April 28, 2008
SFIFF Note #1.
I struck gold with my Movie #2* of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson's queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I'm already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the movie does begin and end with two pieces of a story): just a barely-connected series of almost-frozen tableaus in pea soup-green living rooms, offices, kitchens and bars (and an execution chamber), the camera in one corner dispassionately eyeing, the surreally ordinary lives of urban dwellers. (One review I read afterwards said that the camera moves exactly twice; too bad I missed one of those scenes!). There are a few recurring characters, most notably the disparate members of a brass band, but otherwise we catch people for the single minute they're on screen, and then they're gone, their escaping feet already licked by Lethe's ice-cold wave. I'll be writing more about this movie at the end of the year, I'm sure.
*Movie #1 was Fernando Solanas' latest documentary, Latent Argentina (Argentina Latente), which I think is closer to "Dormant Argentina" -- about the privatization of companies, concessions to multinational firms, and the vast economic inequalities within the country -- had promised to be less dry than the subject matter only because it was by Solanas, but no such luck. Nonetheless it was quite stimulating, if only because I kept thinking of the Philippines the entire time. (It's wonderful how the last time I heard the phrase "el patrimonio nacional" was in a Spanish class reading Claro M. Recto -- something worth thinking about there.) Visually, Solanas gets some beautiful images of the landscape, but this grandeur is dissipated once we get to the second half and we're treated to shots of laboratory after laboratory. (They're not contrasted ironically either, as they're both classified under resources meant to be used.) One treat for Pacific Film Archive viewers: the one time the documentary leaves Argentina is to visit, of all places, Berkeley, and an interview with an Argentinean professor takes place right outside the lobby, a few feet behind where we were watching.
April 21, 2008
A Musical Exercise: 6 from the '60s.
The rationale behind all this.
And now 6 songs from the '60s, in chronological order:
1. Irma Thomas, "It's Raining"
1962
This is the second-greatest slow-dance song ever – second only to "Sabor a Mi" (also from a great movie, Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, and a decade later, John Sayles' Lone Star). Real-life spouses Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi danced to "It's Raining" at the end of Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, and it was my first time to hear it.
I call it only the second-greatest because it's not really a slow-dance song. Irma Thomas is very much alone; if she's dancing at all, it's with herself. But you at least expect the song to end -- especially with the cheerful "drip drop" refrain echoing throughout -- with a knock on the door, or a sweep of the headlights across the window. Instead, there's a slight emotional shift -- just a little one, but it means everything -- in the third stanza: you think she's just waiting for an absent lover, but you realize the lover has left for good. And so she's left (and so are we) with a silent resignation, a surrender to the raindrops. "I guess I'll just go crazy tonight." What a last line.
Amazon link to the compilation Sweet Soul Queen of New Orleans
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2. The Spencer Davis Group, "Every Little Bit Hurts (Live)"
1965
I don't know the circumstances of this recording – probably a small club, people not paying much attention. And everyone messes up a bit, actually: Steve Winwood simply repeats the same stanza he sang earlier, the piano comes in a little late, the guitar plays the wrong chord at some point, an amp or speaker or something falls to the stage floor at 1:35. I have this image of Winwood singing his heart out while everything collapses around him.
The song -- a Brenda Holloway hit in 1964 written by Ed Cobb (who also wrote Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love") -- is anchored by a crystalline agony in Winwood's voice. He cries, he sighs, "yet you won't let me go," he sings, but we wonder who really keeps holding on.
Amazon link to the compilation Live Anthology 1965-1968
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3. The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice"
from the 1966 album Pet Sounds
It starts with a melody taken straight from a carnival roundabout, with an accordion thrown in. I've always wondered whether it was meant to sound parodic. But no, it's pure innocence, bursting with the thrill of youth and the wishful dreams of adulthood; divorced, no pun intended, from reality, the natural bloom of an endless summer. The song finally peaks with a crescendo of professions of love, and the romantic sweep makes you almost forget that the song ends with a parting ("Good night my baby / Sleep tight my baby").
Indeed, the song is driven by a simple, almost unassailable logic:
We could be married,
And then we'd be happy,
perhaps an equation that only young people in love could truly believe, and it's a testament to the Beach Boys' wide-eyed, eternal youth that you, jaded and older and carrying more baggage than you'd like to admit, even while you're listening to the overplayed song on the supermarket speakers as you pay for your groceries, can have faith in this if only for a moment.
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4. The Beatles, "And Your Bird Can Sing"
from the 1966 album Revolver
When I was nine or ten the Beatles stole into my life. (Even before that, when I was three or four, apparently I used to dance to these four musical thieves, boogying down in the living room while my mom put "Taxman" on the turntable, my toes digging into the green carpet.)
But that year I was nine, an entirely new universe burst open from the speakers, a moptopped riot in my ear. Issuing forth from the hi-fi was this magic, the way colonial officials would enchant natives with phonographs, transfixing them with the ghost of the machine inside.
It was at that age that I was turned on -- not in the late '60s sense, for this was 1980 and I was too young and barely conscious of drugs -- but miraculously electrified, jolted, opened to a new magical sphere of listening and hearing and comprehending, as if my nine-year old skinny self had waited all that time for "Nowhere Man" or "Girl" or "A Hard Day's Night". Of course I understood none of it, and its relative emotional simplicities were still lost on a kid who was still deep into "The Electric Company" or Saturday-morning cartoons.
It was the young Beatles -- the baby-faced Paul McCartney -- that my mother adored. So did I, really -- singing along to "Yesterday", though I can't stand it now. My mother dismissed everything after Revolver – even Sgt. Pepper's was too noisy, too chaotic -- and it was more than a decade later that I really began to appreciate the joy of the White Album, of Lennon's acid tenor keening through the grooves. But Revolver was (and is) the touchstone, something my mother and I still share. I think she would pick "Here There and Everywhere" as her favorite; for me though, it's "And Your Bird Can Sing."
The lyrics, whatever they may mean, hover around the edge of comprehension and unattainability ("you can't see me", "you can't hear me"), but the guitar is not beseeching; it soars and dips in and out of the song with utter delight. "And Your Bird Can Sing" has a guitar solo that would be prolonged in other people's hands, but here it's cut deliciously short to fit the strictures of a pop single, with an insistent guitar riff sneaking through the bridge and chorus, running through my blood.
Twenty years later it is still Revolver that reaches out to a much older self. But in the car when I'm singing along to "And Your Bird Can Sing", it still feels like I'm nine years old.
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5. Van Morrison, "Sweet Thing"
from the 1968 album Astral Weeks
There is a kind of corniness in the jarringly dated slang ("Hey it's me, I'm dynamite", "just to dig it all") that shakes you out of its timelessness -- Edenic images, promises of eternal youth, all the flutes and plucked strings and guitars, but it reminds the listener, who may look at Big Ivan now and see what looks like a portly, perhaps crotchety, old man, that he was once a wavy-haired hippie troubadour poet, dappled with freckles and spring foliage, the musical descendant of Yeats. It's the words that makes the song slip back and forth from 1968 to an eternal present, where Morrison continues to murmur to his "sugar baby." I don't know what everything in the song means, if not a song of praise to the gift of a woman's arms, but, as Morrison sings, "I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines."
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6. The Beatles, "Here Comes The Sun"
from the 1969 album Abbey Road
If you ask me, the utter beauty of this song alone (okay, this and "Something") almost solidifies an argument for George Harrison as the coolest Beatle. (Plus he was in Monty Python's Life of Brian.)
This is the saddest happy song ever, lighter than all your melancholies, radiantly lit from within.
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April 20, 2008
Get Yer Summer Reading On!
I really just wanted to use this picture again. I mean, it's a photo of summer, and it's in Southeast Asia.
Despite my previous melodrama about never teaching again, et cetera, et cetera, I'll be teaching what promises to be an exciting class at UC Berkeley this summer. Lots of moving parts, and I'm not sure yet how it all fits, but it will:
Cultures, Texts and Politics of Southeast Asia
Southeast Asian Studies 138
July 7 - August 15
7233 Dwinelle Hall
MTWTF 10-12
This seminar examines Southeast Asia from the late colonial era to the present through literary and visual lenses. Utilizing a wide range of sources including novels, films, ethnographies, photographs, and scholarly articles, we will explore shifting conceptions of national and regional identity, and the form of the modern nation-state, throughout modern Southeast Asian history. How is Southeast Asia, both as a region and as an area of study, seen in texts from postcolonial and transnational frameworks? How do these texts contribute to emergent or state-sponsored nationalisms? How do affective elements, like memory, laughter, and longing, engage with forms of the national? This class will also encourage students to fashion a critical perspective regarding the authorial voice and the sociohistorical circumstances under which the texts were produced.
It's too short to actually assign a book a week, but this is as close as it gets. In alphabetical order:
- Couperus, The Hidden Force
- Duong, Novel without a Name
- Hagedorn, Dream Jungle
- Orwell, Burmese Days
- Rizal, Noli Me Tangere
And no summer's complete without your summer movies -- list still way subject to change, with a documentary or two tossed in, and just excerpts from one or two instead:
- Ahmad, Sepet
- Bahr and Hickenlooper, Hearts of Darkness
- Bernal, Himala
- Coppola, Apocalypse Now
- Davis, Hearts and Minds
- Fuentes, Bontoc Eulogy
- Monnikendam, Mother Dao the Turtlelike
- Phan, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
- and maybe Weerasethakul, Mysterious Object at Noon, if I can figure out how to teach it.
And of course, a (short) reader of different essays and short stories and maybe some poetry somewhere there. As I wrote earlier, lots of moving parts...
April 16, 2008
The Spring 2008 Mix.
I haven't done this in ages, and I thought I'd try a simpler and more user-friendly, if somewhat less elegant, interface than Box.net for the music. No, you can't download these anymore either, but that keeps me off the hook.
And so: twelve songs, in no order except for a vague mixtape-y flow between them, that I loved in the first four months of 2008, at thewilyfilipino.muxtape.com:
1. Thao with the Get Down Stay Down, "Bag of Hammers"
- From the 2008 album We Brave Bee Stings And All.
- Official website.
"The trick is / You do not get on that interstate bus / The catch is / You stay and see what becomes of us." (I really will be writing a review of this album, I promise.)
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2. Donovan, "Get Thy Bearings"
- From the 1968 album The Hurdy Gurdy Man.
- Official website.
Donovan gets funky. And yes, that's also Biz Markie's "I Told You."
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3. The Budos Band, "Origin Of Man"
- From the 2007 album The Budos Band II.
- Official website.
This is what I imagine: Mahmoud Ahmed by way of Staten Island, to accompany the very beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but all the apes start dancing instead.
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4. Radiohead, "All I Need"
- From the 2007 album In Rainbows.
- Official website.
"I'm the next act / Waiting in the wings / I'm an animal / Trapped in your hot car."
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5. Taken by Cars, "Uh Oh"
- From the 2008 album Endings of a New Kind.
- Myspace page.
Quoting myself here: "The second track, "Uh Oh" (the album's real beginning) has a perfect opening, as instruments fall rapidly into formation: drum heartbeat, stabbing guitar riff, and suddenly, best of all, a synth refrain parachuted in from 1982."
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6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps"
- From the 2003 album Fever to Tell.
- Official website.
I hadn't heard this song before until Rock Band, to tell you the truth. I love the way the notes cut diagonally across the frets: red red red red, yellow yellow yellow yellow, or something like that.
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7. The Cool Kids, "A Little Bit Cooler"
- From the 2007 album The Bake Sale.
- Myspace page.
"Does that belt say 'Star Wars'?" An ode to being a nerd: "I'm in the crib Saturday night with my Sega that's right / Playing a game of that Street Fighter, Street Fighter, Street Fighter / I guess that makes you think you cooler than me / But any girl you can pull I can pull 'em with ease."
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8. Fujiya & Miyagi, "Ankle Injuries"
- From the 2007 album Transparent Things.
- Official website.
I drove up and down from Oakland to Davis and back twice a week, and this song -- plus Can's "Uphill" -- provided the perfect driving soundtrack.
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9. m-flo, "Hands"
- From the 2000 album Planet Shining.
- Official website.
You'll be hearing that piano riff in your dreams, I swear.
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10. Little Dragon, "Test"
- From the 2007 album Little Dragon.
- Official website.
"A test, a test, a test. No rest, no rest, no rest."
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11. Captain Audio, "Lemon"
- From the 2000 album Luxury or Whether It Is Better To Be Loved Than Feared.
- Myspace page.
I heard this on UT Austin's college radio one morning: at first I thought it was some long-lost Liz Phair track, with wah-wah guitar and ragged "We Will Rock You" handclaps and footstomps thrown in.
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12. Led Zeppelin, "The Ocean"
- From the 1973 album Houses of the Holy.
- Official website.
"Now i'm singin all my songs to the girl who won my heart / She is only three six years old / now that's a real fine way to start."
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Again, the songs are here: thewilyfilipino.muxtape.com.
April 12, 2008
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down, Rasputin, Berkeley, 4/12/2008.
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down played for about 30 adults -- and one little girl dancing -- at Rasputin Records earlier this afternoon, and I hope you were there because it was fantastic. "I've never played at this level of heat before," Thao Nguyen told the audience. It was 74 degrees out on Telegraph this afternoon and possibly just a little hotter inside. But no matter -- their particular brand of witty, literate folk-pop, beatboxing and all, was perfect for an afternoon that felt an awful lot like summer.
The setlist, I think:
1. ? [new song, maybe, or something from Like the Linen?]
2. Big Kid Table
3. Swimming Pools
4. Beat (Health, Life and Fire)
5. Feet Asleep
6. Bag of Hammers
7. Violet
8. Fear and Convenience
Full album review of the band's Kill Rock Stars album We Brave Bee Stings And All coming soon on this blog, but if they're ever in your neighborhood (though the last show of their tour with Xiu Xiu is tonight at the Bottom of the Hill) do check them out.
April 09, 2008
The SF Film Fest: What I'm Watching.
The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival is coming up soon, and this year I've taken the unusually restrictive step of watching only films screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Last year -- and I write this without embarrassment -- I lived inside the Kabuki in San Francisco for almost a whole day, beginning with Bunuel's Belle du Jour at noon and finishing up with an Icelandic horror film that let out at 1:30 in the morning, popcorn and nachos for lunch and dinner and a side trip to Playground for a carafe or two of soju, and three rotating groups of friends with myself as the common denominator. But my move to the East Bay has made it easier for me to watch films on different evenings (and, conversely, more difficult for me to watch movies in SF).
This means I miss out on the lone Filipino film in the festival this year -- Sanchez's The Woven Stories of the Other -- which I probably won't be seeing. I was hoping for the latest films by Auraeus Solito, John Santos, Khavn de la Cruz, or Lav Diaz, but no such luck. (I'm rather happy with the Brillante Mendoza films from the recently-concluded Asian American film fest though.)
I'm also missing out on other potentially interesting movies like Du's Umbrella (documentary on Chinese umbrella factories, which sounds fantastic), Ferrara's Go Go Tales (this happens to be the third Asia Argento film in the entire fest, along with flicks by Breillat and Asia's dad), Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (I'm thinking this is probably minor Rohmer, but who am I to say), and Akbari's 10+4 (a sequel of sorts to Kiarostami's Ten, probably a painful film to watch).
I'd love to write a preview like the one on Evening Class, but all I can really do is provide links. Anyhow, here are the films I'm watching, in alphabetical order:
1. Andersson, You, the Living
- Review in the Observer.
I actually don't know much about this film except for a lengthy interview with the director in Cinema Scope.
2. Assarat, Wonderful Town
The critical buzz seems quite high on this one (including a Tiger award at Rotterdam), except for an abysmal review in Slant. I'm on a big Thai film kick right now, so I really want to watch this.
3. Chang, Up the Yangtze
- Interview with Chang on indieWIRE.
See Jia below.
4. Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
- Interview in Cinema Scope.
Some of you Pinoys might recognize John Gianvito's name from an email circulating a couple of years ago looking for contacts / resource persons for his next film on the U.S. military bases and environmental toxic waste in the Philippines. (The synopsis of Profit Motive reminds me of a talk given by Benedict Anderson back in 1991 or so called "My Own Private Ilocos" (I think), accompanied by a slideshow of neglected statues and grave sites, Rizal in his overcoat in countless elementary schools. I'm thinking infinite reproducibility, nationally-generated amnesia...)
5. Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy
- Interview in Premiere.
I don't know anything about this movie except that it looks interesting and that it's about sex in the city I used to live in.
6. Jia, Still Life
- David Denby's review in The New Yorker.
Any movie made by the director of Platform will be well worth seeing. This should be a good companion to Chang's Up the Yangtze above.
7. Maddin, My Winnipeg
- Interview in Cinema Scope.
Maddin's first documentary, though I suspect it'll be a "documentary" in the same way that, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon was a documentary.
8. Sokurov, Alexandra
- J. Hoberman's review in the Village Voice.
Promises to be dreary and slow, which is right up my alley. See also Tarr below.
9. Solanas, Latent Argentina
I've never seen anything by him (this is Fernando, not Valerie -- though the latter would be very cool). Here's my chance.
10. Tajima-Pena, Calavera Highway
That's two decades of groundbreaking documentaries under her belt -- including the classroom favorite Who Killed Vincent Chin? and the very good My America... or Honk If You Love Buddha -- and this one promises to be excellent as well.
11. Tarr, The Man from London
- Review in Reverse Shot.
Promises to be dreary and slow, which is right up my alley. See also Sokurov above. Plus Tilda Swinton is in it!
April 03, 2008
Taken By Cars Interview.
This is my third Taken By Cars-related blog post -- the first was about a June 2007 concert of theirs, the second was a review of their superb debut album, Endings of a New Kind, my favorite album released in 2008 so far -- and this third post, I am thrilled to write, is an actual e-mail interview with the band!
The "interview" -- I'm hoping to actually see them in the flesh this summer -- took place over email in March 2008. The questions were answered collaboratively by all the members of the band.
And here we go:
1. Where does the name come from?
We wanted to use a name that will stick with us for the long term. So we were thinking of mixing and matching some terms, then Kong came up with 'Taken by Cars'. According to him, this was simply based on the fact that we all spend most of our time listening to music in our cars. We all thought that the name connotes movement and a certain sense of mystery so it was a perfect fit for the sound that we play.2. How did you folks meet? Were you in high school bands, were you classically trained, that sort of thing?
The boys all went to the same high school and were in a band ever since. Back then we were covering 90's alternative rock and even classic rock. Then we met Sarah along the way and continued our stint as a cover band. None of us thought of breaking out really, we were just side entertainment in friends' parties or school events and such. Then by mid-2006, we decided to start writing our own stuff and taking the next step.3. I really like these lines from "Logistical Nightmare": "Hands to the sky / We're gods tonight / A million songs to listen to / Thank the letters / I thank you." I'm thinking they're about the music writing process, or the act of performing on stage -- but what *is* the song about?
It's actually one of the happier songs in the album. It's dedicated to the promise that life should be about being grateful (thus the words "thank the letters, i thank you"), about making mistakes and learning from them (thus the words "kiss the ground where I fall"), about not taking yourself or other people too seriously and acknowledging that life is about the little things that move us sometimes ("out of breath, whispering a letdown, moving smile, signaling a turnaround, candid shot, a face to launch a thousand pieces of a dream").4. What were you listening to while composing / recording the tracks? (I'm hearing Bloc Party, Interpol -- maybe some early-80s stuff?) Was there a particular sound you were shooting for on the record? (I'm thinking as well of the lead vocals, and the synthesizer riff on "Uh Oh".)
We were listening to a lot of Bloc Party and Interpol prior to making the album and during recording also..but we were listening to a lot of other things as well. The energy and the vibe of those two bands inspired us no doubt. But then we all have our individual influences too. The things we listen to change constantly. We never really want to rely on a fixed peg for the sound we're trying to achieve.5. I've always been interested in musical histories, in formative listening experiences -- what were yours? Were you folks listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam like everyone else back in the '90s, or did you have different musical backgrounds? Were there bands you wanted to emulate?
Ya, we were definitely listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam back in the 90's. But, I think there was more to the 90's than grunge..it was also the era of ethereal, dream pop, and shoegaze. Bands like Lush, My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Chapterhouse, and Slowdive, among many others, were around at that time. Other than that there's always been the 80's - new wave, dark wave stuff like Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears and Duran Duran. There's so much more to that too though. There were bands like The Ocean Blue, The Bible, The Railway Children... Presently we like the dance rock, electro stuff..that of bands like CSS, Digitalism, LCD Soundsystem and many other things. Some pop ( Madonna) and trance (Tiesto, ATB) and house as well. We could go on and on!6. What's the next project? Are you working on any new songs and trying them out in concert yet?
We're looking to come up with new songs very soon and hopefully be able to play them at gigs already.7. And finally, the proverbial desert island disc question: If you had to be stuck on a desert island with just one album / CD, what would that be?
If you put a gun to my head and asked me that question I still would not be able to give an answer. A compilation maybe! A cd containing one song from all the bands/singers I just mentioned! haha
April 02, 2008
Little Dragon, Elbo Room, San Francisco, 4/1/08.
For an hour last night at the Elbo Room, Little Dragon was the greatest band in the world.
Well, my new favorite band right now, at least. Their 2007 debut album on Peacefrog (it's also available on iTunes, by the way) is just the right kind of sublime -- an effortless downtempo RnB simmer, one of my favorites this year so far -- and their absolutely tight playing last night, at their very first U.S. concert ever, confirmed this.
Little Dragon is a band, first of all, and this is even clearer in concert. (All those tricky drum fills are performed live.) But there's no denying the fact that Yukimi Nagano's voice -- wonderfully wispy, soulfully expressive -- is the real draw. She's also totally riveting to watch on stage, especially when she seems to lose herself in the music, dancing and twisting just before she begins to sing.
They started the set off with "Twice". The last three songs were "Constant Surprises" (right before the encore), "Wink", and "Scribbled Paper" (about one of their favorite poets from Gothenburg).
"Test", of course, was somewhere in there. So was a ridiculously funky "Recommendation" (prompting an echo of "Recommendation" from the crowd during the chorus, all embellished with fluty keyboards and major hi-hat action), a slinky "Forever" (that "ha ha ha ho ho" refrain towards the end was even better live), "Turn Left" (and yes, the crowd was singing along to the "pa pa ra ro pa ra pa" refrain at the end as well), "After the Rain" (is this song about Hurricane Katrina or something?), and a few songs (one called "Tendencies", plus two new songs, "Roundabout" and "Looking Glass") that I didn't recognize.
Anyhow, as you folks can tell, I enjoyed the concert immensely. Only two U.S. dates left -- Goleta tonight, Los Angeles on Friday -- so catch 'em if they're in your area! (Here's a good idea of how they sound live -- a concert recording at Cargo in London earlier this year.)
p.s. Eloise and I were dancing up front right next to the stage, even to the music played by the DJ in between sets. (Geraldine and Kennedy and Stephanie were somewhere in the middle.) At some point Eloise wonders out loud why there were only five other people dancing in the club. (Everyone else was doing the hipster nod, which Little Dragon parodies so wonderfully in the "Test" video.) "Probably because we're from the East Bay," I said. She turns around to ask the woman next to us where she was from. We were right.
p.s. 2. Sorry, Darren: I didn't take any photos, though I was about three feet away from Yukimi's toes.