Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, "Falling Slowly" (2006)

(listen)

I'm normally pretty resistant to romancing rock band musician lifestyles (really!), but I have to admit the movie Once has really got under my skin. It's so tender and beautiful and convincing. In many ways the heart of it is this song, which represents a critical moment of connection in the movie and, as it happens, between the two players as well. Or, well, their own connection probably happened some other much more mundane way. But it is idealized in the scene built around this song, and all of that chemistry and electricity is poured into it, with the two of them shown playing together for the first time, tentatively feeling around for the keys and musical cues and so forth and then working themselves into the song and then suddenly hitting it. And I don't know how this song fits or does not into the (now former) relationship between Hansard and Irglova either, and after all the movie is a musical and a narrative work of fiction, so right right right. Poetic license. But "Falling Slowly" is not a song about being drunk, it's fairly obvious it's about that pesky other "in love" type of falling. Without the movie, the song might seem much more mundane, or overly sweet, or folkie in some tiresome way, though they are each one impossible for me to believe. But I can't say because the movie is how I experienced this song for the first time, and how I think of it, the filter through which I like to hear it. What I can say is that you really ought to go see the movie. Then tell me what you think of the song.

Hell Among the Yearlings (1998)

There's an ever so slightly stuffy air of the self-conscious about Gillian Welch and her old-time folk music project, at least here on her second album, which is the one by her I know best (directed to it via a MOJO list). Welch was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, going to college at Santa Cruz, where it is said the Stanley Brothers reached out and touched her. She hooked up with her musical partner David Rawlings at Berklee. It's a funny background, but she's obviously a natural at this. It doesn't hurt any, of course, to have T-Bone Burnett twiddling the knobs and playing keyboards. The sound is loose and sparkling tight at once, clarified so every string and vocal croak practically can be heard vibrating—beautifully recorded, no surprise of course. Welch's singing holds the center of attention with a reedy commanding confidence, an ability to slip and slide around the notes and words and push against them in convincingly achy ways. And all the playing is fine as can be, shaped and textured and felt. A scan of the titles fleshes out the themes: "The Devil Had a Hold on Me," "Miner's Refrain," "Rock of Ages," "My Morphine." They are all originals, which vexingly then raises questions of what she has to tell us about the devil, miners, morphine, etc., or even yearlings for that matter. It's vexing because they are good questions. "Miner's Refrain," for example, puts me in mind of Harlan County U.S.A., a very fine movie. It sounds like it could play there, dropped in with any of the other musical sequences. But suddenly I realize I am hearing it more convincingly in terms of a shared experience over an acclaimed documentary than some bulletin from elsewhere, "down in a hole," let alone with urgency of narrative. It is as if Welch imagines herself into these dust bowl scenarios and then riffs off that, which is fine I suppose, especially for an early album, testing and trying things. I'm approximately at the point where I start to understand some of the generalized carping one hears about a presumed lack of authenticity, but I'm not sure it's fair, or even necessarily right. But I will say I appreciate Hell Among the Yearlings most when I take it on admittedly superficial terms, as tracks thrown up very occasionally into the shuffle stream or the album whole played through start to finish in track order a few days in a row to get the feel for it. Otherwise I don't pull it out.

Spellbound (2002)

USA, 97 minutes, documentary
Director/photography: Jeffrey Blitz
Music: Daniel Hulsizer
Editor: Yana Gorskaya

Spellbound is so formally effective as a documentary of the annual National Spelling Bee competition, sponsored by the E.W. Scripps company, a media conglomerate, and held in the late spring of each year in Washington, D.C., that one wonders why it hasn't been done more often. It focuses on the competition in one year, 1999, and well before the competition has begun hand-picks eight competitors to follow, traveling to their home towns, interviewing their families, friends, and teachers, and sketching five-minute portraits of each.

These choices were clearly not made randomly—among them are three of the final eight competitors, including the eventual winner, along with children of Mexican and Indian immigrants and children from poor and disadvantaged and from upper-middle-class and privileged households. Regions represented include California, D.C., Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It's a real potpourri, and if the mechanics behind it show, the final result speaks for itself: an absolutely riveting portrait of a competition capable of suspending time the way any closely contested athletic competition can.

B

The bulbous B pretends to be more important than it is by way of its position as the second letter of the alphabet. In fact, it is just the 20th most frequently used letter, ahead of only V, K, J, X, Q, and Z. But consider the word "alphabet," derived from the Greek for "alpha" and "beta," the first two letters of the alphabet. Thus the bumptious B even horns in on the word itself we use for the enterprise at hand. The nerve. Yet isn't this the way after all that people think? One, two, many. Alpha, beta, I'm tired of letters now. And therein lies the rub after all. The letter B pays a heavy penalty for its presumption, its jolly persistent appearances in the ABCs of things and all its bubbly baby talky buh buh buh. If the letter A is the alpha top of the top best of all, the letter B necessarily becomes the fall guy for everything else, winding up with a sleazy extra coat of "loser" for its troubles. B movies, B girls, B team, B squad, 2 hip 2 B square, graduate school F. For people, behaving for all the world as if there is no C, D, or E (let alone P, Q, or R), it's either A—which as we've seen tends to reflexively endorse its own indignity of inflations in the echo chamber of AA, AAA, AAAA, AAAAA, and so on, but which is always at least kind of terrific, good, and acceptable—or it's our friend we are suddenly not so sure about ourselves, the letter B, which seems to stink of something rather unpleasant. But come now. The letter B does have some things going for it. Unlike the vowels and many of the consonants we will see, a B is always a B. It has no multiple duties and is not approximated elsewise. And that is integrity, people, an element in short supply in this man's English alphabet. The sound it represents is always the same moderately complex consonant noise involving coordination with the voice and lips—by name a "voiced bilabial stop" (the term itself gaudy with Bs). Who can say what the logic was of putting that particular and distinct mouth noise second in the alphabet. We're stuck with it now, but then, we seem to be stuck with the silent "gh" in night and tight too. Puns: "be" is a very important word, let's not forget, and "bee" can combine with either or both quite harmoniously, e.g., "don't worry, bee happy" (accompanied by illustration of bumblebee). And say, here's a thought. Could the prominent position of the letter B actually reflect some primal brainstem instinct? After all, babies are pretty important to everyone and they get two of the darn things in a simple four-letter word: baby, which also, for what it's worth, happens to be what many of us call our sex partners at one time or another. And then all that baby talk. Granted, the letter G has stake in this too with the classic "goo-goo gah-gah," and of course "mama" and "papa," but after that isn't it all boo boo buh buh bub bub bub bub bub, etc. Crying out loud, look at the word we have for it: babbling.

Angelo Badalamenti, "Twin Peaks Theme" (1990)

(listen)

I have a lot of memories and associations with this, not least how much the Pacific Northwest has become my home. I remember how exciting and what a novelty it was at that time for something with such a high profile—and so interesting—to be explicitly set in this region. Then the TV show itself turned out to be such a sensation, so weird and freaky and funny all at once, and became associated with strangely high spirits and anticipation too (compare The X-Files). But my favorite moment with all this happened on a winter night many years later, in those bad Bush years, when I stepped into a late-night bookstore insomniac and bleary and they had just started playing the Twin Peaks soundtrack album. I could not figure out what it was. It was the most beautiful feeling, a prolonged extended déjà vu. I became acutely aware that it was raining outside and very dark, but the lights of the storefronts across the street were visible, bars and a pharmacy and a pizza takeout. And of things like how the rain streaked against the window and what that did to the lights and what it sounded like when cars or now and then a truck drove by. It changed the whole scene and mood and I surreptitiously watched the other patrons, who sometimes seemed to be moving and swaying to the music. I suspect, musicologically speaking, it's pretty primitive stuff. Yet so evocative too. I skulked around the bookstore some 20 minutes and finally gave up and had to ask the clerk what it was. The answer was not surprising.

City Lights (1931)

#1: City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

I realized later that I probably could have put Citizen Kane here and maybe even pulled it off. I got kind of cute with these last five picks—an embedded Top 5 for my #5, a four-hour movie for #4, a made-up trilogy for #3, and a matched pair of stellar performances for #2. I wanted my #1 to represent a singular, multifaceted talent at the top of his form, and that's Orson Welles and Citizen Kane without a doubt.

But it's also Charlie Chaplin and City Lights. The guy wrote it, directed it, edited it, stars in it, and he wrote all the music too. And it's great music. The talkies had already arrived and his moment was slipping away, but Chaplin still had a few good ones in him—his best, in fact—along with some strikingly innovative ideas about the place and purpose of sound. This is not a silent picture; it is, as billed, "a comedy romance in pantomime," and sound is a significant part of it even if dialogue isn't, for which he still uses (sparingly) the intertitle cards. It is original in ways that few pictures not done by Chaplin are.

Falling Off the Sky (2012)

What is basically the first album from the dB's in 25 years (and arguably only the second in 30) has turned out to be a welcome surprise on many levels, not least that it so good, with a set that sounds as close to a return to the mind meld between Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey as we could have hoped for. It feels as if they are well aware of their strengths and weaknesses both, playing effectively within their limitations. The Wikipedia entry makes it "jangle pop/power pop" and that's as good a way as any to start on this mess. But don't forget the overarching indie aesthetic, which remains important as constraining and ultimately defining element. The songs are verse/chorus/verse with lines that rhyme and stories about being in love, finding it, losing it, appreciating it, thinking about it a lot, still. No late midlife crisis this, as often as not evidently at peace with its decisions, living with them, unlike the youthful angst none of us can help, and which they rightly and neatly step the hell away from. Instead it's just about getting down to the matter of working with what they have, the stuff of their lives and memories and a persistent way of getting songs to fit together and work. It's much more often "beautiful" than "interesting," which I count as the happiest surprise of all. As we all know by now, or should, "nothing lasts," and so it was hard to know what the old crew had in mind and/or were capable of. It turns out to be pretty simple. They are still here, still in command of their various powers, still productive as a unit, with no airs or pretensions. The sequencing has some feel of a series of careful, deliberate statements: "That Time Is Gone," "Before We Were Born," "The Wonder of Love," it opens, moving quickly to the sublime, with soaring melodies and wide open singing and harmonies. Every track here is solid. I never would have guessed the dB's had another album in them. There might be more. But even if there's not this is as strikingly good a way of going out as any other I can think of at the moment. Feels like going home in a way, and infinitely sweet when it catches you in the right mood.

Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993)

John Lydon here takes on the difficult and neverending task of "correcting the record," in this case the highly visible, and visibly pored over, history of the Sex Pistols. He was a little late to the party, trailing 1989's Lipstick Traces and 1991's England's Dreaming, which effectively set the outlines, thanks in part to a combination of Malcolm McLaren's arguable overparticipation and Lydon's own underparticipation in those projects. But then Lydon practically compounds the problem with this "authorized autobiography" (though a nice touch, that) "with Keith and Kent Zimmerman," which casts an air of the smug and self-satisfied. It feels as if Lydon considers himself ultimately above all this, and so he is. There is minimal effort. It's basically an oral history with Lydon's voice overwhelmingly dominating the transcriptions. For me, if anything, it tends to undercut his case, which is powerful on its face. As Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols he is the first anyone would think of as the chief player in that drama, with Sid Vicious playing a critical supporting role. But the books by Greil Marcus and Jon Savage make powerful and persuasive cases for the importance of McLaren and, rather more incidentally, for Glen Matlock, who made significant contributions as a songwriter. Lydon comes off in this autobiography as a decent human being and an interesting enough cultural figure, sarcastic and radical and embittered though not unpleasantly so. But he seems more football fan than rock star somehow, and somehow this regular guy thing struck me as a tough sell. Certainly Lydon has carried on the most interesting post-Pistols career (though I don't think McLaren is actually that far behind him). But many of Lydon's arguments against the significance of, say, McLaren, or Situationism, seem to boil down to "Nah-nah, can't prove it. I was there and I say not," etc., without producing anything like a satisfying or credible alternative explanation for the hurricanes of phenomena that swirled around the Sex Pistols when they existed. Lydon could well be the one telling the truth, but his version seems by far the least interesting—thus, perhaps, the most convincing in one way. But still, if Lydon is going to stake his legacy on his vision and his words he might have considered taking on the work of composing them rather than simply switching on a tape recorder and speaking into it as the whim moved him. This is a bit disappointing.

In case it's not at the library.

A Foreign Sound (2004)

It occurred to me for the first time recently, going back to this elusive and fascinating cover songs album by Caetano Veloso, the great Brazilian singer and songwriter, that the title could well have been plucked out of the compelling word salad of one of the bravest and most audacious covers here (of many), Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)": "So don't fear if you hear / A foreign sound to your ear / It's alright, Ma," etc. At 22 tracks, this album is packed full, arms wide open, Walt Whitman style, I-am-large—I-contain-multitudes, with room for Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kurt Cobain, and Morris Alpert, which is the track order for the first five songs, so you know how fast it switches and what caps it reaches for: "The Carioca," "So in Love," "Always," "Come as You Are," and "Feelings." For every standard such as "Summertime" there's at least one mostly unexpected pick with an interesting history or twist: "Cry Me a River," which may or may not be associated with Barbra Streisand now but Julie London owned it first, "Nature Boy," a Nat King Cole song later covered by Big Star, "(Nothing But) Flowers," late Talking Heads, on and on it goes. In many ways it's a perfect freak show of references. But in case anyone was still wondering, Veloso proves over and over what a shrewd, insinuating, and overpowering performer he can be. As suggested by the songs already mentioned, there's a lot of extravagance in the choices, but after that it's strictly professional, with a variety of outfits assembled for the purposes of each song, some of which are just Veloso singing and playing guitar and others with big orchestras. But at the same time, from all these sessions, it also feels like an organic whole, more than arguably it has any right to. The bob and weave of these songs can be hypnotic, and there is much to be taken from close listening—the best touches are also the finest, sneaking up on you, often in Veloso's phrasings and scans. So many of these concept projects, such as tribute albums or a covers album such as this, often look better on paper but somehow don't translate, except the occasional inspired track. I admit I had my concerns seeing how wild A Foreign Sound can swing, from Nirvana to Elvis to DNA. It can go some pretty crazy places. But Veloso always seems to know where he is and what he is doing, so let it play, baby, I say let it play.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.