the Dollhouse is owned by the Dollhouse. We know she’s wrong: Echo is free, in her mind. And, as of this episode, we begin to see where Boyd stands as well. All season long we’ve been able to see that Dollhouse discipline, that Panopticon watchfulness, has been slipping: Echo’s constantly displaying signs of wakefulness, Sierra and Victor are plainly in love. Saunders’s alienation (then flight), combined with Boyd’s indifference, explained it: but now Boyd has taken a side. He knows Echo is awake, and he’s chosen to abet her in whatever she’s planning. We always suspected he was a good guy; now we know.

At the same time, we also now know he can supervise the cover-up of a murder, and the dismemberment of a body, without batting an eye. Boyd’s a little bit scary now. Ex-cop? Is that all?

All of this to think about, and so little time in the episode to think about it, because you were too busy feeling it all. It was probably the deepest episode yet, emotionally: just wrenching. Topher is more and more becoming the emotional center of the story, as we watch him wrestle with his conscience. Here we see him, really for the first time, begin to sense that what he’s doing might go horribly wrong. “Epitaphs” tells us both that it will and that Topher does have enough of a soul to be driven mad by his role in it; now we see that soul emerging in the present.

How cool is it, by the way, that it’s a book that reveals that Echo is awake? It could only be a book. The point is that she has broken out of the eternally-refreshed now state of the Doll: she’s engaged in a long-term, multisession learning project, one that implies progression, directionality, awareness of past, present, and future…it couldn’t have been a newspaper, or a blog, for example. Or, more to the point, a typical TV show, where each episode stands alone, allowing you to pretend that last week’s episode never happened. It could, however, have been something like Dollhouse…

Yes: Symphonic Live (2001/2009)

This is a document of Yes's 2001 tour, in support of Magnification. It was recorded 11/22/01 in Amsterdam. A video of the show was released in 2002, and some of the tracks from the soundtrack were released on various limited edition discs over the years. The full show finally made it into mass release this past spring. I just picked it up.

The reality of this round of Yessing was that they'd cast second guitarist/ keyboardist/ co-songwriter/ unsung hero Billy Sherwood loose early in 2000, and fired main keyboardist Igor Khoroshev late in 2000. This left the ancients Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Alan White without a keyboardist, but with a feeling that three and a half studio albums in five years, plus four straight years of touring, had given them some long-needed career momentum that shouldn't be squandered. Since they had already gone through every keyboard player in the known universe, some of them twice, none of whom would speak to them again, they had no choice but to do something else. They hired a film composer to write orchestral arrangements for their new songs, and put out an album, Magnification, where the orchestra (mostly) filled the keyboard slot. Then they took it out on tour.

That, near as I can tell, was the reality. The official story was that Yes fans had been clamoring for decades to see the band play with a symphony orchestra. They actually said this in some press release somewhere - I read it in a number of articles at the time. This, despite the fact that histories of the band had all agreed that the one time they'd done this before, with 1970's Time And A Word, the results had hardly been an unalloyed success. But, no matter. Can't fault the band for trying to sell tickets, can you?

But see: the proof that the band knew full well fans hadn't been waiting for thirty years for a symphonic Yes was that the 2001 tour featured not a single song from Time And A Word. In fact, the tour only featured three or four songs from the new album. Mostly it was the same stuff they'd been playing for the last four years.

More proof: they hired a keyboard player. They found someone willing to work with them, to play a prominent part in the music and then allow his name to be buried in the credits. A young New Jerseyan named Tom Brislin. They used him, then let him go the minute Rick Wakeman woke up.

Do I sound cynical? Well, perhaps I am. But I'll admit to liking Magnification a great deal. The frustrating thing about Yes is that no matter how ugly the circumstances behind one of their studio albums, I almost always find the music sufficient to redeem them.

Tours, live albums, are another matter, and it's Symphonic Live we're here to discuss.

I have limited use for Yes live albums. I have every one of them - I'm a fully paid-up member of Yes fandom - but rarely spin most of them.

Live albums can either offer good listening in their own right, or function as a sort of souvenir, allowing fans to relive a moment in a band's history. Occasionally live albums can do both. So far, most of Yes's live albums do neither very well.

Why? On count one, musical content: I've said it before: Yes have always been a compositional unit, not an improvisational one. They seldom vary their performances from what's on the album, and when they do, it's seldom an improvement. Seldom - but not never. Each of their live albums, each of their tours, seems to have one or two things to recommend it to the serious Yes listener. On Yessongs, it's the great jammed-out "Yours Is No Disgrace," the bruising rhythmic drop-out/drop-in near the end of "Siberian Khatru." On Yesshows it's the glam energy of "Going For The One." I get the live albums to find these moments and extract them like diamonds from a deep, dark mine.

On count two, documentary value: due to membership shifts, label issues, or sheer lack of foresight, Yes has never managed to properly document their live work. It may seem contradictory of me to wish they would, since I just got finished saying most of it's dross; very well, I contradict myself. The fan in me would like to see Yes put out one album to document each of their bouts of touring: either a complete show or a composite, it doesn't matter, but something to commemorate (commit to public memory) each iteration of the Yesshow. Even Yessongs doesn't do this, you know: it covers two tours, by two different lineups.

So how does Symphonic Live stack up?

As a document, it's fair. It's almost a complete show, which makes it more than we have for most Yes tours, but less than it could have been. The minimal packaging (recycled CG from the DVD package, incomplete performance credits) suggests how cheap an affair it is, taken straight from the DVD soundtrack, which is no doubt why we don't get the complete show. No liner notes explaining anything, needless to say. In terms of helping the fan get a (legal) sense of what this tour was about, it's better than nothing. But it could have been more.

As music? I would have been curious to hear the orchestra actually try to replace the keyboards, as was apparently the original plan. Instead, Brislin's there, usually playing a pretty good facsimile of the original keyboard parts. He's a fine keyboardist in fact, acquitting himself quite well on "Starship Trooper," for example. Which leaves the orchestra to do what, exactly? Mostly they're relegated to the background, adding emphasis and frills, but not much actual music.

The band, meanwhile, sound a bit tired. Howe's guitar work...well, it's been years since he had a fire in the belly to match the lightning in his fingers, and he plays it pretty cool here, too. Hits the notes, mostly, but with a sound and an attack that are for the most part doe-eyed, not wild-eyed, not like he used to be. Well, so be it. (But why keep playing the old stuff if he's not that into it anymore?)(Money. Why listen? Hmm.) Squire and White bash it around as energetically as ever, but the orchestra tend to detract from the rhythms, predictably.

There are a few gems. The orchestral backing on "Long Distance Runaround" adds a lot more than color: some really nice countermelodies, a great introduction, and a nice excuse to end the thing rather than go into "The Fish." "Don't Go," a forgettable pop gesture on the record, is surprisingly convincing in this context. "The Gates Of Delirium" provides perhaps the best glimpse of what things could have been, with the strings adding a real grandeur and texture to the band's sound, while they Brislin goads Howe, Squire, and White into kicking out something resembling the jams.

(Tanuki's condensation: Side One is "Long Distance Runaround," "Don't Go," and "Starship Trooper"; Side Two is "The Gates Of Delirium." Slap on a Roger Dean cover and there's yer vinyl Yesshow 2001.)

Duke Ellington: Ellington Uptown (1952)

It really was my next acquisition after this. It just took me a while to write about it.

The music currently available as Ellingtown Uptown is: versions of "Skin Deep," "The Mooche," "Take The 'A' Train," "A Tone Parallel To Harlem (Harlem Suite)," "Perdido," and "The Controversial Suite," all recorded between December 1951 and July 1952, plus "The Liberian Suite," recorded in May/December 1947. All of this is happening in the early days of the lp record. "Liberian Suite" was released as a 10-inch lp in 1948, while "Skin Deep," "Mooche," "'A' Train," "Harlem Suite," and "Perdido" were released as a 10-inch lp in 1952. The latter was also issued in a 12-inch version that substituted "Controversial" for "Harlem Suite," if I understand it right.

So this is really music from two different periods, with considerable differences in the lineups. The Uptown material is mostly rerecordings of classic material, and it benefits from the new format. Ellington and his orchestra can stretch out and develop solos and themes more than they could on a 78. "Mooche" is six and a half minutes of hypnotic groove, while "A Train" nearly becomes a suite in its own right, with the addition of a vocal section courtesy of Betty Roche. "Skin Deep," meanwhile, gets to devote three minutes to one of the most explosive drum solos this side of Keith Moon. Really, nobody needs me to tell them how great Duke Ellington is. And this is great Duke Ellington. And it sounds great: still mono, but compare it to the prewar versions of these songs. Night and day.

"Liberian Suite" even lacks a little in the fidelity department compared to the later material. It's brilliant stuff, though. I guess I have to say I prefer the longer tympani solo in the LCJO version, and it's a sheer toss-up on the vocalists (Al Hibbler's creamy croon or Milt Grayson's stately recitation? they're both awesome). But listen to the violin-trumpet tango in "Dance No. 3." The little drum fills behind the vibraphone solo in "Dance No. 2." The way the horns blend everywhere.

Life is richer with Duke Ellington's music in it.

Sopranos

So this might be worth mentioning.

Finished watching The Sopranos this afternoon on DVD. I never watched it while it was running: a combination of revulsion against the hype (was it the New York Times that called it the greatest work of popular culture ever? please) and being too cheap ever to have HBO. But once it was all out on DVD I finally gave it a shot. That was about a year and a half ago, and I finally finished this afternoon.

Obviously, I don't think it was the greatest work of popular culture evah. How could you even make a case for that kind of claim? I was pretty damn impressed, though, particularly with the first season. But for me it went pretty much consistently downhill from there. Mrs. Sgt. T lost interest somewhere in Season 3; sometime in Season 4 I conceded she was probably right.

I won't bother to say what I liked about it: when I thought it was good, it was for the same reasons everybody else did. Writing, characters, texture, sense of place, detail, subtext, etc., all more complex than anything TV had seen before (although not since: I'm one season into The Wire and one season into Mad Men, too).

Where it fell down for me is a more interesting question (to me, at least). I get, I think, the show's central critique of contemporary America: that our screwed-up past and our present self-indulgence are destroying us, but we're too screwed up, self-indulgent, and self-deluded to do anything about it. It's a cogent critique, and I largely agree with it.

But it poses a problem for a show that runs for six seasons. The whole point of Tony Soprano is that he'll never change. And this makes for kind of a static show. That wasn't a problem in the first season, because we're not sure he can't change. I mean, he's in therapy, right? And he actually seems to be making progress for a while. But somewhere in the middle seasons I got the point, that he'll never change, and after that...nothing really mattered.

I think if I'd been able to follow the intricacies of the mob stories, the stagnant subtext wouldn't have bothered me. But surprisingly (because I thought I loved mob movies), I got bored with the plot fairly quickly. Just too damn many characters to keep straight, especially since the show very pointedly didn't give most of them proper establishing scenes - artistically a nice move, of course, but inconvenient for the viewer, to say the least. Plus, I didn't really like any of the characters - again, not a strict necessity, but it would've helped, over the long run.

So that's that.

Can't rag on it too much, though. It got Dylan to record "Return To Me." Here's a live version.

Gemini (1999)

Gemini, Japanese title Sôseiji 双生児, which could just as well be translated "Twins," although that isn't very creepy, which this movie is supposed to be. It was directed by Tsukamoto Shin'ya 塚本晋也 and released in 1999. Based on an Edogawa Ranpo short story which has been translated (as "Twins"); good story, although most of what's in the film is Tsukamoto's fantasia on Ranpo's themes.

A bit hard to follow at first, but pretty soon you're entranced. Imagine David Cronenberg remaking something from Suzuki Seijun's Taishô trilogy: that's this film. An elegant, classy setting for some truly sick jewels.

And it's the setting that I found myself drawn to, more than the jewels. The crime, the violence, the horror felt very Ranpo, which is to say sort of Poeish, and therefore were more or less what I expected. But I loved the film's vision of late-Meiji/early-Taishô Japan.

Weird hairstyles. No eyebrows. Lines clean, clothes neat, behavior unbelievably poised. Until you get to the slums, which are Dickens on acid. The period details, in other words, are recognizable, but defamiliarized. This is past-as-foreign-country stuff, exoticizing early 20th-century Japan, putting domestic audiences in almost the same position as their foreign counterparts vis-a-vis the country's past. Sort of the opposite of nostalgia. Very interesting.

Mokkun, by the way, is great in it. Even without eyebrows.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Don't Be Afraid...The Music Of Charles Mingus (2005)

It was released in 2005, but it was recorded in 2003, at the same time as this one. It's their most recent release to date (that I know of).

In some ways it's their most puzzling release. As a jazz modernist (I know, all jazz is modern), he's as daring a choice as Coltrane, but then again, since he often wrote for a large lineup, maybe he's not: of all the modernists he's the best fit (unless they want to tackle Gil Evans's work for Miles) (hey, now there's an idea). So why do him? Of course they started out mostly recording Ellington, who was a perfect fit, not an adventurous choice at all; but then again, Ellington was due for a revival, and most of his recordings had been made with primitive technology: for the sonic upgrade, if nothing else, he was worth doing. But Mingus? His records still sound good today. So again: why do him?

I've got no answer. I'm just familiar enough with Mingus to know the above facts (plus, that he's awesome), and not familiar enough to tell you if they're doing anything radical with his stuff here. But I can say: it sounds good, and preserves the humor and weirdness of Mingus's music, if not quite the soulfulness. What I've heard of Mingus never sacrifices grit for glitz; this sometimes does.

So: I've now listened to all of the LCJO's records (except for the ones where they're just Wynton's backing band, playing nothing but his compositions: I figure those belong in a different category). What do I think?

I think they're best experienced live. In concert it becomes clear that their mission is the thing: to present a broad cross-section of the history of jazz, and to do it with a lineup big enough and versatile enough to do it all some justice. And bringing it all together like that, the Duke next to Wayne Shorter, WC Handy next to Fred Rogers next to Dizzy Gillespie, it all makes a certain kind of sense, and of course the music itself is fine.

On record, they haven't quite figured out the best way to present themselves. The discs devoted to the ouevre of a single artist are spotty and even at their best it's hard to think of a truly persuasive reason for their existence. I think their most successful records are the two that just draw from their tours, with eclectic track selections and this historiographical aspect of their work in full swing (pun intended). If they had just released one record a year, documenting each year's repertoire, I'd probably buy them all. That would be something. It might even go further toward making the case for them as an artists' collective to be reckoned with, rather than the combination tourist attraction/PBS special that they seem to be thought of as now.

Then again, that seems to be working out for them. So.