Little Eva: "The Loco-Motion" (1962)

Little Eva's original "Loco-Motion" is the song I've been high on lately. One of those things where you've heard a song a million times but never really listened to it. I really listened to it recently, and was blown away.

It's marked by a perfect musical economy. Not a note wasted, not one more instrument or lick than necessary. Which is not to say it's minimalist: in fact it's a very full and satisfying little record. It's just that it's put together with incredible craftsmanship. That's Goffin and King for ya.

I mean, listen to the drumming. Tough and snarey on the intro and refrain, insistently clangey on the verse, locking into the saxophones on the turnaround. Nothing fancy, but what's there is just right. And speaking of saxophones, dig how much release there is in that sudden sax solo, and how it then dies down into a tension-building stutter, setting up the renewed release of the refrain.

This is a very professional record, in the best sense of the word. But as with much great pop music, it's not any one thing that makes it a perfect record - not just the professionalism - but a combination of things - in this case the tension between the professionalism of the music (including the very solid songwriting, an argument in favor of formula if there ever was one) and something very amateurish.

Which is Little Eva herself. It's well known that she was Goffin and King's babysitter: a background almost too right to be true. She sounds like a teenager in this vocal, and of course that's just what the Brill Building loved in 1962. But she doesn't sound like a scared teenager, or an inept one. She's a great natural vocalist, in charge of the song from the get-go. The producers know it: they put her way up front in the mix, dominating the backing vocals. She's a primary color, not a delicate shade; a belter, if such a thing were possible in the girl-group milieu. She manages to sound both innocent (the unvarnished accent on "swang your hips now") and expert (the second "come on" that ends the verse), spontaneous ("yay-yay-yayeyay") and in control (same interjection).

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

Following up on this, we watched Meaning of Life the other night. Myohmyohmy but I laughed. So let's play a high school game and rank the Python films. For me it's Holy Grail and Meaning of Life neck and neck for no. 1, with Life of Brian a rather distant third. Which may seem odd; I think most people would agree that Life of Brian is Python's best film qua film. Hell, I agree with that proposition.

But it's not quaness that I look to the Pythons for. It's not professionalism or craft (at least not any craft recognizable to me) that made me videotape as many episodes as I could from MTV and WETA back in 1986 and 1987, lovingly label, name, and decorate the tape boxes, and then keep the damn things for twenty years despite layers of original static and growing tape fuzz. It was sheer demented genius, and philosophy.

Holy Grail is the former. It has some deeper meaning, some intellectual subtext, but mostly it's just surreal humor, enough to make you weep with laughter. I never tire of it; I'm not alone in that. Meaning of Life is the latter: it's almost desperately open about its ideas, as if the Pythons figured they may never get another chance to say what they really think with at least a few people listening. I listened. When I was in eleventh grade it felt like Python were the only ones in the world really thinking about stuff. Okay, sure, I was pretty full of myself - but they meant a lot to me.

Thing is, neither Holy Grail nor Meaning of Life are all that great as movies qua movies. Holy Grail makes a point of it, flouting any rule it can divine, of course; and Meaning of Life is, as John Cleese objected at the time (according to the DVD commentary), just a collection of sketches that has trouble justifying its running time.

Life of Brian, meanwhile, is a good movie. A tight film, well-told, with enough jokes to keep you laughing, but not enough to distract from creating characters and telling their stories. It's the perfect balance - some classic Python absurdity, some very focused subtext, all in the service of the story. But you know how I feel about perfection. And Life of Brian does that: it doesn't make me laugh as hard as Holy Grail, or think as hard as Meaning of Life. I admire it; but the others I love.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was this. That Meaning of Life is clearly the most philosophical of the three Python films, but then right in the middle of it (literally) they place what just might be their most inspired bit of surrealism ever. Completely meaningless, and utterly, eye-poppingly, gaspingly funny. And it went wherever I did go.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Portraits By Ellington (1992)

Picked this up because I'm going to see this outfit next week. Have one of the LCJO's albums, which I bought after seeing them once in '95 or so, and I always meant to pick this one up.

It was recorded live in 1991. It's old: back from when the LCJO was concentrating on (re)establishing Duke at the head of the classic jazz canon. Back when it was still concentrating on trying to (as Stanley Crouch put it in the notes to their next release) "create a viable jazz canon." I'm sure that's still one of their goals, but now they've moved on to include other composers. Duke's place is secure.

The whole album's good listening, but the centerpiece and masterpiece is the "Liberian Suite." Jaw-dropping, this. Twenty-seven minutes of slow-burn soul. What instrumentation! Solos for vocalist (Milt Grayson, sounding like a bow-tied version of Leon Thomas), clarinet, vibes, violin, and timpani, in addition to the standard saxes and brass (the best trumpet solo on the record, by the way, isn't by Wynton Marsalis: it's by Lew Soloff, in the suite).

And each one of these unusual instruments cuts deeper than the last. By the time you get to the timpani (yes, timpani) solo, you've been so worked over, body and soul, that the timpani doesn't have to thunder. It whispers. Who would've thought a timpani could make you want ot cry? This one does.

The only way to really judge this record would be with knowledge of Duke's original versions of these tunes. Not an easy thing, since many of these are rather obscure pieces, at least to a novice like me. I know I love what I'm hearing, but I haven't heard an Ellington recording of "Liberian Suite," so I don't know if what I'm loving is the performance or the composition. At this point I guess it doesn't matter. I think Duke's will be my next acquisition, which is probably mostly what LCJO was aiming for here.

Pizzicato Five: Darlin' Of Discothéque (1999)

Something happened, and now this record is ten years old. W, as the kids say, TF?

The version in the video is the short version, from the album known in Japan as either pizzicato five or perfect world and internationally as either pizzicato five tm or the fifth release from matador. (P5's discography is nearly impossible to truly understand. Take a stab at it here or here.) A longer version was released on an ep, and it's worth seeking out.

The song - well, you have to use that term loosely when dealing with Pizzicato, because their big weakness, especially after Takanami Keitaro left, was that they were short on melodies. They disguised this (or made it work for them, depending on how you view it) by reusing the same melodies over and over, tweaking them slightly, and making their genericness part of the overall texture of their art, just another element to be endlessly recombined and reframed. All of which is by way of saying that the tune here isn't too memorable (okay, the bridge is striking, and the "darlin, darlin, darlin discotheque" part is hooky). But that it doesn't matter, because Konishi has dressed it up in such an alluring mix of '60s British psyche, frantic breakbeats, Italian spy movie theme music, heavy metal guitar, and Bollywood that you hardly notice the melody. It's the total package that matters: and in that connection let's not forget the chameleonic Nomiya Maki, without whose ability to inhabit absolutely any style or image of the last fifty years Konishi would have been lost at sea.

For me the best moment is the harpsichord break.

Somebody else's thoughts on Inglourious Basterds

My post about Inglourious Basterds the other day didn't really do the film justice, I know. If you want to read something that does, check out this, by Jim Emerson. He's had a number of really excellent posts on the film over the last few weeks. I don't agree a hundred percent, but that's not important: this is real film criticism.

Assorted thoughts on Inglourious Basterds

I try to keep overt political statements out of this blog, but I can’t think of a way to discuss Inglourious Basterds without taking a stand on torture. So: I’m against it. Always. Read Andrew Sullivan if you want to know why.

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More specifically, I can’t think of a way to discuss this movie without taking a stand on depictions of torture in popular culture. And that’s a more difficult stand to take. I had to give up on 24 halfway through the first season because I was disgusted by what it was saying about torture, and about the torture regime then brewing in American government. Easy call, right? I disapprove of art that excuses torture.

But I loved this movie, and I’m pretty sure it excuses torture. So where does that leave me?

I want to preserve my view that popular culture can be, or at least, contain a space for us to envision things, work out fantasies, experience catharses, that we shouldn’t and probably even wouldn’t condone in real life. Popular culture as a safe space, or maybe a safety valve.

But at the same time I don’t want to deny that popular culture is connected enough to real life to affect it. Like, I think it’s a stretch to think that America’s addiction to Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer didn’t pave the way for Dick Cheney.

Then again, what if the popularity of 24 was only a reflection of pre-existent cultural trends that independently led to Abu Ghraib? Then again again, how could you even tell if they led to it “independently” or not?

Difficult issues; better minds than I have failed to resolve them. All I know is that I hate-hate-hated 24 and loved Inglourious Basterds, and hope that doesn’t make me a hypocrite.

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I haven’t blogged about Tarantino before, but I love him. Jackie Brown is my favorite one of his joints. Which may tell you that I agree with this recent appreciation of him. I like him most for his incredible ear for dialogue and his formal experimentations; his action I like, but it’s not what makes me await each new film of his so eagerly.

I second what Lim says about the dialogue in IB:

Tarantino gives the conversations room to soar and stall and double back on themselves (especially in two agonizingly tense and protracted scenes, in a farmhouse and a basement tavern). Language is the chief weapon of the insinuating villain, brilliantly played by Christoph Waltz, a Nazi colonel fluent in German, English, French, and Italian. Power resides in the persuasiveness of speech; the success of undercover missions hinges on the ability to master accents; and as characters strive to maintain false pretenses, words are a means of forestalling death.

Landa’s facility with language is balanced by the barely articulate eloquence of his opposite number, Aldo the Apache. This is Brad Pitt at his best: he perfectly renders Aldo’s utterances, comical and stupid and clever and sublime all at once. He’s an idiot, but no fool, and in every way Landa’s match.

But the verbal obsessions of the film are most visible in its extensive use of subtitles. At least half the film’s dialogue is in English-subtitled French, German, or Italian. Tarantino pulls no punches here: even when you think he’s pulling a punch, pandering to the audience by making his Nazis speak English, it turns out to be a sucker punch. Language is the main thing in this movie. Even the violence, most of it, is about what it says.

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Brad Pitt is a mediocre actor. But he’s a great overactor. I usually can’t bear to watch him in straight roles, but give him something over the top or cartoon shallow, and he can come up with nearly Johnny Depp-like levels of weird intensity. Twelve Monkeys, Fight Club, Ocean’s Eleven. His role here is one of those, and his performance rises to the occasion.

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Dig what the word “holocaust” originally meant. It’s a Greek word, but most commonly associated with Hebrew rituals described in the Old Testament. It’s a burnt offering in which the animal sacrifice is wholly consumed by flame.

Now think about the climactic scene of this film, in which the Nazi high command (and their concubines and guests) are burned alive in a movie theater. (Well, some of them are shot first.) Their deaths are engineered by a number of people, but mostly by Shosanna, a Jewish woman taking revenge for the killing of her family. She films herself proclaiming this revenge, and splices the clip into the film the Nazis are gathered to watch. By the time the clip shows, however, she’s already dead, and by the time her climactic line arrives – “this is the face of Jewish vengeance” – the screen is going up in flames. Her face ends up projected onto a billow of smoke.

It’s a very mysterious sight, a dead girl speaking beyond the grave, appearing as if a ghost, pronouncing vengeance, dedicating these deaths to the murdered. I would submit that this scene is a literal holocaust of sorts: a burnt offering.

And the offering is wholly consumed: even the sacrificers’ bodies are burned in the fire and subsequent explosion.

Tarantino may be an idiot, but he’s no fool. Or maybe he’s a fool, but no idiot. Either way, I don’t think he’s doing what a lot of people may assume, which is taking the Holocaust lightly, reducing WWII to a joyride. I think this film, in its own twisted, exhilarating way, is a very serious response to the Holocaust; the imagined immolation of those responsible for the Holocaust is a sort of pop-culture offering to the dead.

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So is it a human sacrifice? Or an animal one? Notice how many times humans are compared to animals in the film. In the fantastically taut opening scene, we have Landa, the Jew-hunter, comparing Germans to hawks and Jews to rats (he thinks he’s being complimentary). Later Eli Roth’s character is dubbed the Bear Jew. Then of course there are the Nazis calling Jews “Jew dogs.” The sniper in a bell-tower is compared to a bird in a nest.

The comparisons go deeper than verbal epithets. Remember that opening scene, with Landa comparing Germans to hawks; this is when we first see Shosanna, hiding under the floorboards – not unlike a rat.

Now think of the last scene. Where is she as she exacts her revenge? In the projection room, gazing down at her victims; the film-within-a-film visually compares her to the sniper in his bird’s nest, and maybe we begin to think of her as the hawk, and the Germans as the hapless rats.

Why all the animal imagery? To drive home the point that in war everybody is dehumanized? Does it excuse the torture?

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Does anything excuse the torture? Is this film, as some have called it, torture porn?

It may well be. It certainly doesn’t signal that we’re supposed to disapprove of the Basterds’ tactics: it doesn’t present them as a cautionary tale, or as anything but f’ing awesome.

That may be okay. There may be a place for the catharsis of seeing Jews bash in Nazi heads, as Jeffrey Goldberg suggests.

But if Tarantino’s treatment of the Basterds and their murderous ways is so cavalier, so insensitive, then why do so few of them survive? And if the torture here is so pornographic, then why don’t we get the money shot?

Think about it: the whole movie seems to be leading up to two confrontations. One with the Nazi brass in the theater, and one with Landa. The first confrontation pays off in spectacular fashion – but not really for the Basterds. The two who are there die. The Bear Jew gets to empty a machine gun into Hitler like Clint Eastwood’s wet dream – but unlike Dirty Harry, he doesn’t live to tell about it. In fact, nobody in the theater lives to tell about it – who’s going to tell the outside world what the face of Jewish vengeance looks like? And, as we’ve observed, Shosanna is dead by the time her revenge kicks in. It’s a satisfying scene – but the longer you think about it, the less it feels like a real payoff for the Basterds.

The other confrontation, with Landa, doesn’t go at all like you expect it to. He cuts a deal, and Aldo more or less accepts it. Landa is the one Nazi in the film we come to know more than any other, and to hate more than any other. If there’s anybody in the film who deserves to have his head bashed in with a baseball bat, it’s him. But we don’t get it. We’re left unsatisfied – even the thrill of seeing them carve a swastika in Landa’s forehead is hollow, because we know plastic surgery can fix it, makeup or hats or hair can hide it.

Jack Bauer tortures and saves the world, and Scalia lauds him. The Basterds torture and – what? It’s less clear.

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What about the other charge against the movie, that the Basterds’ brutality almost makes us pity the Nazis, which we shouldn’t have to do?

It’s true that the Basterds’ barbaric violence is held up as a contrast to the Nazi behavior we see in the film. Landa, Goebbels, the SS officer in the tavern, are all so eloquent, so polite, so civilized, while Aldo and his boys are presented as basically Neanderthals.

But I think Tarantino’s game here is actually pretty simple. It’s to contrast the rotten and hypocritical civilization of Europe with the direct and healthy barbarism of America. Landa’s politeness is a veneer hiding his innate murderousness: we finally see this at the end when he strangles Brigitte. Aldo’s savagery is honest to the point of nobility. It’s no accident that he emphasizes his Native American ancestry, and has his men collect scalps. It’s a horribly ham-handed, not to mention politically incorrect, characterization, but that’s the level on which this movie works. That’s the way these characters think. In a twisted way, Aldo and his men are noble savages.

I think Tarantino is trying to keep from letting the Nazis pick up any sympathy from us anti-torture types. The closest thing we get to a “good German” among the Nazis is Wilhelm, and he’s killed by a German, not a Basterd. All the other Nazis are pretty much shown to be evil; we don’t regret their suffering.

Except...what about that first encounter, when we first see the Basterds in action? The Nazi sergeant there is fairly gentlemanly, and gets his head bashed in. Hmm. I don’t know. But this scene did contain one of my favorite moments in the movie. As Aldo is explaining to the surviving Nazi private how and why he’s going to mark him, we see one of the Basterds in the background; a yellow leaf has landed on the breast of his coat, hanging there both as a parodic echo of the Nazi’s chest insignia and, more importantly, as a reminder of the yellow Stars of David Jews were made to wear in the ghettos. A mark for a mark. And a very subtle, eloquent moment for Mr. Tarantino.

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You know what I think? I think this guy's a serious film director.

Tolkien: The Children of Húrin

My recent Tolkien jag ended with me picking up The Children of Húrin, the latest (2007) product of Christopher Tolkien's work with his father's manuscripts. In a way, it's exactly what I wished for while slogging through The Silmarillion: a proper novel-style realization of one of the key incidents, which was told in dry, annalistic fashion in Sil. One wonders if Christopher might be able to come up with a similar synthesized version of some of the other key tales in the legendarium, such as Beren and Luthien...

Here's what happens. Húrin is a Man, and we know what that means in pre-LOTR Middle Earth. He's a loyal student of the Elves, a believer in their lore and more than that in their goals, and so he fights side by side with them when Morgoth invades. Húrin is captured, but despite his human frailty, he refuses to divulge to Morgoth the location of one of the hidden Elven kingdoms, Gondolin. So Morgoth curses Húrin's children, and curses Húrin to have to sit on an iron chair and helplessly behold the sufferings of his children.

The child whose sufferings we most follow is Túrin. I won't go into detail about his life; you can read up on it here. In short, he spends his whole life in exile among the Elves in their various hidden kingdoms; he wants to fight Morgoth - he wants to do good - but everything he does turns to evil. He ends up bringing at least one of those kingdoms, Nargothrond, to ruin, murdering his best friend, marrying and impregnating his sister: Túrin has it rough.

I described this book to Mrs. Sgt. T, and she said: "what a downer!" She's right. This is perhaps the most concentrated dose of Tolkien's grim outlook.

Túrin isn't a perfect man - he has his flaws, including pride and wrath and stubbornness - but he's well-meaning, full of pity and feeling, capable of love, and stalwart in his opposition to evil. But he suffers anyway. His flaws, in other words, aren't of the tragic kind; and yet his story is tragic. He suffers greatly; he suffers for his father's acts; and his father's acts, too, are blameless.

In short, I don't detect any didacticism in this tragedy - no "avoid hubris" moment. It's grimmer than that: all this suffering comes as a result of an unyielding opposition to evil. Evil, in Tolkien, can crush Men. Because they're weak.

I found it a strangely cathartic novel. I mean, it offers absolutely no hope, no redemption. But that's precisely what makes it so moving. Your heart just aches for Túrin, because he goes through so much, and he really doesn't deserve to: you pity him, which is an important emotion in Tolkien. It's a noble one, and a worthy aim for a story of this sort.

I found it interesting that (Christopher?) Tolkien chose to end the tale where he did, with Húrin, finally released, finding Túrin's grave. In The Silmarillion we learn that Morgoth more or less broke Húrin; he never willingly gave up Gondolin, but he unwittingly led Morgoth's servants there, and then managed to inadvertently trigger the fall of the third of the hidden kingdoms, Doriath. It's not hard to see this as the full end of the doom (as Tolkien would phrase it, and in fact does) of Húrin and his children. But it's left out of The Children of Húrin, which only brings the father back at the end of the story to see his son's grave and mourn, sort of a grace note to the tragedy. That may be for the best: seeing how all Húrin's valiant efforts, as well, come to naught might have been just too grim to take.