The jazz pianist Dave Brubeck died on Wednesday, December 05, 2012 at age 91. In a characteristic bit of rhythmic eccentricity, he died a day before the downbeat of his 92nd birthday.
December 06, 2012
November 21, 2012
Post-Rock and the City
Augusto Contento's Parallax Sounds is unlike any music documentary you've ever seen--and unlike any documentary you've ever seen. The film looks back on the post-rock music scene in 1990s Chicago, intercutting interviews with musicians with a Walter Ruttmann-style urban image montage. Contento, who co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Kênya Zanatta and co-produced with Giancarlo Grande, focuses on five key musicians: Steve Albini, David Grubbs, Damon Locks, Ken Vandermark, and Ian Williams. The interviews are filmed in Contento's trademark tracking shots. Most often the subjects appear on a water taxi chugging back and forth on the Chicago River. The musicians emerge as distinct characters, each with their own story. Although all of them are still working musicians, they seem a bit forlorn, a little lonely now that the scene is largely dead. (In fact, more musicians were originally scheduled to take part, but they had left Chicago long ago.) Only Vandermark seems still energized by his work. He's definitely the star of the film, his intensity cutting across Contento's languorous visual style.
The purpose of Parallax Sounds is not to recreate the local music scene of the 1990s as if one were there. Contento was a big fan of Chicago post-rock, which he heard as a young man in Italy. He's recreated that experience--listening to the music from afar and imaging the city that produced it. No peripheral figures appear in the film: no journalists who covered the scene, no one from Thrill Jockey Records, no fans. Despite its bustling air, the film has a solitary feel to it.
If Contento is uninterested in creating a conventional documentary, he really captured visual experience of the city, particularly the downtown area and lake front. The movie begins in deep winter--the frozen lake shore is chilling, literally--and ends in high summer when the city really opens up.
Contento seems to thaw himself. His Strade d'Acqua (Roads of Water, 2009) consisted almost entirely in long tracking shots, mostly of a boat traveling on the Amazon River. In Parallax Sounds he uses the same basic technique--he must have bought a monthly pass to the Chicago Water Taxi--but with greater attention to composing within the frame. At times he approaches the abstractions of Ruttmann and Alberto Cavalcanti in Rien que les heures (1926), but warmer than the former and less playful than the latter.
If you're looking for a film that captures the post-rock scene of the 1990s as it once happened, then you'll be disappointed. Instead, Parallax Sounds traces the music's coming into being, its origins in the city itself. The film is a way of listening.
July 02, 2012
April 13, 2012
Fun Friday: Designs on the New World Edition
This has been a really busy week, so I've been in a virtual Internet blackout. Right after I finish this Fun Friday entry I'm going to look up the weather report from the new weather satellite launched by North Korea. I've been looking forward to it for a long time.
First up this week is a screening of Parallex Sounds at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival (CIMMfest). As I've mentioned before, Parallex Sounds is a documentary on the post-rock scene in 1990s Chicago. The film is shot in director August Contento's distinctive style, heavy on the horizontal movement, with a soundtrack by musicians including Ken Vandermark, Steve Albini, Wayne Montana, David Grubbs, John Herndon, and Rob Mazurek. A work-in-progress preview of Parallax Sounds takes place on Saturday, April 14 at 5:30 PM at the Wicker Park Arts Center in Chicago.
The 20th Congress for the New Urbanism takes place May 9-12 in West Palm Beach, Florida. This year's Congress will focus on current problems (crappy housing market, rising seas, income disparity) and past legacies (Spanish and European urban planning for the New World). Early registration has passed, but it's still possible to register for parts or all of the Congress. Schedule and registration info available on the CNU site.
I'm currently reading Miriam Hansen's Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, which has revived my own interest in considering how Walter Benjamin's theories about cinema and photography can be updated to illuminate current cinematic practices. One interesting confluence of Benjamin's philosophy and modernist cinema appears in Irmgard Emmelhainz's multi-part essay "Between Objective Engagement and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974)" in the journal e-flux. Emmelhainz reports that French Maoists took their cue from Benjamin, which he probably would have regarded with much ambivilence.
Walter Benjamin’s critique of Lenin’s professional intellectual was influential in the French Sixties. For Benjamin, the problem with professional intellectuals is that when they attempt to integrate themselves into the proletariat, they ignore their own position in the process of production. Benjamin calls this the trap of logocracy, a system that implies the ruling power of words. In order to avoid this trap, Maoists prioritized practice (working alongside workers) and denigrated discourse, focusing their energies on liberating the forms and instruments of production (to achieve self-management) and promoting self-representation.
I'll have more on Miriam Hansen's terrific book when I finish it.
January 20, 2012
Fun Friday: The Snow Storm Edition
We're in the middle of a snowstorm here in Chicago, which means harrowing drives and shoveling driveways. It's a good time to be inside. (The pigeons above were photographed in Daley Plaza by the Chicago Tribune's E. Jason Wambsgans.)
And if you're hunkering down for the night, then the thing to do is watch Downton Abbey on Netflix streaming. Roger Ebert expresses the essential contradiction of most (including mel) English majors: most of them are liberals, but the discipline itself has a conservative streak, especially when it comes to English country houses.
although my politics are liberal my tastes in fiction respond to the conservative stability of the Downton world. The more seriously I can take it, the better I will like it. To be sure, there is monstrous unfairness in the British class system, and one of the series themes is income inequality. What must be observed, however, is that all the players agree to play by the same rules. In modern America the rich jump through every loophole in the tax code. But look what happened in the first episode of "Downtown Abbey." The Earl's presumptive heir went down with the Titanic and the title passed to a distant cousin, Mr. Matthew Crawley of Manchester, who now stood to inherit the title, the house, the land and the money--including the personal fortune of Cora, the Earl's wife. So deeply are the principles of inheritance embedded in the Crawley family that both the Earl and his wife seem staunchly prepared to give up their earthly possessions and be courteous in the process.
Be forewarned: As my wife and I discovered to our dismay, there are only seven episodes in the first season, which concludes, abruptly, with the announcement of the start of World War I. Just as the world of Downton Abbey has sucked you in, it blows up.
As long as we're in retro mode, the death of the remarkable Johnny Otis, followed by the death of one of his discoveries, Etta James, offers an occasion to look at the transition from big band jazz to rock and roll as America's pre-eminent form of popular music. Ben Greenman at the New Yorker has a nice tribute to James.
And finally--I have to hit the road now--here's an unlikely curl-up-with-a-good-book recommendation: Michel Houellebecq's new novel, The Map and the Territory
December 01, 2011
Jazz Is Dead
If you go to the Jazz Record Mart on East Illinois Street in Chicago you will find the CDs of trumpeter Nicolas Payton in the racks alongside Danilo Perez, Jeremy Pelt and Chris Potter. However, Payton begins his latest blog entry, "On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . .," by declaring, "Jazz died in 1959."
This is probably news to Perez, Pelt, and Potter, all young jazz muscians. Payton qualifies his remark by allowing, "There maybe cool individuals who say they play Jazz, but ain’t shit cool about Jazz as a whole." According to Payton, jazz has never recovered from its separation from American popular music. 1959 was the last year jazz was cool. That year two of the greatest albums in jazz--in American music--were released: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and Dave Brubeck's Time Out. The following year Ornette Coleman began dabbling in what became known as Free Jazz. Originally Free Jazz was supposed to be ultra-modern, but by 1965, when John Coltrane released One Up, One Down before jumping off the aesthetic cliff, the end was clear. Listen to Coleman and the late Coltrane and you can hear them saying, "we love jazz, we can't live without it, but we need to do something else."
So what does Payton play? Not jazz. "Jazz is a brand," he writes. "Jazz ain’t music, it’s marketing, and bad marketing at that." Instead, he is a "Postmodern New Orleans musician. I create music for the heart and the head, for the beauty and the booty." I pointed out on Twitter that "postmodern" is a marketing term as well, and to my surprise Payton responded, "Yeah, but it doesn't carry a negative connotation to me. Jazz is over. My Postmodernism is just the beginning. Stay tuned."
I replied that I would. I heard Payton perform at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago a few years ago and he was amazing.
I came to jazz by playing trumpet as a kid. I didn't play jazz, either. I played pre-modern horn splatter music. That said, like about 99% of white male Midwesterners born after 1960, the center of my musical world is rock. It's inescapable. From time to time I make an effort to find new bands, but for the most part I've become, to borrow a phrase from Mark Athitakis after he bought the collected songs of R.E.M, a middle-aged guy in a nostalgia bunker.
Jazz could be my escape route from the bunker. Outside the bunker, it's a no-man's land. I've already exhausted the patience of my wife and my friends for going to jazz clubs. It's possible to find some exciting contemporary music in the Jazz Mart if you're willing to sort through rack after rack of bland neo-jazz. The whole genre of jazz seems stuck between the safe and the fusty. Payton describes the current state of jazz more colorfully: "Jazz ain’t cool, it’s cold, like necrophilia. Stop fucking the dead and embrace the living."
It's better to listen by name, by tradition, to listen for pushing against the limits of the form. There are musicians who do this. Three names that come immediately to mind are Payton, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Moran. All three work within definable--and quite old--traditions, yet they continually surprise the listener. They defamiliarize jazz so that it can be heard again.
Note: I highly recommend Nicholas Payton's Twitter feed, @paynic. Also recommended is Vijay Iyer at @vijayiyer.
August 26, 2011
Fun Friday: Hurry Up September Edition
It's been a crazy summer for me: 18-hour days managing an iPad app development project. Let me tell you, iPad apps may be easy to use, but they're difficult to build. Fortunately, the project will be completed by the end of this month. Here's what I will be doing with my free time next month:
Anyway, first off this week MAS Context editor and Chicago architect Iker Gil, working with photographer Andreas E.G. Larsson, have completed their project "Inside Marina City." Their project examines the lives of the residents of Chicago's Marina City, designed by Bertrand Goldberg, the architect of the imperiled Prentice Women's Hospital. Overshadowed a bit now by the behemoths erected around it (I'm thinking of you, Trump Tower), Marina City was a radical experiment in urban residential architecture when it was completed in 1967. "Inside Marina City" shows how people have adapted the buildings' unusual spaces for their own purposes and tastes. Originally billed as a "city within a city," Marina City as seen through Gil and Larsson's eyes is still a microcosm of middle-class urban life.
The "Inside Marina City" exhibition will open this fall at the Art Institute of Chicago as companion piece to the Art Institute's Bertrand Goldberg retrospective, "Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of invention." The "Inside Marina City exhibition will run from September 17, 2011 through January 15, 2012.
There are three more days to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign for Parallax Sounds, a documentary film about Chicago's architecture and its relationship to the post-rock movement of the 1990s. The film features director Augusto Contento's trademark languid tracking shots in which key figures in the city's 90s music scene--Steve Albini, Ken Vandermark, Ian Williams, David Grubbs, among others--reflect on how Chicago's physical and cultural environment shaped their music. In this scene Ian Williams ((Battles, Storm & Stress, Don Caballero) describes his fascination with the city's grid system.
Ian Williams on Chicago's urban landscape from Parallax Loop on Vimeo.
The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago will exhibit the work of the postwar Soviet artist and designer Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998). During the chilliest period of the Cold War Koretsky developed an idiosyncratic form of post-Socialist Realism depicting human suffering on a global scale--including within the Soviet Union itself. "Vision and Communism" features more than ninety of Koretsky's posters, photographs, and maquettes. The exhibition runs from September 29, 2011 through January 22, 2012. The exhibit is part of The Soviet Arts Experience, a citywide event showcasing the art and culture of the Soviet Union.
April 08, 2011
Fun Friday: Parallax Sounds Edition
It's been a very busy week for me. I had to wind up a couple of big projects by today, and tomorrow I start a whole new set of projects with a new employer. My first new assignment is managing an iPad app development project, about which I'm pretty excited. I'm continually surprised at how quickly the mobile space has taken off in the last year, and I can't resist getting involved in it.
In the meantime, a backlog of blog topics is starting to build up: the new David Foster Wallace novel; Walter Benjamin's concept of allegorical representation and how it relates to the city of Detroit; a new monograph on the Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang; and a documentary on the social, political, and economic conditions on the Amazon River.
The documentary film on the Amazon, Strade d'Acqua (Roads of Water) is directed by Augusto Contento. Last Saturday I attended a screening of the film, about which I will have more next week. After the screening, the film's producer, Giancarlo Grande, presented the first highlights from Parallax Sounds, a project by Contento, Grande, and Kênya Zanatta currently shooting in Chicago (still above). Ken Vandermark, who provided the soundtrack for Strade d'Acqua and appears in Parallax Sounds as part of the film's examination of the post-rock movement in 1990s Chicago, accompanied the screening on a soprano saxophone (below).
Tonight and tomorrow night the Hideout will be the venue for fundraisers for Parallax Sounds. Musicians appearing in the documentary will perform on the Hideout's intimate stage for the low price of $10. Friday's lineup is The Eternals and the Tim Daisy/Ken Vandermark duo. Saturday night's lineup is the Tim Daisy/ Devin Hoff/ Ken Vandermark trio in its debut performance, the Jeb Bishop/ Tim Daisy/ Nate McBride trio, and AZITA. I will be attending the Saturday performance.
Vandermark is an intense and amazingly inventive performer. He shouldn't be missed, even if you don't normally attend jazz shows. I would also highly recommend the guy who sells homemade tamales in the Hideout.
January 31, 2011
Re-Visioning Post-Rock
Last Friday I met with Kênya Zanatta, the assistant director and co-screenwriter for a documentary film about the post-rock movement in 1990s Chicago. The film is directed by Augusto Contento, who also made three lyrical documentaries set in Brazil: Tramas (2008), Strade Trasparenti (Transparent Roads, 2008), and Strade d'Acqua (Roads of Water, 2009). The working title of the film is Parallax Sounds.
The Chicago post-rock movement centered around the Wicker Park neighborhood seems like an unlikely subject for the Paris-based crew. Zanatta explained that Contento became a fan of the music in his native Italy, where it was very popular in the 1990s. Contento had already worked with post-rock musician Ken Vandermark, and the jazz musician figures prominently in the new film. (Vandermark is currently preparing the Strade d'Acqua soundtrack for release and he was also the subject of Daniel Kraus's film Musician.) Other musicians who will appear in the film include David Grubbs, Damon Locks, Steve Albini, and Azita Youseffi (above). Thrill Jockey Records founder Bettina Richards will also be interviewed.
Zanatta, a Brazilian native now living in Paris, is in Chicago to scout locations and prepare the musicians for their filmed interviews. Contento uses a lot of long-duration tracking shots, so Zanatta is looking for place where Contento's camera can settle in and do its work. I'm imagining a cross between the tracking shots of New Orleans in Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, which were filmed by a camera mounted on the gate of a hand-pushed station wagon, and the city symphony sequences in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, shot with a camera hidden in a valise. In any case, filming of Parallax Sounds begins in March.
Contento's camera will also be led around by the musicians, who will give tours of the city as they know it--or once knew it. None of the musicians featured in Parallax Sounds originally comes from Chicago, and several of them no longer live here. As a result, Parallax Sounds will look at a particular place and a particular time from an outsider's perspective. The film is being produced by Cineparallax, a French independent production company founded by Contento and Giancarlo Grande. Funding for the project comes from the Centre National de la Cinematographie's COSIP initiative and the North Rhein-Westphalia Film Fund. The producers are working with other production companies in Germany (Troika Entertainment), Italy (First Sun Produzioni), and Finland (the television network YLE). The only stateside production support comes from Bulletproof Films, the Chicago film production company responsible for the excellent documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, directed by Chicagoan Yony Leyser. So far distribution arrangements have been made in France, Germany, and Finland.
Cineparallax will probably land an American distribution deal, and it will be interesting to see how the film is received here. The term post-rock is rarely, if ever, used to describe music being played today. The sense of crisis in the 1990s, when American popular music was caught in the grip of M.C. Hammer, has largely passed, although rock music sales still lag behind rap and country music. The 1990s generation of musicians were the last to work before Napster blew up the music business. The Chicago that fostered musical and artistic experimentation has largely disappeared, too. Baby strollers now outnumber electric guitars in Wicker Park. While there are some interesting bands based in the city, and post-rock fixtures like Tortoise still play here, the local music scene lacks the cachet of Austin, Brooklyn or Montreal. Considering the me-too indie music scene here, it's fitting that a group of Europeans remember when Chicago was at the center of the alternative music world.
Parallax Sounds is scheduled to be complete in October, 2011.
December 08, 2010
The Political Beatle
I remember switching on the radio one sunny winter day in 1980 to hear WXRT disc jockey Terri Hemmert say, "I'm just trying to get through this day the best I can." Like a lot of teenaged boys at the time, I had a radio crush on Hemmert, and I immediately became concerned that the usually genial, quick-witted DJ was breaking down on the air. A few moments later, Hemmert, a devout Beatle fan, announced that John Lennon had been killed.
Everybody has their own John Lennon. From what I've seen of the remembrances of him on the anniversary of his death, an enduring favorite is the John Lennon of Double Fantasy, that home-baked-bread album that established his persona as the Domestic Beatle. My John Lennon, though, is the Political Beatle.
This Lennon was established in a much earlier solo project, the 1966 film How I Won The War, directed by A Hard Day's Night director Richard Lester. Look magazine fumbles for words to describe the new Lennon:
Whoever would have dreamed that beneath that mop lurked a Renaissance man? Yet there, shorn, sits John Lennon, champion minstrel, literary Beatle, coarse truthsayer, who turned Christendom on with one wildly misunderstood gibe at cant. Now, face white, tunic red, playing wounded in a field of weeds, this pop-rock De Vinci is proposing to act for real. Relaxed to all appearances, he is all knots inside.
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