popsublime

Spring Awakening (Eugene O'Neill Theater, January 10th, 2007)

2011-12-30T01:15:00.023-05:00

I’ve never been a huge fan of musicals. After performing in two of them back in high school — Grease and Brigadoon — it was clear that the form itself is often narratively flimsy, and sometimes even narratively non-existent. Almost exactly five years ago now, however, I saw the best Broadway musical that I’ve ever seen in my life, Spring Awakening. More of a pop/rock opera (based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 German stage-play of the same title), this musical took the genre to places I’d never seen it go before, with lyricist Steven Sater and composer Duncan Sheik at the helm, alongside an ensemble of exceptionally talented young people in the original cast.

Adding to my excitement was that just a couple of hours before the show, I had the chance to meet Sater and Sheik at the now-defunct Virgin Megastore in Times Square, where they signed copies of the album with the entire cast, who performed two songs from the show as well (“Touch Me” and “Totally Fucked”), much to the surprise and delight of shoppers and onlookers. To own an autographed copy of the original cast recording is even more special, of course, because several of the show’s stars — including Jonathan Groff (as Melchior), John Gallagher, Jr. (as Moritz), and Glee’s Lea Michele (as Wendla) — have since gone on to other high-profile roles on stage and screen.

By the time we’d had dinner at Thalia and arrived at our seats in the packed and bustling theater, I was anticipating the show more than I’d anticipated one in a very long time. (The experience was made a bit more surreal because sitting directly in front of me and my friend was none other than Jerry Seinfeld!) I’d read some reviews of the show, yet I still wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it, though I’d admired Duncan Sheik’s music for a whole decade already.

The musical itself actually began very quietly, barely even noticeably. Lea Michele walked onto the stage while the house lights were still up and stood on a chair (as I recall) to sing the show’s plaintive opening number, “Mama Who Bore Me.” Throughout much of the performance, members of the cast were seated in chairs at the sides of the stage, which was designed like an old-school classroom, with the backstage ropes and pulleys and bare brick walls exposed all the way at the rear of the space. Some audience members had been seated at the edges of the stage beforehand, too, discreetly shuffled in with the ensemble.

The set was dimly lit for most of the performance, appropriate to the age of the story, one that contains a significant share of heavy, shrouded topics. The original play was considered scandalous in its own time for addressing various taboo subjects — sexual desire, masturbation, abuse, suicide, abortion — all in relation to the lives of teenagers. Even in today’s more liberal world, teens are still often treated like non-sexual beings by the culture-at-large; as a result, those kinds of issues tend to get downplayed, silenced, or ignored by the adults in their lives. Sater describes the musical’s genesis in the liner notes of the CD, mentioning that he first gave a copy of the play to Sheik in the wake of the shootings that occurred at Columbine High School in 1999:

“Soon after, I called Duncan with an idea: what if the songs in our show functioned as interior monologues? Characters would not serenade one another in the middle of scenes — instead, the songs would voice only the thoughts and feelings of each character’s private landscape. (This seemed, after all, the point: when we keep the kids out of the conversation, we can’t hear what’s going on inside them.)”

That Sheik’s score sounds so contemporary, both in style and delivery, is the musical’s greatest strength. These repressed German students from so long ago are given an opportunity to express their frustrations and hopes wholly in modern terms; the gift of time itself, and the social changes that history gradually allows, are affectionately granted to them. And to balance out that vibrant expressionism, the narrative threads of the original play are presented, for the most part, impressionistically, lightly binding the songs together here and there for cumulative effect.

I remember that on the train ride back to Boston from New York, I listened to the songs of Spring Awakening for the entire four hours. They hadn’t lost any of their power in the privacy of my headphones, and the pop elements that Sheik had planted in them sounded even more vivid on the recording than they did in live performance. The upbeat harmonies of “My Junk” appealed to me instantly during the show. A quartet of girls sings it to the character Hanschen, played by Tom Deckman, as he admires (ahem) a postcard of a beautiful woman. So many of the musical’s themes travel through the song’s verses: “It’s like I’m your lover, or more like your ghost / I spend the day wonderin’ what you do, where you go… / We’ve all got our junk, and my junk is you.” Later, Sater and Sheik tease out the title metaphor further, flirting with the notion of pop music as dreamy spiritual nirvana: “I go up to my room, turn the stereo on / Shoot up some you in the You of some song.”

The boys of the ensemble get their spotlight early in the musical, too, through the rollicking schoolhouse rock of “All That’s Known” and “The Bitch of Living,” capitalizing on how conflicted they feel in their adolescent stretches of agony and ecstasy (amply captured by Bill T. Jones’s jubilant, acrobatic choreography). During the appearance at Virgin Megastore, Sheik remarked that “Touch Me” is his favorite song from the musical, and it isn’t hard to see why. With its alternating pulses of longing that are quietly restrained and then suddenly overflowing, the song soulfully approximates the desire for physical intimacy felt by younger people, who are commonly, though understandably, kept at a distance from one another until they’ve reached a certain age. In this way, the bodies of the songs themselves replicate the bodies of the young characters and performers throughout the musical, permitting them access to realms of release and satisfaction that they might not find otherwise.

I can clearly recall and visualize how stunning the staging was for the numbers in the middle of the show, “The Mirror-Blue Night” and “I Believe,” strategically placed at the end of Act One, just before the intermission. The star-like, descending round lights of “The Mirror-Blue Night” perfectly matched the tone and spectral imagery of the song, whereas the simple device of a wooden plank suspended from ropes made an ideal, subtle platform for the prayer-like “I Believe.” Melchior and Wendla consummate their relationship upon the plank, while the other actors sit cross-legged on the stage surrounding them, gently swaying the platform from side to side. (The boys who like guys share a similar moment with “The Word of Your Body” when it’s reprised in the show’s latter half.)

Although the second act opens with Moritz’s song “Don’t Do Sadness,” the musical does proceed in that direction. His character’s increasingly frenetic disposition — which snagged Gallagher one of the show’s eight Tony Awards — spirals downward to a terrible breaking point, and most of the remaining songs refer back to that heart-stopping moment. Sheik’s poignant, guitar-centered score (with orchestrations by Simon Hale) is most affecting in that mode; I never thought any musical would move me to tears, but that happened three times. It’s rare for a piece of musical theater to construct itself around darkness and “the sorrow at the heart of everything” and actually pull it off, at least with an audience that’s willing to be taken there.

“Left Behind” and “Those You’ve Known” are for me the musical’s most powerful songs. Melchior mourns the loss of his friend Moritz with a piercing clarity that only the young are capable of, carried by Jonathan Groff’s pure-as-water vocals: “The talks you never had, the Saturdays you never spent / All the grown-up places you never went… / All things he ever lived are left behind / All the fears that ever flickered through his mind / All the sadness that he’d come to own.” The memories of those who’ve been lost culminate in a scene that's set in a moonlit graveyard, where the ghosts of Moritz and Wendla join Melchior to sing “Those You’ve Known” (borrowing the melody of “All That’s Known” from earlier in the show). At their emotional apex, the song’s poetic lyrics remind me of the countless brilliant people who died during the AIDS epidemic, as well as those who've survived them:

“Now they’ll walk on my arm through the distant night,

And I won’t let them stray from my heart.

Through the wind, through the dark, through the winter light,

I will read all their dreams to the stars.

I’ll walk now with them, I’ll call on their names.

I’ll see their thoughts are known.

Not gone — not gone.”

The show's contemplative yet rousing finale, “The Song of Purple Summer,” reunites the ensemble at the front of the stage, in a line-up that’s reminiscent of “Seasons of Love,” the heartfelt hit from Rent, that other popular mainstay of the contemporary American musical-theater idiom, which Spring Awakening resembles on several levels. But Spring Awakening also holds the distinction of being thoroughly authentic and unique.

The Music of Gregory Gray

2011-09-03T06:00:00.060-04:00

One of my favorite people I’ve gotten to know a bit via the ether of the internet this past year is a wonderful pop musician with whom more listeners should be familiar. He’s something of an enigma, a nomadic poet and a shapeshifter, but a true gentleman, nevertheless. He’s also one of the only mainstream musicians I can think of who released three major-label pop albums with three different record companies over the span of a decade in the ’80s and ’90s. His name is Gregory Gray — or at least that was his name on record sleeves for a while back in those days.

The singer and songwriter known for a time as Gregory Gray was born in the north of Ireland in 1959, under the name Paul Lerwill. He was a member of the bands Rosetta Stone and Perfect Crime before being signed to CBS Records as Gregory Gray in 1985. A self-made artist in the same fashion that his fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde championed, Gray was (and remains) a devoted fan of Beat Generation poetry, an eclectic spectrum of music ranging from punk to jazz to folk, and much of the authentic talent that lies on the fringes of popular culture.

There aren’t many people of whom I would say this, but he also has such impeccable taste, and not just in terms of his distinctive personal style. Browsing through his list of favorite videos on YouTube a while ago (he currently posts all of his own new songs and videos there as Mary Cigarettes), I was so impressed by the sharp, hilarious, and consistently brilliant catalogue of the things that he loves. It’s one of the best aesthetic examples of “we are the things we like” that I’ve come across in a long time.

Gregory Gray’s 1986 debut album, the evocatively titled Think of Swans, was completed just before the compact disc revolution began, so the record was released only on vinyl and cassette. Several months ago, I was able to find a pristine promotional copy of the LP from a record dealer in England. I hadn’t actually played anything on vinyl for about 25 years, so I had to track down a record player to listen to the album on as well.

Once I put the needle in place, the sound in my headphones whisked me back to the great New Romantic period of the early ’80s, but without ever fully settling there. Saxophone, guitar, and piano all wander through these ten songs, with some brief, sporadic nods to New Wave rock (on the catchy opener “Life of Reilly”), blues (on “Charlie Gets Hurt,” a tune about a sort of dandy figure), and classic synthpop (on the epic closing number “Seatown”).

David Bowie’s legendary glam persona is certainly a stylistic touchstone here, and he’s one of Gray’s most apparent influences. Even the cover image on the single for the album’s finest track, “Books to Read Twice,” was taken by the late Brian Duffy, who photographed Bowie for his Aladdin Sane and Lodger album covers. The overall tone of Think of Swans is youthful and upbeat, lyrically playful and opaque, delivered with vocals that are always passionately invested. “Johnny Purify,” from which the album’s title is drawn, blends together sonic elements both industrial and dreamlike. And the end of “Seatown,” an ode to jaded Irish sailors, explores the archetypal themes of leave-taking and homecoming, which will re-emerge later in Gray’s oeuvre:

“Life does not begin and end

In this little shanty town

So I’m leaving

But I am not really leaving.”

Gray’s sophomore album, 1990’s Strong at Broken Places on Atco/Atlantic Records, was a much more thoroughly polished commercial endeavor. Produced by Davitt Sigerson — who also produced records for such acts as Tori Amos, The Bangles, and Olivia Newton-John — Gray’s second disc found him crafting his lyrics with more radio-friendly aims, while broadening his sonic palette to include slight touches of funk (“Universal Groove”), reggae (“People Are Hard”), AOR balladry (“Don’t Walk Away from Love”), beach party surf-rock (“The Fun Has Just Begun”), country twang (“Easier Said Than Done”), gospel (“A Hard Man’s Gonna Fall”), and even some rhythmic appropriations of early hip-hop in his vocals at times. His voice itself is truly unique, and it can swerve in seconds from soulful choirboy loftiness to a full-throated howl.

Though the lyrics on Strong at Broken Places are accessible, they still don’t make easy compromises, often poking fun at the music industry and culture that funded the making of the album — meaning, of course, that these songs are quite a bit smarter than the majority of what’s out there in the pop music idiom. As Gray archly sings on “When the Music Turns into Money,” “Fender jangle like a zillion shillings, / Drum machine stamp like a printing machine, / The chorus comes like a train in a hurry, / The singer can’t sing, she’s a tacky young hussy.” The song’s memorable refrain, with its intentional irony fully intact, is “I’m a goldmine, I’m a goldmine, I’m a goldmine.” Only a handful of pop songs succeed at sincerely dismantling the mainstream music business from within it, and this happens to be one of them.

Outsiders of various sorts lurk at the periphery of many of Gray’s songs. One tune on his second disc begins, “All of my friends have settled down, / They talk a foreign language now… / I have always gone astray / And marry every town I stay.” And when Gray sings, “I don’t give a damn, / I don’t give a damn” on the chorus of the album’s opener, you’ll believe him and you’ll sing along, too. His earnest penchant for incorporating catchy chants, riffs, and hooks from song to song is especially noticeable on each of his records: “Cowbells and Linn drums and tambourines play / No matter wherever you go.”

In one of his recent videos on YouTube, Gray mentions how crushed he felt when Strong at Broken Places didn’t garner the commercial attention that it deserved upon its release, to the extent that he contemplated leaping from the seventh-floor balcony of the hotel in Los Angeles where he was staying at the time. Importantly, he acknowledges the necessity of living past such moments of desperation, since we can all move forward to do other things on new days. Given the distance in time that retrospect provides, the question of commercial achievement matters much less now, and this album can still be appreciated for just how solid and ably performed all of its songs are.

On his third and final album in 1995, the jaw-droppingly good Euroflake in Silverlake, Gregory Gray raised the stakes of his own game significantly. His previous album’s producer, Davitt Sigerson, had since become president of EMI Records, so he offered Gray his new album contract. As luck would have it, the famed pop music icon Stephen Hague was enlisted to oversee the album’s production. Hague had already collaborated on massive hits with a roster of some of the UK’s most celebrated musical luminaries: New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Marc Almond (of Soft Cell), Jimmy Somerville (of Bronski Beat), Holly Johnson (of Frankie Goes to Hollywood), and Britpop darlings Blur.

While some of the album’s sterling production values can be attributed to Hague’s contributions, Gray’s singing and songwriting had also strengthened in confidence and innovation by this point. The album’s themes encompass everything from urban malaise to finding happiness in gay relationships to surviving in the wake of the AIDS epidemic in New York City. For me, part of the album’s enduring allure comes from Gray’s unabashed openness about being gay in several of the songs, something that’s still a rarity in the world of mainstream pop music today, unfortunately.

In fact, that’s probably what led me to discover Gray’s music in the first place. A gay friend of mine who was a manager at Strawberries Records on Boylston Street in Boston at the time had placed Gray’s CD on the “Manager’s Favorites” listening station in the store, prompting me to give it a spin. I was totally blown away by what I heard, and a couple of the record’s tracks, “Lover, Brother, Friend” and “Three Minute Requiem,” remain among my very favorite songs of all time to this day. (More on those two songs later.)

One quality that really resounds on this album is Gray’s disregard for societal conventions, his dismissal of cultural demands and expectations, again reflected in his love for the Beat poets. Rather than being overly serious, this attitude manifests in a clever humor throughout the duration of the album. The opening track and the album’s single, “The Pope Does Not Smoke Dope,” delivers just as much as its tongue-in-cheek title promises, discreetly underscored by a sleek techno beat and a hopping harmonica line. A sublime meditation on just how little sense the world makes, how things never operate the way that they ideally should, Gray’s verses satirically encourage us to accept the entire disillusioned mess at a more relaxed stride:

“It’s not enough behaving wisely

And having someone you choose to call dear.

It’s not enough to pay the rent on time

And function on fear.

It’s not enough to give yourself completely

To what every day demands.

Who cares if you visit your mother

Whenever you can?”

“I’m Not Paranoid” kicks that adrenaline up a few notches, cruising along on swells of rhythm guitar, punctuated by The Kick Horns’ jubilant trumpet flares and some metropolitan drama: “The DJ’s on amphetamines, / The night goes on forever, / My lover and I are soaking wet, / The police don’t think it’s clever. / They’re waiting in the parking lot, / They’re waiting for some evidence, / They’re waiting for a promotion, / Their pay raise is my innocence.” The segue into the appropriately ethereal down-tempo “Coming Off Drugs” works seamlessly as a kind of come-down in itself.

The album’s fourth track, “Lover, Brother, Friend,” is a song that’s been immediately loved by every single person I’ve ever shared it with. I can distinctly remember making out to it with a boyfriend back when I was in college, just lounging on his bed together in his dorm room, looking out at the thousands of shimmering lights spread over the city. Despite its seeming simplicity, this direct and unadorned love song possesses a magical kind of euphoria that no other song I’ve heard has ever quite matched:

“Dreaming I’m asleep,

Waking up with you

On a hallelujah Sunday,

Far away from fear

Or falling out of love,

New York in a hailstorm.

I’ve been alone every single day.

Satellite, come into my life again.”

Individual identity is another recurring motif on the disc, “I Don’t Know Who I Am” being the most whimsical example (“Too much time for thinking / Makes a person lose their way”), obliterating everything from religion to gender. “Troubled Mind” feels equally lighthearted, swaying along on a breezy island rhythm in spite of its title subject, as does the Peter Gabriel-esque “Town with No Telephone.” “Tough, Baffling Road” turns more downbeat both in its tone and its list of dire but likely predictions (“In the future you’re gonna need a fortune just to stay alive…to keep your clothes on…to have your children”).

Perhaps the album’s most brilliant, unexpected stroke is “Scenes from a Madison Avenue Office,” a dramatic monologue/fantasy that’s spoken from the perspective of a Manhattan business executive, either in person or via the telephone, to a different sort of working girl whom he’s hired for an evening’s worth of her services. The sad bridge of the city’s overheard traffic makes a perfect crossover to the album’s quietly profound orchestral finale, “Three Minute Requiem,” which recounts the years spent in the shadow of AIDS during the decade leading up to the album’s release:

“We live in times

When making love can kill you,

So I’m on my guard,

And life is hard enough.

What kind of fool

Would look me in the eye

And tell me I am wrong

To live my life this way?

I left my home

So I could be myself,

I stumbled into town

Trying to move ahead.

No fear of hate

And no fear of fate,

1975 was a totally different game.”

So much is captured by the heartfelt lyrics of this song, an entire portion of history for an entire subculture of people — and moreover, it closes on a hopeful, open-ended note: “Let there be laughter, / And let the music play.” The song belongs in a time capsule, along with all three of Gregory Gray’s albums. But naturally, each of his albums can already be cherished as its very own time capsule.

To hear and download (totally for free!) Gregory Gray’s excellent, more recent songs that he’s written and recorded independently as Mary Cigarettes — all of which are consistently poetic, atmospheric, refined, and occasionally a bit raunchy — please visit and have fun exploring at:

http://soundcloud.com/marycigarettes

You can also enjoy watching his artfully composed videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/marycigarettes

Postscript: I start another busy school year of teaching college courses this coming week, so my blog will be on hiatus a bit over the next few months. I’ll plan to write another post or two along the way, whenever I can squeeze some in. And in the meantime, thanks to everyone who reads and comments on them.

John McCullough, The Frost Fairs (Salt Publishing, 2010)

2011-07-30T20:20:00.026-04:00

The debut full-length poetry collection that I’ve most anticipated reading over the past few years is John McCullough’s recently published book, The Frost Fairs. I met John where he resides in Brighton, England, a couple of years ago when I was visiting London for spring break. We had been introduced by our mutual friend Alfred Corn, and John and I exchanged our poems and shared enthusiasms via e-mail during the months leading up to our meeting in person. There aren’t very many people with whom I feel instantly at ease, but John McCullough is one of them.

It’s not difficult to see how the landscape of a place like Brighton has influenced the visionary tone and otherworldly spirit of John’s poems. After my arrival on the train from London, we walked down the steep road to the long beach covered with small round stones, a skeletal ghost of an abandoned pier to our right, and a bustling carnival of a still-active pier to our left. I felt the same way I did the first time I visited Provincetown on Cape Cod, another lively gay coastal town; I was entranced and slightly overwhelmed, yet the place intrinsically made sense to me. The day was brilliantly sunny and unseasonably warm, especially for early March in England. The sunlight reflecting off the harbor by the marina was so intense, in fact, that John left our outdoor lunch that day with a shiny red sunburn on one side of his forehead.

John is an inheritor of some important gay predecessors whose presence stands out in his work: the relaxed formalism of Thom Gunn, the earthy sublime of Mark Doty, the chatty stylishness of Frank O’Hara, who himself appears as a ghost-like image in John’s poem “Reading Frank O’Hara on the Brighton Express.” In the midst of watching John re-paint Brighton, I laugh every time I read the lines, “with different kinds / of queen walking different kinds of dog,” because it’s such a precise offhand observation. It also suggests a semi-scientific interest in the world that becomes the central subject matter of many of John’s other poems: clouds, weather, seashores, rock formations, planets, galaxies, or in John’s own words, “what keeps us awake on cold moonless nights, / plotting outer and earthly and inner space” (from his poem “On Galileo’s Birthday”).

The poet whose influence is most apparent in John’s writing, however, in both theme and style, is definitely Elizabeth Bishop, whose poetry John has closely studied. His seriousness about attending to the world’s infinite details, despite the frequent playfulness of the language, comes directly from her. The effect is not imitation, but rather a common understanding of the mechanisms of space, time, and the human heart. The way in which John navigates the relationship between inner and outer realms could itself be a kind of reading of Bishop’s work, as well as an expression of gratitude for the reliable companionship that her poetry has provided him.

When accepting an award, Bishop once referred to her life and travels as “timorously pecking for subsistence along coastlines of the world,” an analogue for John’s routine walks around the coast of Brighton. In Bishop’s work and in John’s work, too, the ocean and what inhabits it are never very far away. And neither is the sky, or moreover, the cosmos. Witness how he chisels out the opening stanzas of “The Floating World,” wedding sky to ocean to earth:

“At noon, the sunlight richochets off white cliffs.

The oystercatcher blasts its kleep-a-kleep

but no one’s listening. In ruptured chalk, fossils

of iguanodon and mammoth strive

for attention, claw over hoof. Flattened limbs

stretch wide, a tableau of thirst.”

Of course, somebody did hear the oystercatcher’s call, and then documented it exactly for us. This is a trick that John has down just as Bishop did; his attention is so intimate and engrossing that we forget he’s there — we forget, in fact, that he’s whispering into our ears. His presence in these poems is like the shifting shapes of clouds in his poem “Tropospheric,” or like the soundless, distant tide at night in “Motile,” images that surround us as much as they dwell somewhere within us.

History — often queer history — takes an equal place in The Frost Fairs. “The Other Side of Winter,” from which the book’s title is drawn, evokes fantastical images similar to some early scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, in which the River Thames freezes during an especially harsh London winter, the legendary “Great Frost” of 1683-84. For centuries, entire festivals would spring up right on the ice during such deep winters, with merchant markets, sports and skating, even theatre and other live entertainment occurring on the surface of the frozen river. John vividly imagines the end of one of these fairs:

“Overnight the Thames begins to move again.

The ice beneath the frost fair cracks. Tents,

merry-go-rounds and bookstalls glide about

on islands given up for lost. They race,

switch places, touch — the printing press nuzzling

the swings — then part, slip quietly under.”

The rest of this magical poem — and that’s indeed the right word to describe it — is concerned with the male speaker’s encounter with a ship’s sergeant, and particularly with a pipe that the seaman gives to him (“Even now it carries his greatcoat’s whiff”), along with a promise that he’ll write. This is a poem that’s more like a film; I hesitate to give too much of it away. So to see whether or not that sailor’s promise is fulfilled, you’ll have to go and read the poem for yourself.

Also included in the book is “Georgie, Belladonna, Sid,” a poem that incorporates polari, a lexicon of coded slang invented and primarily used by gay men in the early 20^thcentury in London’s Soho district. The poem comes complete with a glossary, so that readers can readily translate lines like, “Sid bats his ogle riahs / in ten minute spells,” and truly appreciate the poem’s mind-blowing close: “Each dusk I vada / the ripped-open, scattered rose sky and pray / to God for the safe return of my blackout.”

“The Empress of Mud” recounts the extraordinary tale of Marion “Joe” Carstairs (1900 - 1993), a rich British lesbian who dressed as a man, raced power boats, and purchased the Bahamian island of Whale Cay, which she then turned into a home for herself and her guests. As John does elsewhere in the book (during a hilarious series of dramatic monologues told from the perspective of a taxicab driver, for instance), he totally reanimates Carstairs’s voice here, in heightened stanzas that also feel appropriately down-to-earth:

“Lonely? I have too many friends to waste time

staring at women’s necks, to write letters

to a moon-faced girl in London, explaining

why I cannot return. There are flamingoes

in my garden. I am in Wonderland.

Perhaps I shall put down a lawn for croquet.”

Not only is this mature, fully realized poem John’s rendition of Bishop’s remarkable “Crusoe in England,” but it’s also perhaps his most distinctive homage to Bishop herself. She, too, was a lesbian who revised and perfected the many places where she lived, if only through her attentive writerly and painterly eye. The poem’s reluctant conclusion — “And nothing I say or build is good enough” — seems to echo both the dedication and self-doubt that Bishop felt towards much of her own work.

At the core of John McCullough’s The Frost Fairs is a hard-won and solid-as-granite foundation, a lasting literary achievement that’s replete with range, restraint, and ambition. Regardless of how far this achievement carries him — and all indications promise that the ascent will surely be a lofty one — my affection will remain for the figure at the end of his poem “The Dictionary Man,” the lone boy who’s asleep at his desk, dreaming over the words.

Rosanne Cash, The Wheel (Columbia Records, 1993)

2011-06-29T17:38:00.015-04:00

Ever since I heard Rosanne Cash in concert for the first time last month in the Berkshires, I’ve been returning to my favorite of her albums, 1993’s The Wheel. It’s obvious to me why I like this album the most out of all the superb records from Cash’s thirty-year catalog: The Wheel is the closest she’s ever come to recording a pure pop album. With a career that began deeply steeped in country music — partly through association with her legendary father, the late Johnny Cash — Rosanne first made her name in that particular genre, though the majority of her songs lean more in the direction of folk. One listen through the selections included on The Essential Rosanne Cash, her excellent two-disc career retrospective released back in May, makes that distinction fairly clear.

The Wheel arrived at an important turning point not just in Rosanne Cash’s career, but in her personal and romantic life as well. As she chronicles in her recently published memoir Composed, she met her future husband and musical collaborator John Leventhal just as she’d begun recording the album, and the two ended up co-producing its eleven songs together. The sonic result is appropriately buoyant, filled with the bliss and adrenaline of newly falling in love, both with a person and with a place. Cash had relocated with her daughters from Nashville to Manhattan just prior to writing the first songs on The Wheel, having divorced her husband of a decade, country musician Rodney Crowell. The album is imbued with the vibrant atmosphere of New York, while the City of Lights makes a shimmering appearance on the song “Sleeping in Paris” as well (“I thought I knew which way the wind blows / But now it’s blowing me back to you / And the wind speaks French too”).

Cash’s previous release — 1990’s moody, self-produced, and Grammy-nominated Interiors — had closely explored her divorce, and it also marked her commercial crossover from country singer to mainstream artist. The Wheel was clearly intended, from an industry standpoint, to cement that status. It’s a transition that a number of other female folk/country songwriters and performers had successfully made at right around that time: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega. Chapman’s runaway 1988 hit “Fast Car” is especially useful to consider in this context; in addition to the song’s brilliant, enduring appeal both lyrically and musically, “Fast Car” found an audience largely because of how unusual a fit it was for standard Top 40 pop fare. The very unexpectedness of such a song at the top of the pop charts helped to make it, like Vega’s “Luka” not too long before, an authentic novelty record.

Although the three singles from Cash’s The Wheel — “Seventh Avenue,” “You Won’t Let Me In,” and the album’s title track — didn’t experience similar chart runs, they were all equally worthy of doing so. In fact, The Wheel is one of those rare albums that doesn’t include a single mediocre song. Cash infuses it with a thematic and sonic integrity from beginning to end, endowing the album with the unassuming sweep of an internalized musical, one that’s meant to play on a solitary Broadway in the mind of each individual listener. In Composed, she describes the overarching concept of the album as elemental, featuring “recurring themes . . . of fire and water, wind and moon.” Along with its distinctive pop veneer, this thematic continuity is largely why the album appealed to me so much from my very first listen.

The elemental, earthly through-line of The Wheel, ironically, carries an almost cosmic scope. Love, heartbreak, and rejuvenation are all set against the vast machinery of the universe itself. The central image of the title song is equal parts zodiac, prayer wheel, and celestial pocket-watch. This is best expressed by how Cash chooses to open the album with a series of questions that feel down-to-earth and mythical at once, counterpointing Sleeping Beauty with Persephone:

“How long was I asleep?

When did we plan to meet?

Have you been waiting long for me?

When did the sky turn black?

Do you still want me back?

I’ll pick it all up piece by piece.”

It’s no coincidence that the highlight of Cash’s concert last month for me was her encore of “The Wheel,” performed solo and acoustic. Even without the driving, jubilant rhythms of John Leventhal’s electric guitar from the album version, she managed to give the song its widescreen, propulsive thrust: “And the wheel goes round and round / And the flame in our souls / It will never burn out.”

“Seventh Avenue,” the album’s second track, is my very favorite of Rosanne Cash’s songs, full-stop. I admire how quiet and introspective it feels, an open declaration and a private musing, just like all the best works of art. Anybody who’s spent a night in New York City, or even just a night alone anywhere, can relate to the intimate, emotional scene that she paints:

“The world keeps getting smaller

’Til it closes ’round my room

And everything I feel now

Is hard and fast and true

My window is a spotlight

On the madness down below

It takes a silent figure

To make this place a home.”

Most art that’s created, ideally, comes from within this same space, the silent, darkened room above a street, and certainly, that’s where most songs begin and take shape. This particular song is also born out of pain to some extent, as its gorgeous and plainspoken chorus makes clear: “Now the candles burn all night / Without you / And the moon hangs out of sight / So blue / On Seventh Avenue.” To telescope from a small room out into the heavens seems like exactly the right move to me, the way that gazing up at a star-filled sky feels like looking at everything and nothing at the same time. The great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a wonderful prose-poem about Shakespeare titled “Everything and Nothing.” Likewise, saying that “Seventh Avenue” captures everything and nothing is one of the best compliments that I can give it.

The album continues to balance intensity and ease on “Change Partners,” a soaring mediation on shifting gears to the “new dance” of a different and better relationship (“I’m purified by fire / Renewed by my desire”), via the uplift of a swooning piano refrain. “From the Ashes” takes the rising phoenix metaphor, as well as the sense of euphoria and reawakening, a few steps further, as does a later track, “Fire of the Newly Alive.”

But even love’s new dance has its moments of struggle, as on the melancholy, percussive “You Won’t Let Me In,” which Cash sings “like a girl / On the threshold of her life / In love with the whole world / But staring down each night,” sentiments that are again contemplated on “The Truth About You” and “Tears Falling Down” (“In the cradle of our fears / We sleep without tears”). These darker shades of feeling culminate on “Roses in the Fire,” Cash’s affecting look back at her former relationship, especially potent during an impassioned, point-blank lyrical bridge that’s the emotional vortex of the album: “Oh I’ll kill you if we can’t be friends / I’ll bleed like diamonds running through your hands / I’ll be a bitter taste you can’t forget / And I won’t leave this world until you relent.”

Redemption, however, is the main focus of the album. As Cash famously sings on “Sleeping in Paris,” “A lonely road is a bodyguard / If we really want it to be,” a lyric that she had originally jotted down in a notebook back when she was 17 and revived at just the right moment many years later. A bent for solitude can prevent us from connecting with others, yet it can also protect us until we’re truly ready to do so. The album’s spiritually inclined, ethereal closing number, “If There’s a God on My Side,” returns to a litany of questions that’s similar in tone to the ones that opened the record:

“If there’s a God on my side

Why don’t she show me her face?

If there’s a God on my side

Could she live in this place?

If there’s a God on my side

Is she inside these walls?

If there’s a God on my side

Could she not hear me call?”

The final impression is one of hope and earnest inquiry, but Cash’s obvious mood of uncertainty throughout these lyrics is equally significant and profound. In the context of her life as a whole, I find that element to be quite inspiring. As the daughter of one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American popular music, she was clearly in a privileged position both materially and in terms of preparation for a future career in music herself. But throughout that career, her search through the realm of art and expression has remained resolutely inconclusive, calmly unsure of what exactly she’ll find and how she might grow and change over time. Her willingness to accept the mysterious and the unknown as vital to the act of creating has made her a singer and songwriter of the highest caliber.

Perhaps the finest quality on The Wheel is the sense of immediacy and distillation it conveys from song to song. Cash’s lyrical approach is direct in style and in spirit, maybe because the album is about attempting to shed complexity in the midst of potentially overwhelming emotional complications. The idea that the universe is constantly moving, as a way of keeping our everyday selves unstuck in time, is somehow reassuring and also unsettling. That delicate tension, and the magical energy that’s produced by it, has kept me listening to the sounds of The Wheel nearly twenty years on.

13th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2011)

2011-06-24T19:45:00.033-04:00

Having attended the annual film festival in Provincetown since 2005, I found the roster of films at the latest festival — in its thirteenth year — to be less fulfilling than in previous years. Nevertheless, in the spirit of this blog, I’ll focus my comments on the handful of films that I enjoyed the most at last week’s festival, all of which I very highly recommend seeing when they arrive at your local cinemas over the coming months.

The documentaries are almost always uniformly stronger than the narrative features. This could be due to the whole “truth is stranger than fiction” phenomenon, or more likely, it’s because telling a fictional narrative in an engaging way is a more difficult task these days. Most stories have already been repeatedly rehashed from many possible angles, but even more problematically, a narrative feature film needs to present itself with a distinctive storytelling style that also doesn’t seem false to the viewer. Finding an individual style or voice is perhaps the hardest element for any artist to achieve, film directors included.

My favorite movie in the festival was We Were Here, a powerful documentary about the early AIDS years in San Francisco. The film had played at the gay film festival here in Boston last month, and since I missed it then, I was glad to have a chance to see it in Provincetown. The movie delicately intersplices memories and anecdotes of five finely selected interviewees: four gay men and one female nurse. The four gay men, some HIV-positive and some negative, have all done important work as activists and otherwise in San Francisco over time: a visual artist, a street-corner flower vendor, an AIDS hospice volunteer, and the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society. They all speak with candor and quiet wisdom about witnessing first-hand, and from the epicenter, one of the most devastating (and ironically uniting) medical crises in American history, during which nearly 20,000 men in San Francisco lost their lives, the population size of many small cities.

I was most struck by the film’s seamless tone; the carefully interwoven interviews all felt contemplative, direct, and untampered with. The hospice volunteer movingly recounts how he never fit into the landscape of anonymous gay sex in San Francisco at the time, and once he began doing work as a caretaker, he realized that was how he could become close with other gay men. The visual artist tells a heartbreaking story of rushing his partner who was living with AIDS to the hospital, only to have him die before they arrived there. And the flower vendor recalls watching one man progress from riding around on his bike, to becoming ill and walking with a cane, to being very ill in a wheelchair; then, as new drug treatments were introduced, the man went back to walking with a cane, to walking past without the cane, and he finally returned to riding by on his bike again, older than before but back to his previously healthy self. That image is both instructive and life-affirming, just one of many moving examples from this profound and humane documentary.

Equally moving and profound is Buck, a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the real-life “horse whisperer,” who trained the actor Robert Redford for his role in the film of that title. While the documentary does explore Brannaman’s unique methods for taming and training difficult and unwieldy horses, it’s also concerned with the people who own those horses, and the people are often more in need of assistance than the animals to whom Brannaman so caringly attends.

Mainly, however, the film focuses on Brannaman’s own personal history and the reasons why he ended up in this unusual line of work. The scenes of Brannaman painfully remembering his early childhood — he and his older brother were violently abused by their alcoholic father — are deeply sad but ultimately redemptive. His memories of the foster parents who showed him the meaning of family and unconditional love after his mother’s death provide ample explanation of how he learned to have such insight into the horses’ behavior and his own. A frightening segment near the end of the film, when a wild horse that Buck is training brutally attacks its owners, culminates in a lesson which could describe both the vicious horse and Buck himself: “You can’t hold it against him for how his life has been.”

Errol Morris’s latest documentary Tabloid is also worth mentioning here. Far more offbeat than the other two documentaries that I enjoyed in the festival, it’s also original, bizarre, and hilarious enough that I was in tears laughing at several points during the film. It’s the story of former teenage Wyoming beauty queen Joyce McKinney and her alleged late-’70s “kidnapping” of the young Mormon boyfriend with whom she eloped to London. Morris pieces together the tale and so skillfully arranges its manic details that the effect becomes nearly hallucinatory. I’ve never been on a drug trip, but about halfway through the film, I was sure that it must be similar to what one would feel like.

From a cultural standpoint, Morris is invested in examining how any story becomes “the truth,” since Joyce McKinney’s "manacled Mormon" jaunt-gone-awry was sliced up, devoured, and dramatically reconstructed by the British tabloid press. Her own retelling of the situation is enthusiastically counterpointed with memories of the dueling tabloid editors who greedily bought and sold her story to a public hungry for vicarious thrills and sordid revelations, a predilection which our culture has obviously never outgrown. And neither has Joyce McKinney. She returned to the United States with thirteen suitcases filled with tabloid clippings of her own story, and today she’s still obsessed over the man she fell madly in love with so many years ago.

Keeping with the theme of crazy love, the narrative feature that I enjoyed most in the festival was Weekend, a downbeat gay romantic film from the UK. Two young guys in Nottingham, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), meet at a club and get to know each other over the course of a couple of lazy weekend days. Drinks, drugs, intense dialogue, and frequent sex are all involved, and it doesn’t hurt that both men are gorgeous in an unassuming hipster way. The film is at its most authentic when it delves into issues that resonate with many young gay men today: questions of dating, relationships, monogamy, marriage, loneliness, and self-fulfillment.

Glen is the more “out” guy in the pair, and also the one who’s more willing to interrogate social norms, while Russell is comfortably open but enjoys hanging out with his straight friends more. Who are we in relation to those around us, and how does intimacy with another person affect all of that? Wisely, Weekend avoids providing any clear-cut answers, but instead presents a genuinely intriguing and open-ended double-portrait. The cinéma vérité style of the film brings us in closer proximity to the characters and their situation, making the entire experiment feel naturalistic and true. The movie also demonstrates how gay couples all have to deal with problems that are both similar to those faced by heterosexual couples and different from them in key ways at the same time. Growing up with a sense of ourselves as “outsiders” gives gay men a greater need to connect, and it also often prevents us from being fully able to do so.

A straight and even younger outsider, Oliver Tate, has an equally tricky time connecting with those around him in Submarine, another UK romantic flick that’s set in Wales. The debut feature by director Richard Ayoade, Submarine puts a fresh and vibrant spin on the misfit’s coming-of-age tale. Craig Roberts is pitch-perfect in his performance as Oliver; he sustains the audience’s interest as thoroughly and intently as Holden Caulfield did in Catcher in the Rye. The lovelorn Oliver pursues his sullen classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) throughout the film, catching her but then losing her to a less frenetic sort of guy.

Visually and structurally innovative, the film goes a little over the top with a revenge subplot involving an affair between Oliver’s mother (Sally Hawkins) and a quirky New Age motivational guru (Paddy Considine). Yet we never really lose sight of Oliver’s hilarious and tortured journey into early manhood, which manages to be both wrenching and endearing. There’s more than a dash of Bud Cort’s title misfit from Harold and Maude laced throughout Roberts’ portrayal of Oliver, and the cinematic appeal of his character shows the potential for having a similar endurance. At one point late in the movie, Oliver muses that every person has a “sub-aquatic” mental and emotional life that makes it impossible for us ever truly to know what somebody else is thinking. The stunning fantasy sequence that follows Oliver’s break-up with Jordana, during which he curls up on his bed and literally floats away on the ocean, is alone worth the price of admission.

Perhaps the most exciting moment of the festival for me came when director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) gave a brilliant answer to a question of mine at the festival awards ceremony. Aronofsky was the recipient of this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award, so during his Q&A session with the audience, I asked him about an interesting comment that Natalie Portman had made when accepting her Golden Globe for Best Actress in Black Swan earlier this year. Portman remarked that she appreciated how, after pushing her through many exhausting takes for a scene, Aronofsky would tell her, “Now do this next take for yourself.” I asked Aronofsky how he knows, as a film director, when it’s the right moment to offer that to an actor. He responded that it’s like deciding whether or not to go for the fourth blue ghost when playing the Pac-Man arcade game! I’ll plan to see any future movie that’s directed by someone who can offer such a flawless ’80s video-game metaphor right off the top of his head.

Junebug (dir. Phil Morrison, 2005)

2011-06-10T04:33:00.046-04:00

As I do each year in mid-June, I’m looking forward to attending the annual Provincetown Film Festival next week. One of the early reviews that I posted on this blog last June was my critique of Loggerheads, which I saw at the festival back in 2005. That same year, I also saw the movie Junebug at the festival, and now that we’re back in the month of June again, my thoughts have been returning to that film a lot recently.

The word “original” gets tossed around often when discussing films or any art form, but I find that it rarely truly applies whenever it’s used. Phil Morrison’s Junebug is an original American film that deserves the description. It’s easy to forget the somewhat startling series of images that open the movie, since they don’t seem to connect immediately to the rest of its narrative. We first see some vintage footage of individual, middle-aged men singing, or doing something in between yelling and yodeling (the end-credits acknowledge a national “hollerin’” competition). It’s almost like the southern version of trumpeters who introduced the start of a stage-play in the Elizabethan era. Then the movie’s title is suddenly superimposed over a haunting shot of a thicket of trees at night, an image that will recur at a very strategic point much later in the film.

It's just as easy to forget how happy the earliest scenes of the story are, given the amount of tension and tragedy that follow in the course of the film. We meet George (Alessandro Nivola) as he falls believably in love-at-first-sight with Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz). He attends a benefit auction at the gallery in Chicago where she curates “outsider” art by self-taught painters. The close-up, blissful, headlong rush into their relationship — we’ll soon discover that they married each other only one week later — is necessary for the rest of the film to work. The couple heads south to George’s hometown in North Carolina for two reasons: so that George’s new wife can meet his family (and hopefully be embraced by them), and so that Madeleine can try to recruit the reclusive artist David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) to the roster of painters whom she represents.

Once the film and its central characters arrive at George’s childhood home, we gradually realize that every member of the family wants something in particular. Madeleine wants to sign her painter before a New York art dealer signs him first. George, the silent, smiling golden boy, wants his family to get along comfortably, without disturbing the usual proceedings. His mother, Peg (Celia Weston), despite her occasionally up-front demeanor, wants her children to be happy, a wish that may not include the worldly, elegant Madeleine. George’s frustrated, jealous younger brother, Johnny (Ben McKenzie), seems to want to be left alone, though through his angry outbursts, we also glimpse flashes of his desire to connect with the other members of his family, if he can manage to do so on his own sullen terms. He’s equally disconnected from and disdainful of his overly cheerful and very pregnant wife, Ashley (Amy Adams), who wants Johnny to be as in love with her as he was back when they were in high school.

The family’s quietly supportive father, Eugene (Scott Wilson), holds the whole clan together, as unlikely as it seems for such a reticent, soft-spoken character. He intuits both the genuine love and the various levels of pain in those who surround him, and his gentle quietude is his way of both respecting and enduring that knowledge. He, too, works toward a single goal throughout the duration of the movie; just prior to Madeleine’s arrival, we overhear him whisper to himself, “I’m gonna make her a bird.” The product of his careful woodworking during the film, nevertheless, isn’t presented to her in the end. He pockets the tiny bird instead, knowing that the act of creating something out of love for someone is more important than the gratification of offering the gift itself, and knowing that he will see her in the future and it can wait until later.

Much of Junebug, in fact, is spent waiting: waiting for an air mattress to inflate itself on the floor of the guest bedroom, waiting for George and Madeleine to arrive, waiting for Johnny’s ride to his warehouse job to show up, waiting for David Wark to make his decision about Madeleine’s proposed contract, waiting for characters to show what they feel, waiting for them not to show what they feel. Some of the film’s key scenes unfold in complete silence, simple jump-cut still shots of the empty rooms in the family’s two-story, suburban house, which becomes just as much of a character as those who reside inside of it, shaping their personalities and the way we perceive them. We also see numerous shots of the family’s three couples nestled separately in their beds, suggesting that the film is to some degree a study in the mechanisms and nuances of intimacy.

Several film reviewers have criticized the movie’s male characters for coming off as too underdeveloped, but I find them to be just as complex as the movie’s spunkier female characters. The men simply express their emotions in ways other than language, with their eyes and gestures of consent or dismissal, just as many of the men did during my own childhood in rural Ohio, and more recently throughout my adult life in metropolitan areas along the East Coast. This quality makes one of the film’s most pivotal moments all the more profound, when George sings a hymn about coming home, a cappella, at a church potluck, and gives Madeleine a new and richer understanding of the place where he was raised.

Of course, we also wait for the imminent arrival of Ashley’s baby, whose pre-birth nickname we learn is shared with the film’s title. It’s better if I don’t explain anything more about that here, except to mention that Amy Adams’ inspired, career-making performance is entirely worthy of the Academy Award nomination that she received for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. I recall watching a few lone men sitting in the theater at the festival screening of the film that I attended, and they responded with openly visible feeling to the scene that surely secured Adams her Oscar nod.

Phil Morrison’s direction is nothing short of extraordinary, and I anxiously await another feature film from him in the future. A native of Winston-Salem, he shows his roots faithfully and abundantly in the movie’s details, from the characters’ recognizable, no-nonsense attitudes to his affinity for the area’s vibrantly green landscape. There’s a deliberate quirkiness to the film’s style (accompanied by Yo La Tengo’s offbeat musical score) that’s analogous to David Wark’s bizarrely visionary paintings, partly comical and partly disturbing. It’s in this liminal zone and mixture of conflicting tones — thanks largely to Angus MacLachlan’s textured screenplay and regionally precise dialogue — where the characters’ truthfulness manifests most clearly, making us both laugh and flinch at the emotional situations in which they find themselves. I’m reminded of what I like to call the “deep caricatures” portrayed in Mike Leigh’s finest films. We feel as if we know these characters because their idiosyncrasies make them so accurately honest, yet that same cartoonishness distances us from them and reminds us that what we’re viewing is not actual life, but a work of art.

Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2008)

2011-04-23T00:30:00.020-04:00

Earlier this week, I delivered a brief address at one of the schools where I teach, Emerson College. The resident assistants in the college’s dorms screened Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award-winning film Milk, and they invited me to share some comments about the movie in relation to gay representations in cinema and popular culture. Thanks to all of the students who attended and stayed for our engaging discussion afterwards. Here are the remarks that I prepared for the occasion:

Gus Van Sant’s Milk is an ideal launching pad for considering gay representations in cinema, partly due to its style and subject, and partly due to the point in history at which it arrived. I first saw the movie at an advance screening at Boston Common cinema with my Evolution of Queer Identity class, before the film was officially released three years ago. Cleve Jones, the character played by Emile Hirsch, attended that screening to host a Q&A afterwards, and he noted how coincidental the film’s timing was, in relation to the debate over Proposition 8 in California, which was unfolding at the same time. Younger people, especially, began to participate in a huge and highly visible wave of social activism in support of same-sex marriage rights, the kind of widespread political activism that we also witness in the movie Milk and had not seen very much of here in the United States since the days of Supervisor Harvey Milk himself.

While I do think the movie takes a few small missteps, slightly over-dramatizing or over-sentimentalizing just a handful of times, I find Milk to be a beautiful and important film overall. The movie culminates in a climax that’s all-too-typical of queer-themed cinema, sadly, in that our gay hero dies, but Milk is special in that its hero lives on and looms large in gay cultural history, indeed in our country’s history, even if he didn’t actually survive. His legacy is foreshadowed by the final image he sees from an office window during the tragic assassination scene: the banners for the opera Tosca that’s playing across the street. Harvey Milk, a lifelong devotee of opera, knows at the moment of his death that the narrative of his own life has been irreversibly transformed and altered, and that his life story will now carry the emotional and dramatic potency of an opera itself.

Despite the political urgency of the film, I find the most radical aspect of the movie to be its candid depiction of physical and romantic intimacy between its two central male characters, Milk (Sean Penn) and his partner Scott Smith (James Franco). With the exception of films like Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia, rarely do we see gay male romance portrayed in mainstream cinematic fare, unless it’s presented to the audience as a joke or for comic relief. As the gay writer Allen Barnett perceptively observed in his wonderful short story titled “Snapshot,” “There’s nothing more serious than the desire of one man for another.” In her book Epistemology of the Closet, the late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick referred to this particular kind of seriousness as “the swirls of totalizing knowledge-power that circulate so violently around any but the most openly acknowledged gay male identity.”

Physical and romantic tenderness depicted between men on screen has always been risky, and it continues to be somewhat risky today. While so-called mainstream audiences have become a little more comfortable watching open affection between men, fairly strict limits still remain firmly in place regarding just how much physicality between two men a straight audience is willing to accept or tolerate. The fact that Milk does not back down from this overt physicality — from the early scene of Sean Penn and James Franco flirtatiously chatting in the stairwell of a New York City subway station — is vital to the film and the integrity of its inherent message. If cultural acceptance of gay people is to continue to progress, and if same-sex marriage is eventually to become a federally legalized reality for everyone in our country, then open and honest images of men in love with men, and women in love with women, and everything else in between, must persist in such natural and forthright artistic representations.

The most moving moment in the film, for me, is the moment just after Harvey Milk is fatally shot, when he flashes back in his mind to the scene of himself talking quietly in bed with Scott, James Franco’s character. Harvey Milk’s lasting presence in queer history, and in American history-at-large, is due to his key role as a progressive public figure; however, what he stood for politically — full equality and honorable treatment of queer people and individuals from all underrepresented groups — would have far less meaning without this brief glimpse into his private, intimate life. Our public lives have value as direct extensions of who we are in our daily private lives, so our private lives and our public lives must both be dignified in the eyes of our society, in order for our time on this earth to be truly fulfilled.

Three from the Vault

2011-01-12T21:17:00.053-05:00

Since I have just a bit of spare time remaining before I begin a new semester of teaching at my colleges, I figured this would be a good chance to post another blog entry, to help tide my blog over until the arrival of summer break, when I’ll have more opportunities to attend to such things. This is also an ideal way to share my enthusiasm about three pop music rarities that I’ve been obsessing over for the past two months now: Lovelife by The Painted Word, Shoebox Full of Secrets by Andy Pawlak, and 24 Years of Hunger by Eg and Alice.

In each instance this was the only studio album officially released by each musical act. Therefore, the above title of this blog post, “Three from the Vault,” doesn’t really describe the albums accurately. Despite maintaining a small but vocal underground cult following for over twenty years since their arrival, these three albums have all been retrieved from the deep, deep vault of British pop music, and together they’re about as pristine, emotive, and rapturous a trio of pop albums as one could hope to find just about anywhere, from any era.

Before delving into these records from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d like to say a few words first about the idea of nostalgia, especially as it’s applied to pop music. One reason why these three quirky, far left-of-center albums sound so perfect to me is, no doubt, because I came of age in exactly the time period during which they were recorded and released. (I graduated from high school in 1991.) My ears gravitate naturally to these sounds, half-electronic, half-acoustic, untainted by the cynicism that would come to dominate mainstream pop by the mid-’90s. I think these albums still sound fairly timeless, regardless of my personal associations with the music of my youth.

The problem is that what’s typically referred to, and quite often unfairly condescended to, as nostalgic — allowing ourselves to over-sentimentalize our earlier years, while whitewashing their perhaps harsher realities — doesn’t truly apply in this case. Music is created both inside of time and outside of time; it necessarily reflects the trappings and technology of its era, and in the very best instances, it also transcends them. A recording of the pure sound of a voice and an instrument can tap into something much “older” within us, and it can simultaneously project itself well into the future, as a kind of aesthetic preservation. That’s what permits us to pluck from complete obscurity a fine album composed two decades ago and realize that it sounds just as good now as it did back then. As the great Southern novelist William Faulkner famously put it in one of his later books, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Maybe the most obscure of the three records that I’ll be critiquing here, The Painted Word’s Lovelife (BMG/RCA Records, 1989) brims and sometimes nearly overflows with melodic ’80s pop of the very highest order. In the tradition of Aztec Camera’s Love (1987) and The Blue Nile’s Hats (1989), there’s something almost emblematic about this album. And like those other two albums, it was created with one young British man primarily at its center. In the case of The Painted Word, that young singer/songwriter was Alan McCusker-Thompson. Pictured hazily out of focus on the album’s cover, but nonetheless dapperly dressed, his image often seems to glow when the CD is sitting under the lamplight on my desk, beckoning to me from across the room in his crisp white shirt-sleeves and snug red vest, floating up from an otherworldly little sea of aquamarine.

The Painted Word surfaced in 1986, when U2’s Mother Records label released the band’s moody yet uplifting first single, “Independence Day.” Three years later, in the waning afterglow of the New Romantic movement, the band’s full-length debut, Lovelife, quietly appeared on the British music scene. The album is sophisticated enough not to draw attention to itself, partly because it’s top-notch musical craftsmanship masquerading as mainstream pop. (Even “I Found Love Today,” a B-side for the album’s single “Worldwide,” easily trumps most other songs of the era.) The lyrics on Lovelife don’t intend to astound anybody. As the band’s name suggests, the words in the songs aren’t innately extraordinary; rather, they’re painted, stylized, customary but more colorful than the words that we use in daily life. True to the album’s title, Lovelife is entirely, jubilantly love-centric (“Yes it’s true / That the reason I’m alive / Is to be here by your side”). Or better yet, it’s surrounded by a buoyant cloud of what love might feel like to someone who’s young and overtaken by infatuation, with hardly even a tinge of romantic uncertainty about it all.

Ironically, these love-filled songs somehow avoid clichés through total immersion in them. On the aptly named “Joie de Vivre,” McCusker-Thompson’s delivery strikes a balance between innocence and seduction as he croons (swoons, really) in a resonant voice that bears a distinct resemblance to Sting’s, “We’ll go out tonight / Forget the danger signs / Tonight this world is mine.” Indeed, the song succeeds by creating and spinning itself out into its own little world, beginning with soft piano chords and synth-based rhythms. Midway through the track, the singer’s joined by a joyful chorus of background vocalists, then a full-tilt horns section, along with galloping strings orchestrated by the famed pop arranger Anne Dudley. The man at the song’s helm excels at impassioned refrains and chants, and the one that he riffs on here — “When they take you down, they take you down for good” — propels the song and its singer toward an ecstatic sense of liberation.

The slightly more down-tempo “Wilderness,” with strings that echo classic Burt Bacharach hits, accomplishes a similar openness (“Take your love into the world”), while pensive numbers like “24 Hours” and the nostalgia-limned “boy I once was” of “’77” penetrate through the more somber layers of ’60s-influenced orchestral pop. “Worldwide” readily demonstrates through its catchiness why it was one of Lovelife’s singles, even if the album version’s lingering, soul-inflected outro is what most makes the song worth hearing. And the lazily tender but no less passionate “I Want It Here and I Want It Now” might just be the record’s finest cut, with its smitten young couple strolling through sun-struck Paris, holding hands “beneath the blue armistice sky.”

Although The Painted Word did record another album, Universal, in 1995, the disc was never officially released, and only a handful of promotional copies found their way into the world. Like many other musicians who recorded just one or two albums at some point in the distant past, Alan McCusker-Thompson works in academia today. He lectures on commercial music at the University of the West of Scotland, where he leads the Master’s Program in Music Innovation and Entrepreneurship, among the first academic programs of its kind. He also currently manages musicians with independent and major labels.

Andy Pawlak, another British musician whose first and only album debuted in the same year as The Painted Word’s, has apparently disappeared from the music business far more thoroughly since the release of Shoebox Full of Secrets (Phonogram/Fontana Records, 1989). Some random comments online mention that Pawlak now works as a driving instructor in the far north of England, though like McCusker-Thompson, Pawlak also recorded a second unreleased album, Low Beat Folk, in 2003 under the moniker Monkey.

As it were, Shoebox Full of Secrets is itself exactly that, a musical shoebox full of tiny secret gems, and a shimmering and vastly overlooked pop masterpiece. I was mesmerized by the cover photo and purchased the album, sound unheard, when I stumbled upon the CD at a used record shop in London’s Notting Hill district. It was a wise investment; today, the disc is worth twentyfold what I paid for it. And for only three quid back then, what a sterling album it turned out to be, flawless from beginning to end: thirteen dreamy, hard-to-categorize songs that proved just as beguiling as the album’s cover.

From the playful opening title track, “Secrets,” these songs are largely for and about “lovers keeping lovers warm.” Just as unashamedly romantic as the songs by The Painted Word, Andy Pawlak’s tunes feel like they’ve been partially beamed in from an earlier decade, reviving soulful ’60s and ’70s American pop values more authentically than most ’80s American pop musicians ever did. Rhythmic guitar hooks, chiming piano interludes, and especially the doo-wop harmonies of background vocalists Dee and Shirley Lewis all contribute to the album’s genuine throwback aura.

“Mermaids” may be the best example of this, with lyrics that are whimsical enough to match the boundless energy of the music: “We should be swimming with mermaids / Not praying for rain / In puddles of lace / Watching tumbleweeds tumbling / Feeding ice cream to rattlesnakes.” Sometimes darkness creeps in beneath the cheerful, polished surface of the songs. “Best Regards” tells an abstract wartime tale with tragic swerves throughout its verses:

“And all the children swam

Among the floating bombs

A gift from Uncle Sam

Sent with his best regards

Another boy was took last night

He had his hands and ankles tied

He tasted gun oil in his mouth

And never heard another sound.”

Yet Pawlak’s toughly exuberant vocals help to keep even his darker poetic narratives hopeful. The central figure of “Mother’s Day,” as Pawlak sings of her, rises above the surrounding squalor (“When it all came down around her feet / In the soggy paper maché streets / She kept a hold of love”). “All That’s Left of Me” and “Eskimo Kissing” are punctuated with similar bursts of fresh, surprising imagery, while “Love Letters” and “For Better or for Worse” rely more on lovelorn character sketches to drive the songs gently forward.

Finally, Eg and Alice’s 24 Years of Hunger (Warner Music/WEA Records, 1991) may be the best known of these three rare albums, mainly because of Francis “Eg” White’s still-thriving career as a songwriter for a wide array of major pop stars. White got his start as a bassist for the ’80s British boyband Brother Beyond, and he’s gone on to compose massively successful hits for everyone from Kylie Minogue to James Morrison to Joss Stone to Will Young. In addition to producing tracks for artists like Pink and Sam Sparro, Eg also penned Grammy Award winner Adele’s song “Chasing Pavements,” as well as Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue,” the most unforgettable cut on her debut album, Rockferry.

In between his boyband days and his current status as one of the world’s most successful pop songsmiths, Eg White wrote and recorded one ultra-sublime album with his friend Alice Temple, who was formerly a model in London and a BMX bike-racing champion. (Though first glances may prove deceptive, that’s Temple posing in the striking photo for Eg and Alice’s cover artwork at the beginning of this post.) 24 Years of Hunger has stood the test of time just as well as the albums by The Painted Word and Andy Pawlak, and perhaps even a little bit better, since Eg and Alice’s album doesn’t bear the somewhat outdated stamp of trademark ’80s production and instrumentation quite as much.

The songs on Eg and Alice’s debut rank among the moodiest of pop music, and their greatest appeal is that the lyrics never feel the need to spell everything out. Poetic abstraction is a very difficult feat to pull off well in the setting of a pop song. The disc’s opening number, “Rockets,” achieves this on a variety of levels, gradually but surely working its way into the listener’s consciousness, as Eg and Alice sing about how a bittersweet relationship can make a person want to take off right into space: “And when I touch my baby / So blue, she’s sad too . . . / Send us a rocket or two.” Against a backdrop of light electronics, percussion, and delicate crescendos, Eg’s straightforward vocals intertwine with Alice’s raspy, shy delivery, and the effect is almost indescribably gorgeous.

Elsewhere, “In a Cold Way” courts a distinctively jazzy sensibility in a pleading wake-up call to a depressed friend, while “And I Have Seen Myself” sounds indebted equally to Southern gospel and Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” One of the album’s two singles, “Doesn’t Mean That Much to Me,” faithfully recreates early Prince-variety funk and R&B (“The same key that will let you into heaven / Will open every door in hell”).

But it’s the album’s other single, “Indian,” that provides 24 Years of Hunger with its most alluring, remarkable track. On the surface, the lyrics of the chorus suggest a typical “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” sort of moral (“If you tell me I’m an Indian / You’re an Indian too”). Repeated listening reveals a deeper theme of outsiderdom and feeling like a misfit amongst one’s peers, the word “Indian” perhaps being a kind of lyrical substitute for lesbianism, since Temple sings the majority of the song:

“For several years I have been

On the edge of every scene

A stranger in my town

And even though they say hello

They would not be seen with me

I guess they’ve never known . . .

I wonder how come they can turn me away

I think it’s so sad, we may never be the same again.”

As sonically beautiful, radio-friendly, and unassumingly moving as “Indian” is, it’s unlikely that such a song could ever have been a mainstream hit. That’s a sad fact indeed, considering that pop music listeners would certainly benefit from the clever indirection and thematic seriousness that the song offers. Its message is a potent and universal one: discriminating against people or treating them like outcasts for being perceived as different also places the prejudiced individual firmly in the realm of “difference,” separate from the majority of human beings who attempt to treat each other with dignity.

Although they collaborated as a duo on only one full-length album, both Eg White and Alice Temple recorded subsequent solo projects. Eg’s two solo albums, Turn Me On, I’m a Rocket Man (WEA Records, 1996) and Adventure Man (Spilt Milk Records, 2009), were both quietly well-received by fans and critics. White worked with Temple on her harder-edged debut, Hang Over (V2 Records, 1999), and in 2008 Temple recorded an independently-released album titled Be With You in a Minute. She also contributed lead vocals to “Pull Me Through,” a track on Eg’s Adventure Man.

So why are these three lost albums from decades past significant enough for me to write about now? When we suddenly hear a snippet of a nearly forgotten song from long ago, the feeling that we get of being carried back to our younger days isn’t merely nostalgic. The greatest songs and albums emphasize how memory actually functions. During the different phases of our lives, we move through time in ways that are both continuous and discontinuous at once, experiencing “a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability,” as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space. Pop songs are like indelible gemstones that don’t ever change, but we do. And so they open a bright path back to those unchanged versions of our younger selves that remain trapped in time, the people we were before we became who we are today.

The Music of Gregg Alexander

2010-09-07T22:03:00.041-04:00

The best defense I’ve ever read of a musical performer who’s managed to remain both lightly mainstream and discreetly underground was found, oddly enough, in a thread of comments on YouTube. It was posted by someone who’s clearly a cult fan, in response to an unreleased track by Gregg Alexander. When another listener posted a brief comment criticizing Alexander for singing out of key, the fan stood up for him with a truthful, spot-on retort: “He MADE the key.”

Gregg Alexander (born Gregory Aiuto in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1972) is best known as the songwriter and frontman of the short-lived late-’90s pop/rock outfit New Radicals. Short-lived, indeed; the band released just one album, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, on MCA Records in 1998. The album did, however, spawn one hit song that barely grazed the Top 40, “You Get What You Give,” which spent four weeks on the charts, peaking at #36 in early 1999.

A rollicking, infectious pop number not a little indebted to the likes of The Beatles and David Bowie, “You Get What You Give” is authentically inspirational in its message, while also raising an extended middle finger to the music industry and celebrity culture: “Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson / Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson / you’re all fakes, run to your mansions / come around, we’ll kick your ass in.” Sing along, everybody! Ironically, the track garnered a devoted following among celebrity pop musicians themselves, with none other than Madonna proclaiming in an interview that “You Get What You Give” was not only her favorite pop song of the moment, but also one of her favorite pop songs of all time.

Regardless, Gregg Alexander wouldn’t be nearly as patient with a career as a pop performer as Madonna has been. Disenchanted with touring and the public-relations side of the music business, the shadowy, enigmatic Alexander — who often appeared in publicity photographs with a hat pulled down over his eyes — disbanded New Radicals just days after the release of their album’s less successful second single, the sublime “Someday We’ll Know,” agreeing only to shoot a video for the song. Then he went his own way.

Fortunately, he’s been writing and producing songs for many other pop music acts ever since, and to much acclaim. His most notable accomplishment was winning a Grammy Award in 2003 for co-writing “The Game of Love,” performed by Santana and Michelle Branch. Other artists to whom Alexander has loaned his talents throughout his career include Belinda Carlisle of The Go-Go’s, Ronan Keating of Boyzone, Enrique Iglesias, Taylor Dayne, the UK band Texas, and American Idol cast-offs Justin Guarini and Carly Smithson (recording as Carly Hennessy at the time).

Then, of course, there’s Danielle Brisebois — the singer and former child star, who played a character on the TV sitcom All in the Family. Along with working on each other's solo albums, she was Alexander’s closest sidekick in New Radicals and has remained so throughout much of both of their lengthy music careers. In addition to being musical collaborators, they were also on-again, off-again romantic partners, until their personal and professional lives eventually led them to take somewhat more separate paths. (Brisebois has gone on to write hit songs for such artists as Kelly Clarkson and Natasha Bedingfield, and she’s now married to UK guitarist Nick Lashley.)

But before all of Gregg Alexander’s hard-earned success had even begun to come to fruition, back when he was still in his late teenage years, he’d already recorded and released two impressive but little-heard albums for major labels, his mature yet precocious debut, Michigan Rain (A&M Records, 1989), and the rambunctiously conceived, hilariously titled Intoxifornication (Epic Records, 1992). As intriguing as that early music of Alexander’s is, the story leading up to it is equally fascinating. Let me quote the following excerpt from the liner notes of Michigan Rain, written by the famed songwriter and producer Rick Nowels, dated January, 1989:

“In the summer of ’86 I got a message on my answering service from a Mr. Alexander regarding production on a song for a movie. When I returned the call, the voice on the other end informed me that he was a 16-year-old singer/musician from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who has ‘Thousands of songs,’ and would like me to produce one of them for, oh . . . why not a film soundtrack?

‘Can you send me a tape?’

‘Well, I don’t like to leave tapes around.’

‘Okay, play me something over the phone.’

The next thing I knew, I was driving down the freeway to meet Mr. Alexander. We sat in my car listening to his strange home demos, and after 15 minutes I told him we would make an album together. Gregg has been in my life, studio and refrigerator for over two years. Now he’s yours. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the soundtrack to Gregg Alexander’s home movie.”

I still laugh out loud every single time I read this message from Mr. Nowels in the liner notes. I remember trying similar stunts to get interviews with pop stars back when I was the entertainment editor of my high school newspaper, but I never aimed quite as high at age sixteen as Gregg Alexander did. Rick Nowels, at that point in his career, had already written and produced top-selling songs and solo albums for Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle, and he’d soon do the same for Anita Baker, Celine Dion, Cher, Darren Hayes, Dido, Jewel, and Madonna. To grab the attention of someone of Nowels’ professional stature, especially out of the clear blue, takes not only some serious guts, but also a tremendous amount of talent and luck.

As fate would have it, A&M Records was going through some severe turbulence right around the time of the release of Michigan Rain, so the album got hardly any public attention at all before being almost entirely forgotten. The record label’s confusion is made obvious by the last-minute change of the album’s title, as indicated on the promotional single for the album’s first track, “In the Neighborhood,” which lists the title of the then-forthcoming album as Save Me from Myself, a title shared with perhaps the album’s best song.

For those who took the time to seek out Michigan Rain and listen to its ten playfully ambitious tracks, they discovered a musical and lyrical pop palette that was nearly unprecedented for someone of Gregg Alexander’s tender age. What do the songs sound like? Exactly what you’d expect: finely groomed versions of a 16-year-old prodigy’s bedroom daydreams, funneled through a jangly sheen of ’60s- and ’70s-inspired guitar rock. Alexander was still stuck in high school in suburban Michigan, but on the album’s title cut, he’s imagining himself looking for bar fights, being picked up by some hot babe at a club — except that, unlike many of his peers, his particular daydreams are being fully realized and projected in all of their widescreen, Technicolor glory by a chart-topping record producer. Therefore, the song’s catchy choral refrain: “We made the fallin’ snow so hot / it turned to Michigan rain.”

That song and a couple of others — the anthemic heartbreaker “Loving You Sets Me Free” and the gorgeous, explosive mini-symphony “Save Me from Myself” — could have been massive hits in their late-’80s timeframe, were it not for the deliberately outright quirkiness of Alexander’s howling, pseudo-tortured vocals and coyly over-the-top idiosyncrasies. Religion looms large in other songs, since Alexander was raised, apparently, by conservative Jehovah’s Witness parents. His stance on the punk-lite romp “Sinner Times Ten” is, of course, interrogative, as is the case for most teenagers (“Did we have to bring God into this?”). He's even assisted on this track by the banshee-like background vocals of a young N’Dea Davenport.

In a sense Alexander’s extreme persona throughout the album is a safe embodiment of rebellion, whimsically lashing out against the strictures within which he was raised. As a fictive character in his own songs, he drinks, dances, loves, hates, sleeps around, steals, kills, gets thrown in jail for twenty years. The album’s soaring closing track, “The World We Love So Much,” embraces “all the beautiful things / we’re not allowed to touch” and contains glimpses of epic grandeur, the kind that also hint at what’s yet to come from Mr. Alexander in his later work.

Because Michigan Rain barely even saw the light of day, Epic Records re-packaged half of its songs in 1992 for Alexander’s equally disregarded sophomore effort, Intoxifornication. Two sexy, risqué new singles, “Smokin’ in Bed” and “The Truth,” were released from that album. The lyrics of the latter song make it clear why Alexander’s music was such a hard sell for a mainstream pop audience. His propensity for intense metaphors and point-blank exaggerations run the risk of making the listener take him too seriously. Early in “The Truth,” he croons, “I don’t follow fashion / ‘cuz man it’s such a drag / I got 77 women / and damn am I a fag.” Later, and far more provocatively: “I ask the question / but you are the riddle / I am a Jew / and you’re my Hitler.” What’s clear in the context of his body of work, however, is that Alexander’s lyrics are both sharp and blunt enough to be not just intentionally sensationalistic, but also a clever critique of sensationalism itself.

Two other tracks from Intoxifornication, “I Wanna Seduce You” and “Electric Girlfriend,” seethe with an adrenaline and sexual energy that only someone who’s approaching twenty could conjure up. The effect is youthfully direct and raw (“In you / it feels so good / when I go / under your hood”), but Alexander sings the lines like Disneyland on cocaine. By this point in Alexander’s career, Danielle Brisebois had replaced N’Dea Davenport as his principal vocal counterpoint; Brisebois’ wails, moans, and sighs are as vital to the songs as Alexander’s own. Regarding his penchant for debauchery, Alexander commented in an interview around this time, “I’ve tried most drugs, most positions under the guise of most religions with most genders on most continents.” It’s a brilliant statement that tells you everything you need to know, without really revealing anything at all.

With two self-penned major-label albums under his belt by the time most people are still only halfway through college, Alexander had experienced the best apprenticeship that he could possibly find in the music industry at the time. He continued to make connections in Los Angeles and London, while living in New York City, where he often made spare cash and tested out new songs as a busker in Central Park and Tompkins Square Park. The two New Radicals singles, “You Get What You Give” and “Someday We’ll Know,” actually garnered a huge following just from being heard on the streets there, well before the album itself had even been recorded.

New Radicals’ sole album-length release, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, sold over one million copies internationally, mainly based on the strength and notoriety of its two aforementioned singles. It’s also, without question, one of the most solid and just plain enjoyable albums in the history of American pop music. The dizzying reach and full-throttle personality of the album’s twelve cuts have never quite been paralleled in the twelve years since those songs first hit the airwaves. From Danielle Brisebois’ unaccompanied opening words on “Mother, We Just Can’t Get Enough” (“Make my nipples hard, let’s GO),” swiftly followed by swirling guitar riffs, bluesy plinking piano lines, and lone hip-hop shouts, we know that we’re not in for the usual pop/rock rollercoaster ride.

This first track, along with most of the others on the album, is about unabashedly finding delight in a kind of controlled excess. Note Alexander’s bombastic vocal attack and improvised rush of quasi-Eastern chanting near the song’s end, along with Brisebois’ breathtaking spoken-word interlude, just prior to an immense breakdown of percussion:

“Social Security number, please.

Credit card number, please.

Money, please.

Soul, please.

Please deposit $85 for the next three minutes, please

(or your call will be fucking disconnected immediately).”

Alexander and Brisebois know they’re making music to be sold to the masses, and they bash that fact about as much as they can possibly get away with on a mainstream, major-label album, right down to the UPC barcode that’s tattooed on Alexander’s hand and shoes in the album’s artwork. Despite their respective successes as songwriters and producers since that time, the sentiment registers as sincere here. Then again, they’re getting stoned in the lyrics of the majority of the songs on the album, too, so it’s not as though their judgment would have been perfectly clear-headed back in those days!

Since the album includes a track titled “Gotta Stay High,” this should really come as no surprise. Surely, getting themselves high fueled the album's manic story-songs — “I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away the Ending,” “Jehovah Made This Whole Joint for You,” and “Technicolor Lover” — not to mention the funk-inflected, headlong rant of the album’s title track, on which the lyrics that Alexander sings don’t match up at all with those that are printed in the CD booklet: “I bet you trust your bank / just wait until it tanks . . . / And politics, a fuckin’ joke / Right and left, they’re both a hoax.”

To prove that he’s not all post-adolescent posturing, Alexander shows his softer, less combative side on bittersweet ballads like “Someday We’ll Know” (“Who holds the stars up in the sky? / Is true love once in a lifetime? / Did the captain of the Titanic cry?”) and “Flowers” (“My love is real / as real as the flowers you smoke to get high . . . / as real as our god who has spoken on how we can fly”). The album’s closing number, “Crying Like a Church on Monday,” even fuses pure power-pop with tinges of gospel to achieve its transcendent, melancholy heights.

So with that final, graceful bow, Gregg Alexander largely retreated to studio work behind the scenes. Most recently, with the exception of a track that he wrote with Danielle Brisebois for a new Boyzone album this year, he’s disappeared back into private life, no doubt enjoying the royalties he’s earned from songwriting over the years. I actually like it that way, as much as I love all of his music. It makes his earlier work, in relief, seem even more like the truly ingenious pop music that it is.

Postscript: Because I begin another busy school year of teaching college courses this week, my blog will be on hiatus until next summer for the most part. My sincere gratitude goes out to those of you who’ve read my posts over this past summer. Your feedback and commentary have really meant a lot to me. I appreciate your readership.

Robert Hamberger, The Smug Bridegroom (Five Leaves Publications, 2002)

2010-08-16T06:05:00.025-04:00

I’ve always said that the greatest untold story in literature is the tale of what’s been going on for decades now at rest-areas off of every highway around the globe — and between married, supposedly “straight” men. Then in 2005, along came Ang Lee’s cinematic masterpiece Brokeback Mountain, which became an overnight cultural phenomenon — but not a Best Picture winner at the Oscars, although it deserved to be — for the very reason that’s stated above. Sure, the film was adapted from Annie Proulx’s moving short story of the same name, but few people had read her story before the movie’s release.

Leave it to a straight female fiction writer and a straight male film director to be the first people to tell this story to a wide audience and receive international acclaim for it. Such has been the homophobia of our society, and such has been the internalized fear amongst closeted (or formerly closeted) gay and bisexual men, who it seems have been unwilling or unable to tell the story themselves. Society doesn’t even remotely comprehend the depth and complexity of this subject, because society is what still forces many men to endure that difficult life of secrecy today. If the culture failed to coerce such men into covertly leading double lives, so the twisted logic goes, then the heterosexual and familial backbone of the culture itself would crumble.

Nevermind that it’s already crumbling anyway. As gay and bisexual identity has become more openly accepted in cultures worldwide, some — but not nearly all — of these closeted men have gradually ended their deceptive marriages of convenience, and society has begun to wake up to one of its most desperately hidden truths. The timeframe of Brokeback Mountain begins in 1963, and nearly half a century later, it’s obvious that we’re not living in 1963 anymore.

Eight years ago now, a little book titled The Smug Bridegroom quietly made its way into the world. It addresses the aforementioned themes more directly and more personally than either Proulx’s short story or Lee’s film. It’s a collection of poetry, so again, there’s no doubt that relatively few people have read it. This was the second book written by Robert Hamberger, an English poet who was born in East London in 1957. Hamberger, the author of six poetry pamphlets and three full-length poetry collections — Warpaint Angel (1997) was his first book, and Torso (2007) is his third and most recent — has been publishing his poems since the late 1970s. At that time he was married to a woman with whom he had three children, then he got divorced, came out as gay, and found a long-term male partner seventeen years his senior, who lived with the hardships of heart disease. Hamberger currently resides in Brighton, on England’s southern coast.

The scope of The Smug Bridegroom is vast and impressive, given that Hamberger’s book explores almost his entire biographical trajectory. Whereas many volumes of poetry loosely or even randomly link together poems within several subtitled sections, the four subtitled sequences that comprise The Smug Bridegroom tightly cohere both individually and together, arriving at a structure whose integrity feels completely solid from start to finish. The opening sequence, “Mountains,” involves commentaries on parenthood and the descent into illness of the author’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated. The second section, “Die Bravely,” closely details Hamberger’s marriage, from early courtship to the trials of separation. “The Wolf’s Tale” and “The Rule of Earth,” the latter of which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize and was previously published as a self-contained pamphlet, examine the pain of divorce and coming out as gay at middle age, alongside the poet’s figurative rebirth in a meaningful domestic relationship with another man.

The Smug Bridegroom draws its title from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear himself speaks the lines late in the play’s fourth act, once he’s suddenly realized, in his old age and delirium, that his two eldest daughters have betrayed him: “Why this would make a man a man of salt, / To use his eyes for garden water-pots, / Ay, and laying autumn’s dust. I will die bravely, / Like a smug bridegroom.” These lines also serve as the epigraph to the section that’s subtitled “Die Bravely” in Hamberger’s book. This allusion is affecting and works on numerous levels, conveying at once the deep sorrow that the poet feels about the dissolution of his marriage, the sense of deception involved in “betraying” his wife and children, and the guilty knowledge that he may have intuited he was gay all along on some level, but remained “smug” enough to avoid the open recognition of that fact. In Shakespeare’s play, these lines are also rife with sexual connotations, which are certainly appropriate to the moments of both gay and heterosexual physicality that punctuate Hamberger’s text.

The book’s opening poem, “Mountains,” situates the poet in relation to his parents and to his own children. It’s a fascinating place to stand, both as a writer and as a reader, in the middle of this generational divide. What does it mean to be a son in relation to his beloved aging mother and his absent father? What does it mean to be a father to three young children when one still feels very much like a son himself? Hamberger skillfully evokes and unfolds the intricacies of these relationships, without reducing their infinite nuances: “Looking up (say a year old, sixteen months) / she was a glacier forty foot high . . . / her voice coming from the summit down to me.” Then later:

“At sixteen months

my daughter’s at my feet: far down there,

her cries grapple-hooks pinning their hopes.

Any minute she’ll climb inside me.

I want to be ice. She can’t move mountains.

The season’s shifting. I want to give way.”

All of this is further complicated in that the poet’s mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and nearing her own death. The poem “Mother’s Son” deftly synthesizes fragments from remembered experiences throughout their relationship, from the poet’s earliest memories (“Yanking my hand to Infants that first morning, / me gripping doorjambs and radiators / while everyone gawped”) to disorientingly sad visits to his mother at her retirement home (“Taking my hand / when we walk the corridor saying ‘Allright Dad’”). Hamberger carefully arranges these potentially sentimental images and phrases with exactly the right touch of humanity and restraint, making those moments real to the reader, rather than mere cultural clichés.

Hamberger is also terrifically adept when working in poetic form. The sonnet is the most overused form these days, to say the least, but in his hands, each instance of using the sonnet structure fits because he stays true to this form’s song-like origins, while never calling too much attention to his rhyme schemes or metrical patterns. I’m moved by his sonnet “Your First Words” every single time I read it. The poem describes his initial encounter with his wife-to-be, on their very first day at university:

“‘Can I say hello to you?’ We were eighteen

first night away from home, and I said yes.

You thought I looked safe. How could you guess

in years to come I’d sometimes leave the room when

you were talking, annul you like that, how often

I’d stone you with silence. If I managed to impress

that night with quotes from Plath, it didn’t take us

long to learn no-one lives by poetry alone.”

The next few lines adroitly trace the ensuing years of their courtship, hesitant sexual exploration, and eventual coupledom, with a distinctly effective turn at the poem’s close: “Twenty years on I barely know you, but thanks for asking. / Go back to that night and I’d say yes again.” I can’t think of another excellent lyric poem that deals with this theme in the exact same context, nor can I think of another emotionally precise sonnet that employs the form quite so well in contemporary terms. Such an honest poem within the setting of a book like Hamberger’s was long overdue by the time The Smug Bridegroom was published in 2002. As one acquaintance and literary critic suggested when I asked him about it, perhaps the topic of a previous heterosexual marriage is simply too painful for most gay writers to confront in their work.

Even more admiration is due to Hamberger, in that case, for addressing the subject so thoughtfully here. While the marriage itself may have ended, the wife is not disrespected or left out of the picture. Another of the collection’s sonnets, “Five Years After,” again roused my interest when depicting an amicable post-divorce meeting between the poet’s ex-wife, her second husband, the poet’s male partner, and the poet himself, with an embodiment of elation in the poem’s final image:

“We leave them to their new home, as if we’ve granted

each other a blessing, another chance:

regret and anger trickling into grass,

or away into weather we all moved under once.

Next morning you bend to press

seed-potatoes into the vegetable patch. I balance

to paint our hall like a big yellow yes.”

The aspect of Hamberger’s poems that I most enjoy is their capacity for authentic empathy. These moments of connection manage to feel both vivid and relaxed in Hamberger’s poems, the same way that they so often feel in daily life. In each case they are emblematic, as in the sonnet “In Front of the Kids”: “When I cried in front of the kids they asked why. / ‘I’ve made you unhappy.’ That was enough. / . . . My tough / son ran for toilet-paper to dry / my eyes. He said ‘I want to see you’ / and gently held my face between his hands.” Or in the spare and direct poem “The Coming Out Group”: “He said ‘We’ve always been honest / so I told my wife I’m gay. Five minutes later / she was throwing my clothes out the window… / At work they wrote queer on my windscreen. / I’ve lost everything but it’s worth it. / I’m true to myself’, and he punched his chest / once, hard.”

The two most affecting poems in the book for me, perhaps, are printed side-by-side right in the center of the collection. “A Tree in the Wood” might be one of the most devastating poems I’ve ever read on the subject of gay men and suicide. The poem is preceded by a news-article excerpt from the UK magazine Gay Times, which recounts the story of a Conservative councillor and 40-year-old father of two in Leeds, England, who slashed his wrists and hanged himself on the same day that he was scheduled to appear in court to face gross indecency charges subsequent to his arrest for having sex with another man in a public bathroom. Hamberger courageously elects to re-imagine the man’s sexual encounter itself, a way of focusing on pleasure and desire, rather than emphasizing the social punishment for enacting that desire. The sexually charged imagery is powerfully interspliced with images of violence and self-injury:

“If it’s love I must be cut in two:

stop the body to stop its feelings.

If this sense floods my skin for minutes,

eating a man hungry into my mouth,

swallowing swords, kneading his inches,

feeling good alive together in our sweat

my neck must need rope’s love-bites,

my wrists loosening their grip as he shoots

deserve these slits. My blood can wipe me clean.”

This heartbreaking poem is immediately followed by the equally moving sonnet titled “Sisters,” a piece that’s somehow both antithetical and complementary to “A Tree in the Wood” in tone. The poem playfully recalls the poet and two of his boyhood friends, “[t]hree mummy’s-boy first years at an all boys school, / standing out like cockatoos at a wake” as they together sang and mimed songs by the famed British trio the Beverley Sisters: “We sashayed and fingerclicked thirty years ago. / Months before you died we met in London again: / you two gay, me halfway there. Brothers under the skin.”

The book’s final sequence, “The Rule of Earth,” provides a redemptive ballast to much of the darker content that precedes it in the collection. All twenty-one sonnets in this section of the book chronicle the poet’s romantic relationship with his long-term male partner, from their earliest sexual encounter after meeting over drinks at a pub, to their shared everyday domestic life. The trials that they encounter along the way — suspicious suburban neighbors, being tested for HIV together, spells of silence and depression, the older partner’s heart surgery — are all handled with resilient strength throughout the poems. “The Thought” delicately opens with a strategically repeated phrase: “If I lose you. Watch how I bear the thought: / if I lose you. Never to sense again / your palm against my face while we explain / the way this day has gone, each night / across the pillows, talking late / with kisses when we should have slept.”

There’s both an ease and an intensity in the way that Hamberger navigates these lines, qualities that one rarely finds paired together in formal poetry, or in any poetry, period. To me the scene seems perfectly situated, romantic yet down-to-earth, fully envisioned yet without unnecessary adornment. That same calm emotional exactitude can be felt in “Walking Together,” the book’s dream-like closing poem, which I’ll quote here in its entirety, in order to let the poem’s quiet impact register in full:

“I’m learning to slow my steps in time with yours.

There’s seventeen years between us: a gap

I called a challenge once, the way love ignores

any barrier, mountain, distance. I’d stop

a minute to let you catch up in those early days.

Carried away by how often we said

‘Let’s go for it’ when we met, I read that phrase

as my green light, the same light we saw ahead

walking back last night to our posh hotel.

It glowed at the crest of an avenue of trees

still young and green, while a heart-shadow fell

at our feet from a streetlamp through leaves.

We paused, and in that gap I took your arm

for a few yards of dark, with miles to get home.”

Robert Hamberger’s The Smug Bridegroom is one of the finest poetry books of the past decade. These poems are grounded in hard-won truths and are powered by humanely bracing honesty. Their bravery and expert craft deserve widespread appreciation, as well as a long-standing readership.

Patty Griffin, Flaming Red (A&M Records, 1998)

2010-07-25T11:53:00.039-04:00

Earlier this month I heard the folksinger Ellis Paul perform in concert, and he gave the perfect description of fellow singer/ songwriter Patty Griffin’s voice, since Patty has contributed vocals to several of Paul’s albums. He said that just as photogenic people never fail to look great on camera, Patty’s voice is “audiogenic” and never fails to sound great on a record. I would have to agree, wholeheartedly. Furthermore, in a 20-year career that spans five self-penned studio albums, Griffin has never written a single mediocre song. There are almost no other musical artists on the planet, honestly, of whom this can be said.

Griffin’s sophomore release, 1998’s Flaming Red, is my favorite album of the 1990s. I love it not only for its daring songwriting and sterling production values, but also for its bracing honesty and surprising yet seamless blending of musical styles. A few years ago, when I played the album for a good friend of mine, the writer Alfred Corn, he remarked that the album is “innovative as all get out.” Alfred’s a Southerner by birth, and his colloquial description of the music on Flaming Red couldn’t have been more accurate. Flaming Red shows an allegiance to no particular brand of music and actively refuses to be tied down to one. The album’s musical palette incorporates elements of hard rock (on the title track and “Wiggley Fingers”), twangy yet radio-friendly pop (“One Big Love” and “Blue Sky”), pensive guitar-centered numbers (“Change,” “Carry Me,” and “Big Daddy”), jazz and piano balladry (“Go Now” and “Peter Pan”), as well as a handful of poignant and finely tuned character sketches (“Tony,” “Christina,” and “Mary”) that perfectly bridge the worlds of folk and pop.

While Patty hails from her tiny hometown of Old Town, Maine, she’s resided in Austin, Texas, for over a decade now, and there’s certainly a Southern bent to her voice and the sound of much of her music. Her songs have been covered and popularized by the likes of such country music legends as the Dixie Chicks and Emmylou Harris, and she’s performed duets with many other diverse country music performers, from Willie Nelson to Dierks Bentley to Buddy and Julie Miller. Her debut album, Living with Ghosts (A&M Records, 1996), a polished-up acoustic collection of her jaw-dropping home demo tapes, introduced her to the world as a songwriter of the highest caliber, and also as a classic folk performer through and through. Her debut album provided the ideal stripped-down showcase for her stunningly bluesy, larger-than-life voice, which opened the door to the wide array of vocal acrobatics that she employs on Flaming Red.

I was fortunate to have been following Patty’s career for several years already before her first two albums were released. Back in those days, she actually worked as a switchboard operator at Harvard University in the very same department where I was working at the time, so I’d heard about her music and live shows from co-workers. Catching a truly talented performer at that early stage in her career is a rare opportunity; I was able to hear her sing live in 150-seat venues that are roughly 1/20th the size of the large theaters and arenas where she usually plays today.

Just after the release of Flaming Red, I saw Griffin in concert on August 19th, 1998, at Mama Kin Music Hall, a short-lived venue that was owned by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and located on the famed Lansdowne Street in downtown Boston. (I feel pure shock when I look at my ticket stub from the show: only $10.00!) During her banter between songs, Patty made it clear that this particular venue — a throbbing, smoke-filled bar, with a stage intended for heavy metal acts, among others — was no place for a folk musician. “I’ve always thought of myself as a rock chick,” she proclaimed. And giving herself back that level of artistic permission is what Flaming Red was all about, from the opening burst of pounding drums to the final quiet piano notes.

Like all of the very best albums, Flaming Red is a song cycle, deliberate in its sonic presentation and track sequencing. With that in mind, what follows is my thorough song-by-song overview of the album, with some extra background information (from live performances and otherwise) added in along the way.

The album’s opening title track kicks off the record with a grinding, all-out rock number that’s clearly intended to startle the listener. Think back for just a moment to “Not Alone,” the closing track on Patty’s debut album — recorded solo and acoustic, mostly in her home studio — on which her voice barely registers above a whisper for the entire song; in fact, the song itself is conceived of as a whisper spoken between two lovers in bed, and if you listen closely enough, at just before the two-minute mark, you can even hear a siren wailing past her bedroom window for a second. “Flaming Red,” the following song in Griffin’s oeuvre, jolts us out of that drowsy reverie. You aren’t listening to that folk chick anymore. I’m not her, Patty seems to insist. Instead, you’re hearing an in-your-face tale of a “stupid girl” strutting around in red shoes, “bloody pumps” — a dead girl, we’re later told — who was “dressed like / She deserved everything that she got.”

It’s unclear how much of this abrupt shift in persona was due to the demands of Patty’s record company at the time, though judging from her first-person comments in concert, the temporary re-tooling of her image was equally of her own devising. It’s worth mentioning that Griffin did record a third album for A&M Records, Silver Bell, which was unreleased, sadly, because the label dropped her contract and went under soon thereafter. I have an advance promotional CD sampler from the year 2000 (mailed to me back when I was writing music reviews for Bay Windows) that includes the song “Silver Bell,” along with this printed announcement: “New album Silver Bell due out in September.” That never happened, of course, but it’s revealing that “Silver Bell” is just as much of a hard-rock track as “Flaming Red.” Clearly, the record company had a certain career trajectory in mind for Griffin.

(Little did A&M or Griffin herself foresee that Dave Matthews’ ATO Records label would pick her up and release her next several albums, all very much rooted in the mainstream folk vein, with plenty of room for sonic, but always acoustic, experimentation. Her first album not on ATO Records since that that time, Downtown Church, was released earlier this year; it’s a collection of contemporary re-workings of classic gospel songs, with a few original numbers.)

Regardless of these later instances of turnover in musical identity, the new “rock chick” who appeared on the song “Flaming Red” made little or no sense to some of Griffin’s listeners. I’ve talked to several friends who like her earlier and later work, but were nearly turned off of her music entirely by Flaming Red’s first three minutes: I think it’s just way too loud, they complained, or I never like to listen to hard rock music like that. But how personal taste affects whether or not you’ll buy someone’s new album is about commerce, not art. Flaming Red is art, and it’s artfully synergistic. Griffin’s resistance to being pigeonholed at every point on the album’s thirteen songs actually fits the record’s concepts and serious themes of personal change and evolution at every moment as well.

The second song on Flaming Red, “One Big Love,” was the record’s first single, and it couldn’t be more of a departure from the album’s title track. Accordingly, the song is about exactly what its title suggests, but playfully so. As with many radio pop songs, its narrator is hoping to cement that one big love during a seaside getaway on a summer day, but here she spends most of the time thinking about how she’s taking chances by spending that day away from everybody else she knows. Patty’s hook-laden guitar strumming on the song only serves to underscore how she doesn’t really want to be tied down to any one person, nor to being any one person.

It makes unexpected sense that Griffin then swerves into the dramatic monologue titled “Tony,” the first and most powerful of the album’s character-driven songs. The most striking aspect of the song is its gorgeous sheen and seemingly innocuous pop setting, all drum loops and synthesizers and bleeping electric guitars. The lyrics, which focus on the title character’s suicide, are movingly wistful at first, as a woman who’s looking back on her early years remembers long high school days of sitting behind a young gay man named Tony in class, bored out of her mind: “When I wasn’t too busy feeling lonely / I stared over his shoulder at a map of the world.” The next verse is worth quoting in its entirety because it shows how much the singer relates to Tony, and perhaps also offers Griffin’s reasons for writing this unusual pop song:

“I hated every day of high school

Funny I guess that you did too

It’s funny how I never knew

There I was sitting right behind you

They wrote it in the local rag

Death comes to the local fag

So I guess you finally stopped believing

That any hope would ever find you

I knew that story, I was sitting right behind you.”

I first heard Griffin perform “Tony” at Somerville Theater, just outside of Boston, during the year before Flaming Red was released. The concert was actually introduced by the same Tony who had inspired her to write the song. She performed it solo, with only her voice and her acoustic guitar. Just after the portion of the song that’s quoted above, Tony points a gun at himself during the chorus, and then there’s a long breakdown of drums and guitars on the album version of the song.

But in this solo live rendition, which was my introduction to the song, Griffin ripped a string right out of her guitar with a painful metallic screech, right at the same point in the song when Tony pulls the trigger. The ripped-out guitar string was left dangling from Griffin’s guitar as she played out the remainder of the song. The effect was precise, intense, and staggering. I’d never seen a musician do something like that on stage before, and I’ve never seen anything like it since. That moment remains one of my most indelible memories ever from a live concert. It’s the same moment when I was realized that the world would soon know Patty Griffin’s name.

Back when Griffin wrote “Tony” in the mid-’90s, one-third of teenage suicides were attributed to being harassed at school for reasons related to the student’s perceived sexual identity. Almost fifteen years later, that statistic has become less severe, thankfully, and I can only hope that Patty’s direct, heartbreaking song has helped to change that, even in a small way.

“Change,” track four on the album, continues with the theme of red-hot and sometimes devastating life alterations, this time in the context of a semi-abusive relationship. The metaphor for the man in the relationship is an angry, growling canine (“Dog comes growling up behind you / sinks his teeth in your leg”), a risky metaphor that would normally fall flat on its face as a cliché in any song. But the upbeat rock-inflected instrumentation and Griffin’s in-the-moment delivery save it from that fate: “And now there’s no name for you / Come to find out none of that shit was even true.” The only way to appreciate how successfully Griffin sings this line is to hear it for yourself.

The album’s most bittersweet song, “Goodbye,” again deals with the loss of a close friend. The track is pensive but not overwhelming, as Griffin walks a tightrope of familiar yet originally expressed emotions: “Won’t see you anymore / I guess that’s finally sinking in / ‘Cause you can’t make somebody see / With the simple words you say / All the beauty from within / Sometimes they just look away.” This kind of straightforward emotional candor, uncommon in the realm of pop music, keeps the song from feeling trite, and at the same time — with the help of some gauzy, atmospheric electric guitar work — keeps it from feeling too heavy. The next track, “Carry Me,” is similarly subdued and dreamy for the most part, with an abstract lyrical through-line that could equally describe being carried off to sleep or being flown away to war. It’s a compliment to her compositional skills to admit that Griffin’s lyrics don’t always need to make specific and immediate sense. As with poetry, her more subtle songs arrive at their own kind of aesthetic meaning through repeated listening.

“Christina” must be one of the most unique songs in the pop music lexicon, in that it’s a tribute to a public figure whom few people hear about, which is also one of the key ideas in the song itself. According to Griffin’s introductory explanation of the lyrics during live performances, the song pays sincere homage as it imagines the life of Christina Onassis, daughter of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who was, of course, married to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:

“A piece of the action, pieces of gold

Everyone’s paid well and does what they’re told

For the simple daughter of a simple man

And up in the air, they would write your name there

And love would fall to pieces in the rain

Who would know better than you?

A hundred love letters and none of them true.”

As she always has an innate ability to do, Griffin climbs inside the mind and life situations of the character whom she’s both creating and addressing. The result never seems hokey for a moment, but instead feels haunting and true, especially when, near the end of the song, against a sparkling backdrop of somber yet somehow also cheerful electronic beats, Griffin lets loose a disembodied cry that’s a sonic approximation of what her character must be feeling.

Along with the album’s title track, “Wiggley Fingers” makes for the other surprisingly hard-edged rock number included here, packed full of pulsating guitars and naughty-girl lyrics. The even bigger surprise is that it’s a rock song about, of all things, Catholicism (and why not?) — a tongue-in-cheek jab at the endless litanies of do’s and don’ts that are handed down to Catholic young people, including stipulations of the consequences of those actions: “Old John Paul is keeping a tab / In his big red folder / At night he is dreaming of hollow candle holders / As big as the weight of the world on his shoulders / Amen Amen.” On an album that obviously has plenty of darker moments, this is Griffin’s best chance to let her sense of humor shine through, though even when she’s cracking some harmless jokes at the expense of organized religion, we know that it’s still serious business.

“Blue Sky,” the track that’s probably my second favorite on the album (next to “Tony”), was also released to radio stations as a single, and it’s clear why. More propulsive and a bit less sugary than “One Big Love,” “Blue Sky” is the most wide-open, euphoric cut on the album. This perfect pop song found its ideal vehicle when I played it for my friend Alfred (who’s mentioned above) as we were driving in his car across an enormous bridge outside of Newport when I visited him in Rhode Island for Thanksgiving one year. Just as the opening guitar licks and drum lines throttled into place, we were driving up the bridge and straight into that same huge blue sky that the song describes and celebrates so well.

The next two songs, “Big Daddy” and “Go Now,” are both quasi-jazzy in different ways, slightly brooding and slightly cute at once. The additional guitarists who contributed to the album — Jay Joyce, Doug Lancio, and Daniel Tashian — deserve to share much of the credit on these two songs, as well as many of the others on the record.

But it’s the album’s mournful penultimate anthem, “Mary,” that’s earned Griffin perhaps the highest praise of any song in her catalogue, in part due to a beautiful vocal assist from Emmylou Harris, who’s long been a fan of Patty, and of this song in particular. The lyrics unfold as an incantatory prayer of praise to Griffin’s grandmother, and in them Griffin draws many imagistic comparisons to the Virgin Mary herself:

“You’re covered in roses

You’re covered in ashes

You’re covered in rain

You’re covered in babies

You’re covered in slashes

You’re covered in wilderness

You’re covered in stains . . .

Jesus said mother I couldn’t stay another day longer

He flies right by and leaves a kiss upon her face

While the angels were singing his praises in a blaze of glory

Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place.”

Griffin continues on to trace her grandmother’s personal sacrifices, her peaceful will to endure, and her serene yet vast omnipresence in Griffin’s life. This phenomenal and deeply felt song fully deserves the devoted following that it’s amassed over time.

The album’s tranquil closing track, the childlike piano ballad “Peter Pan,” takes the form of an imaginary letter, seemingly written by Wendy to Peter himself. It’s more of a denouement, culminating in some lovely orchestration, as well as an open, promising ending to the story: “Hey Peter Pan, I’m going home now / I’m all grown up, you’re on your own now / I’ll think of you all painted with the night / You sit and watch from somewhere / As one by one the lights go out.” In the span of fifty minutes, Griffin has covered many of the genres made available to her in our American musical repertoire, and by the close of the album, she’s made herself believably at home in every single one of them.

I’ve listened to the songs on Patty Griffin’s Flaming Red for over twelve years now, in so many different places and mindsets, and on so many different formats: on the radio, on CD, in stereo, with earphones, on my laptop, with my iPod on shuffle, and most fortunately, live in concert a number of times, at venues both tiny and massive. This album continues to reward me; these songs are all a part of me by now, as close to me as my own breath.

Mary Fahl at Club Passim (July 15th, 2010)

2010-07-16T06:50:00.044-04:00

Last night I had the rare, rewarding opportunity to see the magisterial singer and songwriter Mary Fahl perform live in concert, at the legendary Club Passim in Harvard Square. This was a transcendent show and also an ideal venue for Mary, since her songs and distinctive vocal style straddle the line between folk and many other forms of traditional music. Though she remarked between songs that she’s never been classically trained, her resonant, powerhouse contralto, reminiscent of everyone from Joni Mitchell to kd lang to Judy Collins (with just a touch of Cher mixed in for good measure), often belies that fact by bordering on the outright operatic.

As many readers will already know, Fahl got her start as the lead vocalist for the New York-based band October Project, who garnered an underground following and released two impressively atmospheric albums on Epic Records, their 1993 self-titled debut and 1995’s Falling Farther In. Perhaps their best-known song, “Bury My Lovely,” was a hit with the audience when Fahl performed an acoustic rendition of it last night. The only other track that she performed from October Project’s catalogue was “Ariel,” a moving ballad sung from the perspective of the airy servant/sprite from Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest. As Ariel, who longs to be free, revealingly says to his master Prospero in the song, “I love you, I love you / but you are all I know.”

A few years after the founding members of October Project had parted ways artistically, Fahl released her solo EP (and demo CD), Lenses of Contact, on Roughmix Records in 2001. Three of the four songs included on that EP re-appeared on Fahl’s full-length major label debut, The Other Side of Time (Sony Odyssey, 2003). Though the album failed to ignite many sparks commercially, Fahl’s cult fan-base grew larger, and the album drew high critical praise for its pensive lyrical approach and soaring orchestral arrangements, a fusion rarely seen in the profit-driven world of popular music.

Of course, Fahl has expressed her wariness about working with major labels since the end of her association with Sony. One of her best lines of the night came when she introduced the medieval Andalucian love song “Ben Aindi Habibi” and spoke of ancient servant girls who were called forth to sing songs for the sultan; hilariously, she compared that to the experience of playing her own songs for major-label record company executives. Fahl also shared the story of facing even more discouragement recently after she’d completed recording From the Dark Side of the Moon, an album of her re-interpretations of Pink Floyd classics; the label for which she’d made the album, V2 Records, suddenly went out of business just before the album’s scheduled release date.

Luckily, the record label had shipped her two boxes of advance copies of the CD, one of which she distributed to friends and family, and the other of which she’s been selling exclusively at her live shows. “When those are all sold,” she said, “then they’re gone forever and that’s it,” which made the steep price of $40 seem worth paying. Also, those CD sales will help Fahl to re-coup the cost of buying back from the label the rights to her album. She hopes to release those songs digitally online at some point in the future. Her performance of the Pink Floyd track "Brain Damage" from the album was mind-blowing, bewitching, and roof-raising all at once.

Fahl mentioned that she was a student of medieval history and literature, and this is apparent in the broad range of songs that she selects for her repertoire, from Celtic-tinged elegies (“The Dawning of the Day,” Fahl’s emotional tribute to the fallen heroes of 9/11), to Italian arias (Donizetti’s “Una Furtiva Lagrima”), to acoustic songs that she penned herself in Portuguese. Even the colorful fluted dress that she wore for the performance was a nod back to long-lost realms and ancient times. Other highlights of the evening included the evocative “Going Home,” which was featured in the epic Civil War film Gods and Generals, and “Johnny and June,” a memorable folk number that recounts the famed musical marriage of the late Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash.

By the end of the night, Mary Fahl had earned two standing ovations from her appreciative audience, and she’d also made it clear that she’s truly a unique talent among her generation of vocal performers and songwriters. (And as a bonus keepsake, she autographed and personalized the concert poster that I'd swiped from the venue’s bulletin board at the very end of the show!) Her voice at its finest sounds literally cinematic, as deep, wide, and dramatic as a storm-filled Midwestern summer sky.

On a separate but related note: Sometime in the coming week or so, I’ll be posting a lengthy review of my very favorite album of the 1990s. Stay tuned to find out what it is...

12th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 16th - 20th, 2010)

2010-06-27T07:03:00.075-04:00

Perhaps I just selected my list of films well or got lucky, but out of the six years that I’ve attended the Provincetown International Film Festival, this year’s 12th annual festival seemed to have the strongest programming. Over the festival’s five days, I watched seven narrative feature films, eleven documentaries, and one program of short films. I also attended the Awards Ceremony, which honored several cinematic luminaries, some of whom I was pleased to have a chance to meet. I’ll share some in-depth comments about my four favorite films from the festival here, as well as some brief thoughts on two other films that I enjoyed almost as much.

Cairo Time, written and directed by Ruba Nadda (and already available on DVD in Canada), was my favorite film in the festival. Producer Christine Vachon introduced the film by letting the audience know that the script had found its way to her via Canadian director Atom Egoyan, and she also noted that the film stars Patricia Clarkson in her first major leading role. Clarkson has long been respected as a character actress in many excellent independent movies, beginning with her breakout performance as the hilariously deadpan Greta in 1998’s High Art.

In Cairo Time Clarkson plays Juliette, a New York magazine editor who’s traveling to Cairo for the first time to meet her husband there. He’s a United Nations official who’s been unexpectedly delayed for several days, however, by his work in Gaza. So Juliette takes to exploring the city herself, potentially dangerous for a middle-aged blond woman to do on her own. Crowds of men follow her lasciviously, and she learns to stay much closer to her hotel. Fortunately, one of her husband’s Egyptian friends, Tareq (portrayed with quiet charm by Alexander Siddig), steps in to act as her chauffeur and personal escort. The ancient city’s pyramids and continual snarls of traffic provide the backdrop for their love affair that never fully becomes an affair.

The film echoes Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), but Cairo Time is a more mature rendition of a very similar story, with an older woman playing the Scarlett Johansson role. Thanks to Patricia Clarkson’s attentive emotional exactitude, her Juliette is also more reserved and fascinating to watch. It’s a performance of the utmost delicacy that’s also fairly assertive; an implicit streak of feminism underlies the character’s intentions. Each subtly romantic move between Juliette and Tareq is carefully choreographed, respectful of the story and of women. This quality of tacit civility between its romantic leads and the film’s wonderfully languid pace make it feel like a movie from another era, the kind of film that simply doesn’t get made anymore. It's a very particular touch that has mostly faded from the world of cinema, which is part of what made Cairo Time a profound movie-going experience for me.

The festival’s opening-night feature, Howl, directed by acclaimed documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is about Allen Ginsberg’s epic 1955 Beat Generation poem, perhaps the most infamous poetic masterpiece in 20th-century American history. Part literary meditation and part biopic, the film imaginatively recreates the classic countercultural poem and pays sincere homage to it, while also resurrecting a young Ginsberg himself through the precise and rigorous performance of James Franco. A movie about a poem seems unlikely to gain much mainstream attention, but Franco’s reincarnation of Ginsberg should help to make him a bona fide star when the film is released later this year.

Franco’s performance is equally intelligent and brave. The actor has been studying film and writing in New York City for the past few years; in fact, I also saw his first short film, an adaptation of Anthony Hecht’s poem “The Feast of Stephen,” in this same festival. His investment in believably embodying a figure as monumental as Ginsberg is at once palpable and relaxed. And in our post-Brokeback Mountain era—when playing a gay character who interacts physically with other men no longer means career suicide for young male Hollywood stars—Franco’s scenes with the actors playing Neal Cassady and Ginsberg’s longtime partner Peter Orlovsky feel both undeniably sexy and authentically beautiful. (Yes, I was melting in my seat.) I commend Epstein and Friedman for making sure that these scenes were filmed honestly and realistically, and for knowing how to present them that way within the film’s broader context.

What’s most remarkable about Howl is that the screenplay is comprised almost solely of primary source materials: the actual text of Ginsberg’s poem, monologues from archival interview footage with Ginsberg (which Franco painstakingly re-enacts), and the court transcript from the 1957 obscenity trial surrounding the poem. This explains why we don’t hear much dialogue spoken by Orlovsky, Cassady, or Jack Kerouac during the film. The script’s various elements are interspliced throughout and linked together by the courtroom trial, with a roster of first-rate actors playing the lawyers and literary experts on the witness stand. Jon Hamm, of television’s Mad Men, is especially affecting as the defense attorney; his closing argument is a truly virtuosic piece of acting, in which his eyes alone convey vast measures of conviction, emotion, and professional restraint simultaneously. His final words urge the judge, and us, to consider that art — and the appreciation of art, by extension — should be in pursuit of “honest understanding.”

Howl represents the poem itself by re-staging Ginsberg’s early public readings, along with fantastical animated sequences designed by artist and graphic novelist Eric Drooker, who collaborated with Ginsberg on the 1992 book Illuminated Poems. The animation works well at various points in the film, especially during the darker “Moloch” section of the poem. After thinking about the film for a few days after seeing it, I came to appreciate the suitability of the animated segments even more when I realized that Ginsberg’s poem is itself much like a cartoon, a colorful, expansive exaggeration of the Beat Generation’s key figures and political views, of the many things that they loved about American culture (sex, drugs, liberty, the desire to be all-embracing) and the more oppressive, conformist things that they despised. I think that the film will come to be deeply admired with the passing of time, just as Ginberg’s poem has.

Two of the festival’s documentaries also stood out to me, out of the sizable number that I saw. My favorite was director Jeffrey Blitz’s Lucky, a captivating exploration of the various fates of American lottery winners in the aftermath of receiving their gargantuan cash prizes. The tales range from a humble married couple who won over $100 million and moved with their two teenage kids to a gated community in Florida (where they filled their garage with expensive sports cars and cemented the tiled letters “PB,” for PowerBall, at the bottom of their swimming pool), to a man who extravagantly spent all of his $12 million winnings and is now dying of lung disease while living in a mechanic’s shop, where he runs errands for a meager wage.

In the Q&A session afterwards, Blitz commented that viewers of the film are always most curious about the former lottery winners who lost everything or went bankrupt. Money is usually far easier to lose than it is to gain, so I found the intimate details in the film to be more intriguing. For instance, the story of a family of Vietnamese immigrants who barely escaped their war-torn country in a large wooden boat, and who’ve now built palatial homes for their family members left behind in Vietnam, moved me and many others to tears when they spoke about the struggles they’d faced. But the message of the film seems to be that no matter how tragic or triumphant your story, you still have to deal with your everyday life and thoughts, and all of the things that those might or might not amount to. Blitz also directed the amazing 2002 spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, and he’s quickly become a brilliant observer of the many joys and complications involved with being a citizen of the meritocracy known as the U.S.A.

Belgian filmmaker and NYC transplant Frederic Lilien’s The Legend of Pale Male was the other most engrossing and heartfelt documentary that I saw at the festival. Certainly, the red-tailed hawk known as Pale Male, who first arrived on the scene in New York City in the early 1990s, became a legendary news item after setting up house with a series of female mates by building a huge nest atop a swanky Fifth Avenue apartment building, where the celebrity residents include the likes of Mary Tyler Moore, among others. Bird-watchers and children from all over the world converged in Central Park to delight in seeing the aerial acrobatics of Pale Male on a daily basis. Disenchanted with his father’s law business back home in Belgium, Lilien decided on the spur of the moment to become a wildlife filmmaker right on the streets of New York, following the tale of Pale Male for the better part of a decade. Lilien’s own story gently bookends the documentary, and the film includes some of the most breathtaking photography of New York that I’ve ever seen in any medium.

Pale Male sired a number of young hawks over the years, until conflicts arose and the apartment building’s owners decided to evict the hawk and his family by dismantling and removing their carefully constructed nest. For those unfamiliar with the story, I won’t give anything else away. Let’s just say that Lilien finds an impressive amount of suspense and humor in the events as they unfold, and his film champions a true avian hero that you can cheer for. It’s rare when a film can make you fall in love with a metropolitan cityscape and the wonder of nature all over again, but given its unique intersection of urban and natural themes, The Legend of Pale Male easily accomplishes that.

As for my two “runner-up” films from the festival, Undertow (Contracorriente), a Peruvian film written and directed by Javier Fuentes-Léon, deserves mention here for its stunning oceanside cinematography and its clever twist on a traditional romantic tale. Miguel, a fisherman, has been secretly involved with Santiago, a visiting bohemian painter, unbeknownst to anyone else in his village, including his pregnant wife. With the help of some deft magical realism, an unforeseen turn sets the plot in motion and forces Miguel to face up to ghosts that he’d rather not confront. And it surely doesn’t hurt that the actors playing the two central characters (Cristian Mercado as Miguel, and Manolo Cardona as Santiago) aren’t at all difficult to look at! This film also received the HBO Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the festival.

François Ozon’s Hideaway (Le Refuge) fits snugly into his ever-growing body of work. The French director’s recurring themes and fascinations are all amply evident here: alternative families, bodies, death, and blurred lines of sexuality. Tonally subdued and deliberately paced, this contemplative story concerns Mousse, a young woman portrayed with calm assurance by Isabelle Carré. Her boyfriend Louis, a heroin addict played by Ozon veteran Melvil Poupaud in the first few minutes of the film (note: viewers made squeamish by needles should be aware that those early scenes are hard to watch), dies of a drug overdose and leaves Mousse behind to discover that she’s pregnant with their child. Louis’s gay brother, Paul (played by the gorgeous Louis-Ronan Choisy), looks after Mousse at a secluded country chateau in the wake of their mutual loss. Ozon has already proven his worth as a serious director with a recognizable style, and Hideaway impressively adds to his prolific filmography.

I’ll close with some remarks about the festival’s Awards Ceremony, which took place before a packed house at Provincetown Theater on the Saturday night of the festival. Each of the festival’s honorees participated in a conversation-style interview on stage with a noteworthy member of the film community. First up, Hedwig and the Angry Inch star John Cameron Mitchell (who’s totally adorable in person) interviewed Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, recipients of this year’s Faith Hubley Memorial Award. Two-time Oscar winners for their documentaries The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, Epstein and Friedman have also directed such celebrated documentaries as The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175. The pair of men were down-to-earth, generous, and disarming, qualities that one finds in liberal supply in all of their films. They insightfully responded to questions about the making of Howl, and about how each of them got their respective starts as filmmakers. I was fortunate to speak with Rob Epstein for about fifteen minutes at the festival’s closing-night party, and I can say that he was just as smart, kind, and personable with me during our talk.

Tilda Swinton, who was seated right in front of me at the Awards Ceremony — wearing a fabulous pair of custom-made pumps specially hand-crafted for the occasion . . . with wooden bananas for heels, no less! — accepted her Excellence in Acting Award following a spirited and often hilarious discussion with the renowned film critic and scholar B. Ruby Rich. It’s no surprise that Derek Jarman’s most famous muse would feel quite comfortable in Provincetown; she said that she welcomed the sandy dunes and beaches after traveling from her home in northern Scotland. Several of her other comments were surprising. She mentioned that she’s never liked referring to her job as “acting,” for example, but rather views it as collaboration (“I think of films as conversations”). She also admitted that she’d initially planned to become a writer when she started her undergraduate career as a student at Cambridge University, until she got involved in theatrical productions and eventually became part of Jarman’s ensemble, or “Derek’s children,” as she affectionately called their group in retrospect.

Finally, mainstream cult-comedy director Kevin Smith accepted his Filmmaker on the Edge Award from John Waters, who’s a seasonal Provincetown resident and himself the longtime king/queen of cult comedies. Though I’ve never seen any of Smith’s popular slacker generation films like Clerks, Mallrats, or Dogma, I did enjoy Chasing Amy and have watched clips online from some of his “stand-up” gigs, for which he’s become equally famous over time. Dressed in his trademark outfit of baggy calf-length blue jeans and a sports team hoodie, Smith was sweating buckets throughout his extremely lively conversation with Waters, constantly ratcheting up the outrageousness, while testing the mannered New England audience’s limits with swift, manic, profane, free-association humor. Eventually, everybody gave in to Smith's witty rants and storytelling, and the whole place (including Tilda Swinton) was laughing uproariously.

The big finale of the evening came when Waters hesitantly asked Smith, “Can’t you afford to fly first-class?” The audience took a collective gasp, since he was clearly referring to the recent, widely publicized incident in which Smith was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight, purportedly because he was too large to fit into a passenger seat in coach. Smith’s rambling but seemingly well-rehearsed reply went on for nearly twenty minutes, and every single minute was worth hearing. He explained that he refuses to fly at all now, and drives everywhere around the country in a big tour bus.

The most revealing moment of the night, however, was when Waters summed things up by saying, “So it sounds like you turned the whole situation into comedy! What else can you do with pain?” That remark provides perhaps the best explanation of why both directors have made the kinds of movies they’ve made, though as many of the films in this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival abundantly prove, not all pain results in comedic art. I’m very grateful for that, and for the infinitely dazzling mosaic of human stories represented by these films.

Loggerheads (dir. Tim Kirkman, 2005)

2010-06-14T07:10:00.048-04:00

In anticipation of this week's Provincetown International Film Festival, I was thinking back to some of the best films that I’ve seen at the festival over the past five years. The film that stands out the most in my mind is Tim Kirkman’s Loggerheads, which screened at the festival in 2005, the very first year that I attended.

The attributes that make Loggerheads so memorable for me are its narrative style, its tone, and its performances (though its writing, direction, and cinematography are just as commendable). Kirkman’s screenplay is structured around three separate but interlocking storylines, which take place at three different locations in the filmmaker’s home state of North Carolina during three consecutive years: Kure Beach in 1999, Eden in 2000, and Asheville in 2001. The brilliant intricacy with which Kirkman interweaves these stories throughout the film, jumping back and forth in time and space, never calls attention to itself, feeling perfectly natural and unimposing in each successive scene.

This ease of movement is reflected in the film’s unique tonal quality. I originally saw the film in Provincetown’s cavernous, echoing Town Hall, which has been closed and under renovation for the past two years. I sat in the back row to give myself some extra space, far from the screen and the sound-speakers. The distance and the immensity of the venue accentuated for me just how dramatically even and uninflected the tone of the entire film is. Although the narrative tension gradually builds throughout the film’s ninety minutes, the actors’ voices never rise above normal speaking volume. Only once or twice in a key scene does a character sound momentarily stern. That level evenness of tone — while keeping the audience’s attention thoroughly engaged at every moment — is extremely difficult to achieve.

The film’s intertwined plotlines are all centrally concerned with mothers, and the story is based on actual events. Grace, played with understated elegance by Bonnie Hunt, has long mourned the loss of the son to whom she gave birth out of wedlock as a teenager, and who was immediately placed with an anonymous family by an adoption agency. Because North Carolina laws stipulated (until very recently) that all adoption records must remain permanently sealed, Grace has been unable to find her son, Mark, who’s subtly and movingly portrayed by Kip Pardue. Those same laws also prevent Mark from initiating any sort of contact with his birth mother. By the time she locates him via the services of Rachel (Robin Weigert), a woman who relies on covert networking to make such connections happen, Grace is tragically about a year too late.

Through Mark’s story, we learn that he ran away from home at age 17 and has lived an itinerant life since then, due to fallout after his adoptive parents, a conservative minister and his reluctantly devoted wife, discovered that Mark is gay. Veteran screen actors Chris Sarandon and Tess Harper play Mark’s parents, Robert and Elizabeth, in a pair of impeccably detailed performances. In fact, all of the actors’ portrayals in the film are so delicately calibrated and finely crafted that they make award-winning performers seem nearly histrionic by comparison. Equally remarkable are Michael Kelly as George, the seaside motel manager with whom Mark becomes romantically involved, and Ann Owens Pierce as Ruth, Mark’s childhood neighbor who keeps in touch with him and eventually helps him overcome his estrangement from his adoptive mother, despite Elizabeth’s anxiety about the apparently gay male couple who’ve moved in across the street.

The opening image of Mark’s storyline is one of the most beautifully photographed introductions I’ve ever seen in any movie: the camera slowly pans across the sand to find Mark’s tousled blond hair and handsome, unshaven face in a sunlit close-up, just as he wakes from a night of sleeping on the beach. The image is also symbolic, as we find out later when the film’s title is explained during one of Mark’s monologues. He’s come to Kure Beach to see the rare loggerhead turtles; the place is a sanctuary for them, especially the female loggerheads, who return to the same beach where they were born when it’s time for them to lay their eggs. Grace, Mark’s birth mother, appears on this same beach in the film’s closing scene. The loggerhead symbolism lightly underscores the film, never feeling too blatant or heavy-handed.

As Mark begins his relationship with George, who finds him not long after he’s woken up, it becomes clear that Kure Beach — its name is no coincidence — will also be a protective sanctuary for Mark himself. He reveals to George that he tested positive for HIV on his 21st birthday, and that he’s decided not to treat the virus with medication. Pardue and Kelly are both believable and unexaggerated in their portrayals, refreshing to witness in an era when gay male characters are still too often presented in stereotypical ways. Cinema needs more gay male representations like the characters in this film: everyday, matter-of-fact, sexually open but not overly sexualized.

The most impressive and effective element of Kirkman’s film is its use of intelligent transitions. When juggling three storylines simultaneously, segues from scene to scene need to be seamless and sensible. Kirkman accomplishes this by poetically creating connections through both imagery and dialogue. One such instance occurs when the camera first gazes down a staircase to where Grace sits contemplatively, then cuts to an aerial perspective shot of Mark and George standing beneath a hotel balcony, and then finally cuts to Elizabeth staring down from her bedroom window as we hear her husband ask, “Are you spying on the homosexuals?” In a later scene, a shot of Mark's sky-blue bandanna fades into a gently revolving blue sky, with sunlight sifting down through white clouds around the borders. At every turn we can feel Kirkman’s sure directorial hand, even if we’re not aware of it at every moment. Ultimately, the film's trajectory is heartbreaking and restorative at once, like a long summer afternoon that I wished would never come to a close.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning the film’s soundtrack music, which features three strategically selected and precisely placed songs by contemporary folk performer Patty Griffin: “As Cold As It Gets,” “Rowing Song,” and “Forgiveness.” Given that Griffin didn’t write these numbers in relation to the film, it’s stunning how appropriately the lyrics of these tracks fit their respective scenes, both emotionally and thematically. I’ve been a fan of Griffin’s music for many years now, and hearing these songs again in the context of Kirkman’s film deepened my appreciation for her talents as a singer and songwriter even more.

Next week, I’ll be posting a full report about the 12th annual Provincetown International Film Festival here on my blog, including some critiques of my favorite films from this year’s festival.