15th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 19th - 23rd, 2013)

This past week’s Provincetown International Film Festival was the fest’s 15-year anniversary celebration, so I’m happy to report that the fifteen films that I saw (plus a couple of shorts programs) were perhaps the strongest in all of the years I’ve attended the event.  All of the movies that I selected to watch this year were engaging and well-made, with topics ranging from Bauhaus architecture on Cape Cod to the acting career of Harry Dean Stanton to sexual hi-jinks on a doomed airline flight helmed by Pedro Almodóvar.  As usual for my annual retrospective of the festival, I’ll consider more closely the handful of films that I enjoyed the most, the ones that will leave me thinking about them during the weeks and months ahead.

My favorite film from this year’s festival, Kevin Schreck’s documentary Persistence of Vision, was also the film with the most unusual subject among the movies that I saw.  It’s an in-depth study of the Canadian/British film animator Richard Williams, most famous for his Oscar-winning work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the live-action animated comedy starring Bob Hoskins and the cartoon creature of its title.  Much lesser-known is The Thief and the Cobbler, the unfinished and perhaps unfinishable film to which Williams devoted over 25 years of his life.  Williams and his dedicated crew of animators aspired to make it the most accomplished, detailed, and mind-blowing hand-animated epic in film history, and had it been completed as Williams envisioned, it almost certainly would have been.

The Thief and the Cobbler, a fantasy that follows a silent cobbler named Tack as he’s pursued by an evil Grand Vizier named Zigzag, was short on story and even shorter on dialogue, concentrating instead on optically complex, almost hallucinatory imagery.  The footage from the original film that’s featured in the documentary is staggering in its dynamic level of intricacy and motion, prompting audible reactions from other audience members at the screening I attended.  One interviewee who was hired by Williams to work on his film recalls that three months of intensive drawing by the entire animation team would amount to just five seconds of screen time.

Of course, Warner Bros., the financers of the film, eventually pulled the plug on its funding, immediately terminating Williams’ work on the project. The film was then acquired by Miramax, who transformed it into a more cheaply animated, Aladdin-like movie-musical titled Arabian Knight, released to very little fanfare in 1995.  Williams, truly a master of technique, refuses to discuss the film to this day. While obviously tragic, the documentary is actually about artistic determination.  The story proves just how individual real art is, how much commitment and singularity of vision it requires, and how creating something for merely commercial ends can be ruinous.

More overtly crowd-pleasing but equally enjoyable was Twenty Feet from Stardom, which carefully traces the history of female background singers and won the HBO audience award for Best Documentary Feature at the fest.  Finely directed by Morgan Neville and filmed in warm tones that seem to match the singers’ harmonies, the movie tells a rousing tale of talented women who are so often overlooked in the music industry, yet who always give both live and recorded music its spirit and its backbone.  Some very renowned musicians — Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Stevie Wonder — offer their thoughts on collaborating with and being the beneficiaries of such powerhouse back-up vocalists.

One point that’s made clear early on in the film:  the overwhelming majority of these women, most of whom are African-American, started out singing in the church.  Whereas musical success is usually defined by the star-system of being a solo artist, background vocalists reach back to their musical roots by focusing on singing as a form of community.  Sometimes lightning strikes and one can become famous as a background singer, like the wonderful Lisa Fischer, who has toured with The Rolling Stones for two decades, or ’60s Phil Spector protégé Darlene Love, whose “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” remains a holiday standard half a century later.  Startlingly, Love found herself on the outs and cleaning homes for a living not too many years after that 1963 classic became a hit.  One of the film’s most moving moments occurs when she remembers telling herself that she needed to find some way to return to singing professionally and the music world that had meant so much to her in her younger days.

Despite its undeniable value as entertainment, Twenty Feet from Stardom contains some political and feminist messages as well.  Claudia Lennear, who sang background for Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and Stephen Stills, insists that her work as a back-up vocalist in the politically charged era of the 1970s was her way of being an activist, both as a woman and as an African-American. Táta Vega, a veteran session singer for everyone from Elton John to Madonna, laments that her career as a solo artist was stalled because she’s a larger-framed woman in a business that’s fixated on body image, but also says she’s grateful that staying out of the limelight probably kept her from dying of a drug overdose.  And a fixture in the current generation of younger background singers, Judith Hill, mournfully recalls Michael Jackson’s sudden drug-related death that happened just before she was set to embark with the celebrity on his final world tour.

Turning to the narrative features from this year’s festival, I feel compelled or even obligated to comment on Reaching for the Moon, a biopic about the prominent 20th-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop has long been one of the authors whose work I’ve admired more than almost any other writer’s.  She’s known as a kind of perfectionist and a poet of great restraint; she often subtly evoked her emotions in her writing rather than expressing them outwardly in her life.  Because of my own image of her and my own relationship to her work, I knew in advance that my views might not always align with what the film presents. There are some embarrassing moments when the screenplay falters or strains, but overall it represents quite successfully a woman whose enigmatic life and reticent persona are difficult to render in any medium.

Poets’ lives and careers tend to be relatively uneventful, so the trick here is how to capture the viewer’s attention without sensationalizing the more biopic-worthy aspects of Bishop’s biography: her alcoholism, her lesbianism, and her reserved approach to her longtime friendship with fellow poet Robert Lowell, who occasionally showed an unrequited romantic interest in her.  Lowell (portrayed by Treat Williams in the film) plays a limited and functional role of support in the movie, in two scenes that somewhat flatly bookend the story. Miranda Otto’s Bishop is capably performed, by turns brittle and wild. Her inevitable voiceover readings of several of Bishop’s most famous poems are skillfully delivered, if also a bit uncomfortable to hear recited in this particular context.

The narrative centers on the years in the 1950s and ’60s when Bishop wound up living and loving in Brazil, almost by accident.  Glória Pires is superb as Bishop’s Brazilian partner, the self-trained architect Lota de Macedo Soares.  She endows the character with a feisty directness and gravitational pull towards Bishop that seems authentic to what recent books about the couple have suggested about her.  The film picks up its pace when Lota decides to break off her previous relationship with another woman to pursue Bishop, after Bishop’s admission that she’s often mortified when reading her own poems. It’s as though Lota realizes that Bishop needs her in order to survive, which becomes a cruel irony by the time the film reaches its dramatic climax.

The scenes during which Bishop enters into a kind of imaginative fervor while writing poems like “The Shampoo” are effective enough, even if they’re a romanticized cinematic version of the rather dry realistic process of writing poems at one’s desk.  I’m not quite sure what Bishop would think of seeing herself involved in such a grand, widescreen production, but I wonder if some of the aforementioned mortification would factor into her reaction.  Although this biopic is a commendable effort in many regards, in a sense I think that Bishop’s poems themselves are all we really need, unless the film can help to introduce her work to a larger readership.

Finally, the best mainstream film that I saw in the festival, The Way Way Back, couldn’t be any further removed from the world of Reaching for the Moon.  A sensitive teen comedy written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who won an Oscar for co-writing 2011’s The Descendants), The Way Way Back is a distaff version of ’80s John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles, with Liam James in the Molly Ringwald role as Duncan, an awkward misfit teenager just waiting for something to shake up his everyday world of home and family.  The movie is more genuinely offbeat than similar teen comedies that merely claim to be, and it’s also closer in tone and spirit to those timeless John Hughes movies than other attempts at approximating them.  Some ’80s songs by REO Speedwagon and Mr. Mister on the soundtrack early in the film even tricked me into thinking that the movie is set in the ’80s, until I noticed Duncan’s iPod.

Duncan’s on a beach vacation with his mom Pam (Toni Colette), her boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell, embodying a caddish jerk like nobody else can), and Trent’s older and far more popular blond daughter Steph (Zoe Levin).  Bicycling away each morning to avoid the dysfunctions of this makeshift clan — not to mention a hilariously inappropriate neighbor played to campy perfection by Allison Janney — Duncan lands a job at Water Wizz, the local waterpark (and an actual attraction near Cape Cod).  More importantly, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with the park’s freewheeling, bohemian manager, Owen.  Sam Rockwell’s performance as Owen is an award-worthy comedic gem, layered with playful irreverence, slapstick physicality, and palpable touches of humanity as he bonds with Duncan over his feelings of outsiderdom.

Situated at the film’s gentle heart is Duncan’s wish to find somewhere that he can belong and be himself.  Among the other misfit employees and denizens of Water Wizz, he tells Owen by the film’s end that it’s the only place where he ever feels happy.  When it’s revealed that Trent’s having an affair with a friend’s wife, chairs have to be re-arranged in Duncan’s summer household, bringing the getaway and his beloved summer job to a premature close.  I’ll leave the movie’s concluding twist undisclosed here and simply say that it’s poignantly conveyed, and that it explains the film’s title in a couple of different and meaningful ways.

Overall, the festival’s films were mostly well-attended by diverse audiences.  Because this was an anniversary year, the various parties and special events, especially the closing-night block party on Commerical Street, saw even higher turnouts.  Harmony Korine, the quirky and groundbreaking filmmaker who got his notorious start at age 19 by writing the screenplay for Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids, received the Filmmaker on the Edge award for directing at this year’s festival.  During the conversations with honorees at the festival’s awards ceremony, when interviewer John Waters asked him if making edgy films requires living an edgy life, Korine said that it’s more about the life of one’s mind.  From a similar standpoint, I hope that in the festival’s future years, the focus of the discussion among filmgoers continues to be the films themselves.

The Bubble (dir. Eytan Fox, 2006)

It’s time again for my annual pre-Provincetown Film Festival blog post.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a film that I saw at the festival back in 2007, Eytan Fox’s The Bubble.  The celebrated Israeli director has become known for his gay-themed films like Yossi and Jagger and Walk on Water, which focus with authenticity and complexity on relationships between men.  His films are always bold, too, keeping the sexual aspect of those relationships well within focus.  The Bubble follows suit, this time exploring a romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian man.  Several films have taken this particular “star-crossed lovers” approach in a gay Israeli context (the most recent being Michael Mayer’s Out in the Dark), but The Bubble still feels to me like the most successful and genuine effort of its kind.

The film’s title refers to its setting — the city of Tel Aviv, a relative bubble of acceptance and liberation within a war-torn desert of political strife.  More specifically, it refers to the area of the city surrounding Sheinkin Street, similar to trendy, gay-friendly Old Compton Street in London’s Soho district.  Inside this socially tolerant bubble, the movie’s four central characters emerge:  Noam (Ohad Knoller), a sweet, quiet record shop employee who also works as a military check-point guard; Yali (Alon Friedman), Noam’s flamboyant best friend; Lulu (Daniella Wircer), the free-spirited straight female roommate of the aforementioned men; and Ashraf (Yousef Sweid), the Palestinian guy with whom Noam falls in love.

Noam first meets Ashraf under very intense circumstances in the film’s dramatic opening scene.  Ashraf is on a bus heading into Tel Aviv when the bus is stopped at an Israeli military check-point where Noam is working on guard duty.  During the inspection of the passengers, a pregnant woman goes into labor, and the baby must be delivered right in the middle of the road.  The frantic tension of the scene is palpable and believable.  After they exchange some subtle but knowing glances, Ashraf retrieves Noam’s dropped identification card and later takes it to Noam’s apartment to return it to him.

Eytan Fox incorporates a number of smart moves into the film, one of which occurs during the first night that Noam and Ashraf share together on the roof of Noam’s apartment building.  They’ve vacated the apartment for the night so that Lulu can spend it privately with the handsome if malign magazine editor she’s been dating.  The camera intersplices naked close-ups of Lulu and her date in bed together with identically intimate close-ups of Noam and Ashraf sleeping together up on the roof, as if to say:  young people do enjoy sex, and there’s not much distinction between gay and straight in that regard.

Ashraf decides to stay on for the duration after that first night he spends with Noam, partly because he has a chance to be himself in Tel Aviv.  He begins to work as a waiter at Orna and Ella, the restaurant where Yali is a manager.  Meanwhile, Lulu becomes increasingly involved with a group of Israeli anti-occupation activists who seek to find peace and common ground with Palestinian young people, even organizing a rave on a beach where the characters can all come together in what feels like a kind of paradise for them.

Of course, it’s not a paradise for very long.  Ashraf doesn’t have a government permit that would allow him to remain in Tel Aviv, and his conservative Palestinian family expects him to marry a woman and have children.  Further drama ensues, bringing about Noam’s separation from Ashraf.  In a very funny sequence, Yali and Lulu perform an Israeli pop song in drag in an attempt to rouse Noam from his bed and his depression after the seeming breakup.

Yes, Yali embraces his queeny side, and no, there’s nothing wrong with a stock gay character who can drop hilarious and witty one-liners about Take That, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.  In fact, all four characters are finely drawn and acted, and their dialogue is lucid and clever for the most part.  The screenplay does contain some overly convenient and melodramatic twists, all of which I’m willing to overlook because of the film’s emotionally precise inner dynamics.

This emotional exactitude is a fairly rare quality in movies that focus on relationships between gay men.  Noam and Ashraf are both treated with an understated sense of dignity throughout, just two everyday guys who have found themselves deeply and irreversibly attracted to one another.  Not to mention the obvious chemistry between the two actors, which helps to foster some of the most moving scenes of physical closeness between men that I’ve ever seen on screen.

And that closeness works to devastating effect at the film’s climax, during a tragic scene that’s foreshadowed by some dialogue between Ashraf and Noam early in the movie.  The morning after they’ve first had sex on the rooftop, Noam says in Hebrew, “We were explosive,” and explains to Ashraf that the word “explosive” can be used as slang for when something’s cool.  Their climactic finale that fatally echoes those words (along with a visual cue from Martin Sherman’s canonical 1979 play Bent) is filmed in a burst of light with a 360-degree, hyper-kinetic tracking shot, the perfect directorial decision for a heartbreaking scene that might otherwise be impossible to render.

Also to his credit, Eytan Fox doesn’t leave the viewer with any unearned sentimentality or simple answers in the film’s voiceover denouement (alongside a beautiful cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” by Ivri Lider in the movie’s closing credits).  Certainly for gay men surrounded by the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, love is forced to try to persist amidst violence and persecution.  The Bubble creates a realistic fantasy that approximates what exactly that struggle must feel like.

Hem, Departure and Farewell (Waveland Records, 2013)

It’s nice to know in May that I’ve heard what will probably be my favorite album of this year. The fourth studio album by the Brooklyn-based band Hem, Departure and Farewell, sounds like a goodbye album that might not actually be one. The album’s title and several of the songs’ titles (“Last Call,” “So Long,” etc.) seem to suggest that this may be the band’s farewell. The group’s founder/songwriter Dan Messé has called it both a breakup album and a reunion album. Certainly, the album’s themes are consistent with that notion; each song draws on motifs of either leave-taking or homecoming.

Seven years have passed since Hem’s previous effort, Funnel Cloud, was released in 2006.  Hem’s players have been through a lot since then, including the dissolution of two band members’ marriages, as well as the principal songwriter’s descent into and recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.  Messé provides a glimpse of that struggle on the song “Tourniquet”:  “The prospectors still search for highs in the heights / ‘Til their first bloody nose which they laugh off despite / How it seems that whatever gets left in the bar / Just becomes a part of Brooklyn / And here we are.”

Back in February of 2006, I was fortunate to hear Hem perform an intimate concert at Berklee College of Music here in Boston.  My memory of the entire evening is especially vivid.  After dinner with a friend at an Indian restaurant around the corner from the venue, we walked to the concert through a slow-motion snowfall that I’ve experienced on only one or two other occasions in nearly twenty years of living in the city.  It was a bitterly cold night, but there was no wind to cause the snow to blow or drift, so it just fell unhurriedly until it reached the ground.  By the time I was in my front-row seat, I already felt like I was in a comfortably hypnotic daze.

The show was as magical as the snowfall.  I was grateful to chat a bit with Dan Messé and the band’s vocalist Sally Ellyson in the lobby afterwards, and I’m so glad that I had a chance to tell Dan in person that I think his songs are brilliant.  They both signed Sally’s copy of the evening’s set list for me.  (I still have it tucked away inside the booklet of my Funnel Cloud CD.)  Back out into that otherworldly snowfall we all went, a snowfall that felt more cinematic than realistic, which is an appropriate description of Hem’s music itself.

A mixture of folk and chamber pop, Hem’s songs somehow sound orchestral even when there’s no orchestral accompaniment.  In fact, my favorite songs from their early catalog — “Sailor,” “The Fire Thief,” “Pacific Street” — do feature an orchestra, a trend that’s continued on their latest disc.  This lends Messé’s songs the touch of classicism that his lyrics deserve.  He usually approaches his subjects through a sunny haze or across a watery distance, preferring a floating approximation to exactitude, though he does also have exactitude at his disposal when necessary.  I remember he mentioned being obsessed with Rickie Lee Jones’ 1981 masterpiece Pirates, and it’s a lyrical style that she, too, has employed for many years now.

Folk music has long been about traveling: on foot, by train, over water, in cars, along dusty country roads.  Departure and Farewell is also largely concerned with travel.  The sense of reprieve in the music is always balanced by a sense of loss.  On the opening title track, the travel is both an exterior and an interior journey: “The summer folds the afternoon, / And pins a shadow to the lawn, / And sweeps across the empty room / Where I am gone.” How do we find again the path inside ourselves when we’ve gotten hopelessly lost? That’s the band’s mission on this album.

Surprising, then, that the songs are so often rapturous, though also not surprising since melancholy and bliss are a pairing that Hem has become known for mastering.  Likewise, these songs brush up equally against rebirth (“Things Are Not Perfect in Our Yard,” “The Seed”) and death (“Walking Past the Graveyard, Not Breathing”). Hem instrumentalist Steve Curtis’ song “The Jack Pine” similarly relies on the metaphor of a forest fire to explore the end of a long romance. About half of the time, Hem’s songs come across as hymns, while the other half of the time, they lean in the direction of literate children’s songs (“Seven Angels,” “Gently Down the Stream”). “Bird Song” owes an open and faithful debt to Neil Young’s classic track “Birds.”

Beyond the midway point, the album inhabits a dream, familiar territory for Hem, but it’s a strategy that reaches full maturity here.  This maturity culminates on “Last Call,” a song that immerses itself in a drowsy, drunken high, underscored by a lilting choir and Gary Maurer’s precisely drifting guitars.  The final effect is for the band to be swept away, out into a dark and moonless night:  “Last call when the waters came / Rushing in at our feet. / Let’s tear the door from the frame / And float off down the street.”

Listening to an album like this, so rife with the complications of love and human interaction, always makes me wonder why people put up with the hassles of relationships at all, unless it’s because they’re trained to expect to put up with them.  Then they pay the penalty and the price.  Hem’s Departure and Farewell is, at its eloquently wistful heart, a record about loneliness and overcoming it.

The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats (Virgin Records, 2012, Collector's Editions)

Just a few months ago, I reviewed The Blue Nile frontman Paul Buchanan’s solo album Mid Air for my blog, so I was totally excited when brand-new Collector’s Editions of The Blue Nile’s first two albums, 1984’s A Walk Across the Rooftops and 1989’s Hats, arrived in my mailbox this past week.  When you’ve spent over two decades listening to music that’s as indelibly crafted as these two albums are, the songs set up residence somewhere inside you, and both of these albums by the quietly lauded Glasgow trio of Buchanan, Robert Bell, and Paul Moore are, without reservation, contemporary classics.  Despite its aura of enchantment, the music is so unassuming and real that calling it genius almost isn’t enough.

The true cause for excitement for longtime devotees of The Blue Nile is the bonus disc that’s included with each remastered two-disc set, both of which feature a generous handful of rarities, remixes, B-sides, and live tracks.  With these two albums in particular, it feels like a bounty, considering that the original track-list for each record was only seven songs per album, clocking in at a running time of just over half an hour.

First, a little history on how these two unique, enigmatic albums came about.  At the dawn of the 1980s, as electronic technology and synthesizers were beginning to dominate the mainstream music industry, a company called Linn had manufactured a drum machine that it sought to find a band to promote.  The Blue Nile became that band, and its first two albums were recorded as a sort of showcase for Linn’s drum machine.  Though released five years apart, the band’s debut and its sophomore effort garnered enough critical acclaim and modest commercial success that Virgin Records picked them up and delivered the distinctive, contemplative sound of The Blue Nile to a wider international audience.

I love the story of how I first discovered The Blue Nile as a teenager living in the sprawling Midwestern suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio.  Aside from the city’s best pop radio station, Q102, my only other link to the greater world of pop music at that time was the lone copy of Billboard magazine that sat on the shelf in Waldenbooks every week at our local shopping mall.  I’d spend an hour browsing through it from cover to cover, poring over the music charts and new releases.  Once, late in 1989, I spotted a tiny, text-only advertisement somewhere in the back pages of the magazine.  “Call this toll-free 1-800 number,” it said, “and we’ll send you a free promotional copy of The Blue Nile’s latest album Hats on cassette tape.”

I had no idea who The Blue Nile were, but I called the telephone number, left my name and mailing address on their recorded answering service, and the free cassette showed up about a month later.  Hearing those songs for the first time was a strange experience for 16-year-old me, who’d grown accustomed to the ’80s pop/dance music of the era in which I came of age.  This unusual music by The Blue Nile was dark and moody, pulsing and vaguely shimmering, a stretch for me to connect with back then; to my young and unsophisticated ears, the songs sounded as far away as the country of Scotland did.  Without articulating it to myself entirely, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, “File this tape away for future reference, and come back to it in a few years when you’re ready.”

Fast-forward to my college years in Boston, when I finally worked my way backwards in The Blue Nile’s catalog and purchased an import CD of A Walk Across the Rooftops at Tower Records on Newbury Street.  Listening to the remastered versions of the seven songs again now, I’m struck by how eccentric and reserved they are at once.  Specific locations are rarely mentioned in The Blue Nile’s songs, opening them up to a universe of associations, but the palette of motifs is consistent and palpable:  rain, traffic lights, railroads, cities and countrysides.  Love-weary or ecstatic people traversing diurnal landscapes.  All long-standing, reliable images and themes, and that’s helped to make The Blue Nile’s albums so durable.  Just when they’ve lulled you into a meditative state of drum beats and guitar hooks and piano notes, they’ll toss in a lyrical surprise; “caught up in this big rhythm” of Los Angeles on “Tinseltown in the Rain,” suddenly “there’s a red car in the fountain.”  The jubilation of a pure pop track like “Stay” is tempered by the solemn, downbeat urban portrait of “Easter Parade” (“I know you, birthday cards and silent music / Paperbacks and Sunday clothes… / And then the people, all running forward”).

The final two songs on A Walk Across the Rooftops, however, have always gripped me most.  “Heatwave” blends Buchanan’s pleading vocals with both cosmic and earthly concerns:  “You live beneath another star / You are pretending love is worth waiting for / You always breathe another air / The rivers in the distance must be leading somewhere.”  The album’s closing number, “Automobile Noise,” constructs a lightly industrial soundscape around its commentary on the meaningless yet hypnotic swirl of capitalist pursuits, “Climbing a ladder to all the money in the world / Watching it blow across the wire.”  Rare bonus songs like “Regret” and the previously unreleased “St. Catherine’s Day” provide the album with a gorgeous denouement here.

Hats is, in my estimation, an even more perfect album overall.  I’ve occasionally played it in my classes when I’m teaching about blues.  The songs on Hats are far from blues music sonically, but their lyrical roots and somber rhythms are based in a similar idiom.  Structurally, Hats is one of the finest pop albums I’ve ever heard, and it might well be the top contender for the very finest.  Its seven tracks seem to move through the seven days of the week, starting with a late Sunday night train ride on “Over the Hillside” and ending with the understatedly joyous celebration of “Saturday Night.”  The album distinctly etches out a trajectory through time, maybe even through a work week, and just as in our everyday lives, “Saturday Night” is its reward (“Quarter to five, when the storefronts are closing in paradise”).

“The Downtown Lights,” the second track on Hats, is probably The Blue Nile’s most famous song, in part due to Annie Lennox’s dramatic rendition of it on her 1995 album Medusa.  A quintessential encapsulation of longing that both embodies and transcends its own era, the song projects itself into a nighttime skyline, drifting over the exquisite loneliness of metropolitan life:

“The neons and the cigarettes

The rented rooms, the rented cars

The crowded streets, the empty bars

The chimney tops, the trumpets

The golden lights, the loving prayers

The colored shoes, the empty trains

I’m tired of crying on the stairs…”

That potent crescendo segues into the slow-drip seductiveness of “Let’s Go Out Tonight,” which the late Isaac Hayes once covered in a soulful nine-minute version.  “Headlights on the Parade” whisks Buchanan and Company back to the main thoroughfare in their hometown of Glasgow, perhaps explaining that song’s shift to up-tempo percussion and sweeping orchestral flares.  One of the package’s previously unreleased bonus tracks, “Christmas,” nestles deep into archetypal Blue Nile territory with delicate bleeps and swoons, amidst images of twinkling holiday lights.

At one point Paul Buchanan had considered titling his recent solo album Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century, and it would have been an appropriate move, in light of his own lasting and poetic songwriting sensibilities.  Of all the records that get re-released with deluxe Collector’s Edition treatments these days, the two 1980s albums by The Blue Nile are easily among the most warranted and most overdue reissues.  The new audience that will gradually discover and experience these extraordinary songs for the first time absolutely deserves to be found.

D. A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press, 2009) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press, 2012)

Two books of poetry that I’ve returned to frequently over the past couple of years are the most recent books by San Francisco-based poet D. A. Powell, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. I’ve followed Powell’s books since his 1998 debut, Tea, and his five volumes together form one of the most exciting, innovative bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. Chronic and Useless Landscape are assured in their voice and imagery, commanding and relaxed at once.

The title of Chronic refers to many different thematic aspects interspersed throughout the book, literally and figuratively:  constancy (in the sense that pain and illness can be chronic and ongoing, just as life itself can be, if we’re lucky), the persistent drives of desire and addiction (“chronic” being one of the slang nicknames for a drug like marijuana, for instance), but most of all, in terms of time (chronicles, chronology, the ticking of the clock that never lets up).  Powell also plays with the word via the poems’ titles and the sequencing of the collection, which is divided into three sections—“Initial C,” the long title poem, and “Terminal C.”  Over half of the poems’ titles begin with the letter C, and nearly half of the poems’ titles end with that same letter.

This is indicative of both the fullness and the playfulness in Powell’s poems.  All of the major motifs like love, sex, and death are underscored, delicately and deliberately, by fragments of beautiful but derelict landscapes, glittering shards of pop music and entertainment culture, and the slow-motion transition of an agrarian society to a thoroughly post-industrial one.  Powell’s style and stance have taken root somewhere directly between a couple of other poets with distinct California ties, Robinson Jeffers and David Trinidad, though Powell’s poems don’t ever sound exactly like anybody else’s.

Situated amongst crematoriums, California poppies, and continental divides is one of Powell’s finest, most evocative poems, “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic.”  Even in his more formal and classically allusive moments, Powell is never too far away from disco, and this poem raises that association to near-classical heights:  “it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded.  and love is in the chorus waiting to be born.”

Bananarama, Michael Sembello, and B-movie horror flicks are also invoked elsewhere in the book, alongside Maria Callas and Virgil.  There’s an ode to a crab louse that’s as hilarious and trenchant as Frank O’Hara’s wonderful poem “Louise.”  Chronic is the only poetry book I know of that includes an actual fold-out centerfold (!) for two of its poems.  The amiable ghost of Walt Whitman always lingers here, too, in Powell’s long-limbed lines and his all-encompassing eye as it sweeps across the plenitude of meanings of America.  And not just the American past and present, but its potential future.  From the end of Powell’s poem titled “cancer inside a little sea”:

“what does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak

or who does not speak, whether the poems get written

whether the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all

child to come, what will you make of this scratched paradise

this receptacle of soil, water, seed, bee, floating scat and spore

brutal wind and brutal tide.  the insignificance of fortunes”

If D. A. Powell's close concentration on squandered rural/urban hybrid landscapes began to take shape in Chronic, it became the sprawling connective tissue in Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.  During my very first reading of the book upon its release back in February, I was already in tears by the poem “Tender Mercies,” which is only the second piece in the collection, a rapturous apocalyptic prayer that’s suffused with redemptive hope:

“The earth’s a little harder than it was.

But I expect that it will soften soon,

          voluptuous in some age hence,

because we captured it as art

                        the moment it was most itself:

fragile, flecked with nimbleweed,

                                  and so alone,

it almost welcomed its own ravishment.”

In “Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct,” Powell writes, “Ruin, by the wayside, you took as sacrament,” and that acts as a sort of aesthetic/religious mission statement for the book.  He’s able to find some overflowing gorgeousness wherever he turns, from a blossoming grove of almond trees to a young man in worn-out jeans strolling through a suburban shopping mall.  I’ve kept swooning over “Boonies,” a sensuous remembrance of a youthful encounter that’s as close to Cavafy (by way of Antler, perhaps) as anybody else has gotten:  “We’d keep together, he and I, / and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue / each other through the crush of darkling rifts.”  The poem “Pupil” spins a swift reversal on the intellectual seduction of a student/teacher relationship (“You are the headmaster.  Now you must master me”).

I think D. A. Powell is the poet who’s currently pouring the most of himself, with great candor and daring, right into his books.  Composed of equal parts humor and risk, poise and feeling, Chronic and Useless Landscape make an infinitely readable double-portrait that continually resolves, without ever quite settling or coming into permanent focus.  To quote the reassuring closing lines of “Tender Mercies”:

“Be unafraid of what the future brings.

I will not use this particular blue again.”

Paul Buchanan, Mid Air (Newsroom Records, 2012, Deluxe Edition)

For the frontman of a well-known band to release his first solo album more than thirty years into his musical career is surely a rarity, to say the least.  In fact, Paul Buchanan of the celebrated Scottish trio The Blue Nile, which originated back in 1981, might be the only singer/ songwriter who’s waited quite so long to make his solo debut.  His re-arrival with Mid Air is a thoroughly unique and sublime affair, easily my favorite album thus far this year, and maybe the quietest lyrical pop album ever recorded.

Featuring just a delicate piano and Buchanan’s distinctively contemplative vocals, barely registering above a whisper here, these songs together form the equivalent of an intelligent lullaby for adults.  Nearly all of the album’s fourteen songs are under three minutes long.  The Blue Nile became famous in the U.K. for an extremely high level of quality control; the first two of their four exquisite albums contain only seven songs each.  Leave it to Paul Buchanan to create the world’s smallest, most intimate album.

Or not so small, perhaps, in the case of Mid Air’s deluxe edition, which includes ten extra tracks that are unavailable elsewhere, mostly instrumental versions of the album’s highlights, along with three bonus songs.  Strictly limited to 2,000 numbered copies (mine is #589), this special box set quickly sold out and was soon going for astronomical prices of $400 and upwards on eBay.  Gorgeously designed in every detail, the 7-inch box also contains a 20-page booklet with handwritten lyrics and impromptu photographs taken by Mr. Buchanan himself.

Mid Air is certainly a kind of self-portrait, and a self-portrait in the waning years of middle age.  It’s no coincidence, then, that he’s the only musician who appears on the album.  Song titles like “Wedding Party” and “Two Children” make it obvious what station in life Buchanan is singing about, and the mournful tone of his reminiscences also make it clear that all may not have gone as he once expected.  The record feels as if it’s constructed around the concepts of change and loss, especially the album’s opening title track:  “The buttons on your collar / The color of your hair / I think I see you everywhere… / I can see you standing in mid-air.”

Despite how seamless the album sounds, “Newsroom” is among its standout tracks, so perhaps that’s why Buchanan chose that name for his independent label that released the record.  “Last out the newsroom / Please put the lights out / There’s no one left alive,” Buchanan somberly sings; “No one to make love to / No one to blame.”  Mid Air is, without question, a dark-of-the-night album, and also an end-of-the-world album (“Half the world has gone to sleep / Half the world is on its knees / Dreaming of somewhere else”).  But its songs bravely face what’s to come, rather than despairing over it.  Buchanan’s music has always fostered a sense of wonder in the human inability to shake off the stubbornness of the past, thereby finding a way to sustain ourselves in surviving the present.

Sonically, there are many audible touchstones that link these songs to The Blue Nile’s back catalog.  They often seem like tiny sketches for such contemporary classics as “Easter Parade” and “Family Life,” though written two or three decades later.  It’s as though Buchanan is acknowledging his musical past while also gradually letting it go.  That helps to explain Mid Air’s sense of hushed hesitation, too, a quality that annoyed me a bit on my first listen, but eventually grew on me over time.  Like all the finest works of art, the album convinces its audience to encounter it solely on its own terms, which also happens to be the artist’s way of giving back something to us.

Bright Light Bright Light, Make Me Believe in Hope (Aztec Records, 2012)

The album that I’ve been looking forward to the most in 2012 is definitely Make Me Believe in Hope, Rod Thomas’s full-length debut as Bright Light Bright Light, his fantastic electronica project.  (Yes, he snagged that unusual moniker from one of his very favorite ’80s movies, Gremlins!)  I’ve had a huge musical crush on this scruffy Welsh Londoner ever since his catchy and melodic acoustic record, Until Something Fits, first appeared in 2006.  Seven of the eleven tracks on his new effort as Bright Light Bright Light were made available gradually over the interim, and to increasing applause from all corners of social media.  Four previously unreleased songs join them here, equally solid on every sonic and lyrical level:  intelligent, dance-floor ready tunes that are also infinitely hummable.

It’s no secret that Rod is a die-hard fan of piano-based house music from the ’90s; he currently hosts and DJs an ongoing retro club night called Another Night at venues throughout London.  (And he’s a totally fabulous remixer, by the way.)  The influence of Rod’s fascination with ’90s dance music is fully and gorgeously apparent throughout the songs on Make Me Believe in Hope.  Bright Light Bright Light strikes the same balance of drama and optimism that made pop/dance divas like CeCe Peniston and Lonnie Gordon so appealing to an entire generation of club kids, while also putting a brand-new spin on the genre.  Check out Bright Light Bright Light’s recent music videos on YouTube for a taste of the cutting-edge visual artists with whom Rod has collaborated.  Exciting concepts, indeed.

And it’s for that reason that part of Bright Light Bright Light’s pop DNA was hard-wired by Rod’s deep admiration for Pet Shop Boys and Erasure.  There’s always an aura of world-weary disenchantment to complement the surging adrenaline of these tracks.  Rod has mentioned how the songs on his new album focus on numerous kinds of interpersonal and romantic connections, but a sense of disconnection — and the resulting frustration — is just as present, if not more so.  That’s perfectly logical in a way; gay men are surrounded by a culture that’s often unloving, so it follows that loving others and being loved in relationships won’t usually be too simple for us.

Rod critiques this idea from the onset of Make Me Believe in Hope, which starts out with a “storm of solitude” and “my one reliant friend.”  The shimmering opener, “Immature,” boasts a far more honest chorus than the vast majority of pop fare:  “Now everything I wanted seems so immature, and all the time I wasted shines like gold.”  In fact, it’s that level of honesty that makes the sudden glimpses of hope on the album possible.  The feeling of being jaded, tempered by a stubbornly redemptive longing, again plays a central role on “Love Part II,” with its sly taunts of a “clever boy” and ecstatic refrains of “I’m in love again.”

The most danceable number on the record, “Feel It,” furthers the pursuit of desire to the brink of a techno breakdown, which then gets uplifted by the type of roof-raising diva vocals (courtesy of Mykal Kilgore) that formed the intense heart of house music.  The track was arranged and engineered by Del Marquis, otherwise known as the guitarist for Scissor Sisters, who also provides a sweet vocal assist on the sweepingly cinematic “Cry at Films.”  Both “Waiting for the Feeling” and “Moves” continue in this same irrepressible, epic direction, as does the more subtly charming (and chiming) “A New Word to Say.” I'm also certain that I hear a fun little nod to Stacey Q's "We Connect" in the awesome bridge on "Waiting for the Feeling."

Although the entire album is phenomenal (truly), my favorite songs are the slightly darker tunes.  “Disco Moment” brilliantly unfolds its melancholy “boy meets boy, boy loses boy” storyline; Rod describes it as the kind of song he’d imagine for a key scene in a John Hughes movie from the ’80s.  The track begins midway through “another awkward conversation,” a snippet of a lover’s quarrel in a relationship that has clearly reached a stalemate (“I want to go home, or stay out, or go dance, just not this”).  By the song’s close, we’ve arrived at a point of heart-rending separation in the midst of a crowded dance club:  “So you have your disco moment alone, I’ll stand at the side of the room.  You’re dressed in light, I’m just a shadow that’s flickering.”  This theme is beautifully extended on the more down-tempo “How to Make a Heart” as the singer muses, “It’s funny in such a small room there can be so much space between us.”

Despite how finely realized his euphoric and introspective moments are, Rod Thomas also knows exactly when to turn the proceedings a bit more downbeat.  The album’s final two tracks, the quiet “Debris” (featuring vocals by Allison Pierce of The Pierces) and the affirmative “Grace,” together offer the listener a generous emotional landing pad and denouement.  In just over 40 minutes, Bright Light Bright Light’s Make Me Believe in Hope makes me believe in the future of pop music all over again.