“Dear Town,

We had our hopes for you.

Everywhere you were marked with stars and red ink. You were settling into late youth, like us, and we thought you might not mind our scuffed heels if we polished them first. You were our Special Occasion with your floating sterile fireplace and three story front door.

The boy’s soup was amazing; Vietnamese-style lobster bisque gussied up with western cream and ocean bits. I had vegetables pickled in rainwater which soaked my salad into wan watercolor.

Then the weird sea preparations: his stingray wing lopped off into pot pie crust and my bass draped over beans and fungi that slithered away under its muddled eyegreen sauce with every bite.

But dessert is where you lost us, despite your good wishes looped in chocolate letters on the rim of his plate. My little cake sat deflated on one side and deffered to the hard Chinese Checker sauce bumps to its left. His cherry crisp wasn’t and the fruit huddled outside its crepe.

Where was your joy, Town? I looked at your plump walls and thought about climbing them; I wondered if your spiky palm was real. But I didn’t think about you at all. And I wanted to.

Love,
M.”
   
   

Town Restaurant
at the Chambers Hotel
15 W 56th St
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 582-4445
Town’s Website

Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood. Tense, massed and corrosive, in constant nervy tremolo, at times loping in Bartoky pizzicato. It’s what few scores are today: a fully-developed character, without which the movie simply wouldn’t be what it is. An integral voice as important as setting, protagonists, pacing, plot.

From the start, with that slow pan from hill to quarry, it shivers the screen in trumpeting discord. The tone for the entire movie’s set — acid green and always on the cusp of exploding into violence, unresolved & shaking, sonically begging for resolution. Which Daniel Plainview brings with bowling pin in the final frames.

Can you imagine the film without the score? I can’t. And with modern film I almost always can — most scores are superfluous at best, at worst pandering to some misguided notion of a film audience dependent on treacly cues in the form of piano arpeggi or string crescendo to decide how to feel.

Here, Greenwood’s score is about the only thing — aside from Paul Dano in a few scenes, and Dillon Freasier, the child who plays H.W. — that consistently stands up to Daniel Day-Lewis’ obsessed, possessed presence for sheer force & focused savagery. For every shot of oil-masked Day-Lewis staring at a burning derrick, wild-eyed with halfgrinning greed, face pooling out of black like some mug out of a Caravaggio canvas, there’s an equal passage where Greenwood’s score howls out of silence with just as much awful glee.

Whether or not Greenwood composed the music specifically for the film is immaterial to me (He was denied an Oscar nomination because parts of the score come from his pre-existing piece “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”). What matters is that it colludes with and bears up the film as much as do its leads, and helps deliver it home as the mesmerizing, ugly, monomaniacal life study it is.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood

Kohina

This, the little silver niche.

Draw around yourself curtains of
bleep, 8-bit hymns &
sine wave chorales.

You can shake yourself
til your gears wobble and clink;
wave your Lost-in-Space tube-arms
to the blocky beats.

These are the noises of our lives now;
our children will program robo-robins
to pitch their warbles
to metallic scratches.

These are the murmurs of the great silver expanse.

These are noises of death & of
bustling binary fertility.

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

To me, watching Ivo Pogorelich play Chopin as he does here in the 1980 Chopin competition in Warsaw is not much different to me than watching Otis Redding sing “Shake” or Iggy Pop writhe on stage to something off Funhouse. It’s like seeing Coltrane blow holy hell out of his sax. It’s like hearing Patti Smith sing stairs up into the night on “Birdland.” Or Howlin Wolf throttle his guitar neck and sing the rafters into splinters. It’s pure channeled soul: the kind that’s wracked and hurt & fearful and writhing but swept up and organized in a solid mountain of feeling. The heart’s blood, black and wild, captured & focused in a sealed vial of white glass.

From what I understand, Martha Argerich, a judge at the Chopin competition from which this video’s taken (and a legendary Chopin interpreter in her own right), walked out when Ivo was eliminated. I can see why. If for no other reason that these are two Chopin interpreters who capture what’s hardest to capture in this composer’s works: delivering all the massive shifts in feeling without making it seem fragmented, schizophrenic, and doing so with tremendous technique.

Chopin’s works speak to me in part because they depict extremes of emotion side by side as they really (and uncomfortably, sometimes) exist in the human heart; Ivo speaks to me because he seems to understand this intuitively in how he plays. He switches from the most delicate and aching touches to the most hammering fortissimos without making you think he’s just playing up contrast/shock-value. His rubato, his pacing, it all shows a piano player who feels (rather than has read) that Chopin was a revolutionary of the heart’s mapping as much as he was of the keyboard’s.

This is how he plays the Scherzo no. 3: as the story of one human heart struggling and battling, in tragedy and absurdity, unifying it all by making the emotional vicissitudes (which are so characteristic of Chopin’s Scherzos) seem less like hodgepodge extremes yoked together and more like different portraits of the same human face — like Monet’s haystacks seen in varying shades of light. All of a piece, despite the changes, despite the furious switching.

Anyone else out there a huge Chopin fan? Any other interpreters you can recommend?

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Pause at broccoli powder,
probe its puree,
consider cobia cubes,
then jaw it all in one quick
Cava-fueled forkstroke

Now pizza pebbles –
a little caterpillar
of parmesan, oil & tomato balls
falling away in your mouth
like savory cotton-candy

Now knot foie,
a sesame-studded taffyish tie,
like ribosomes on endoplasmic reticuli

Then Eggs Benedict, abused,
undone, scattered,
yolk gelled to cylinder,
hollandaise battered in cubes,
puddling out from tine-splits
in sudden hot pools

By this time, wine fully settles
in the deep couch of you,
making study & dissection
& finesse of fork
give way to blunt hunger
Which is a little like listening
to Debussy covered
in double time by a
drunk garage band

Later, all you remember
from the last dishes:

Chartreuse jelly,
singing from its dish
with clear coy wild notes;

Cherried cucumber
in glisteny medusa mass
like some gulfshore algae;

And cuttlefish, squash & chamomile in a cup
with smeared orange dollop:

Gorgeously preposterous,
flavors & scents by all rights
banned from blend
conjoining to startle & twist
nose and tongue
to glad calculus of flavor
   
   

Wd-50:
50 Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
Phone: 212.477.2900
www.wd-50.com
   
**NOTE: Photo above is not mine, it’s from WD-50’s website.

Lucian, You Forgot Your Eyes

Your faces are maps:
Heat maps,
Topographical maps,
Charted & mapped terrains
Of everything but emotion,
Terrains analyzed & broken down
Into globes and bands of flesh and light.

And, as with all portraits,
This reveals more about the painter
Than it does about the subject.

And what about the painter?
There he is, he paints his own eyes
Like they’re already gone, cavities,
Hand at his neck
Like he’s readying a noose,
Face and hair merging into
Broken chaos-froth behind him,
Face flesh already made to crumble.
This is serenading death.

You wanted them slack, you said,
Slack like animals at rest.
But you go beyond that now,
Rendering everyone
Like they’re beef carcasses:
Hollow, inanimate,
Even when the visage isn’t downturned,
Even when the face not crumpled in sleep,
Even when the eyes aren’t shut
Or the gaze inert
– You can make a face a husk,
A breathtaking taxidermy.

And so your portraits are lies,
Or at best mistitled,
For they say nothing about anything
But you.

And this is their revelation.
This is their great cold power.

Only the man with the blue scarf
Escapes your scalpel-blade brush.
He looks back at us, engaging, undissected,
Spark of challenge animating his gaze,
As if to say: “I know what you’re trying to do.
I won’t be your mirror.
You’re going to get my eyes, god damn it.”

That time, you did.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

A film review by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

I was definitely putting this one off — I simply hadn’t yet been in the mood for a movie that would chain me up for two hours in a cell with my inner hand-wringing political alarmist.

I never did find that mood. I just got so sick of not having anything new from Netflix that I sucked it up, stuck in the disc and turned down the lights.

Back when this movie came out, tons of paste-headed critics got dandered up about it not being subtle, probing, & nuanced enough as a study of politics, totalitarianism, the state, Law, Justice, Fear, Art, Man, God, blabbity blah.

Nonsense. I mean really, is it this movie’s obligation to deliver a finely shaded political-philosophical treatise? Why? Who said it had to play out with the rigor of Thomas Hobbes or Machiavelli? Who the hell goes to Hollywood for in-depth socio-political analysis anyway?

“The Prince” this is not. The movie’s fascist ruling party feel more like caricatures than rounded human beings, for instance. And you never feel that hopeful that the chaotic England V leaves behind is going to be that much of an improvement after all the explosives and fireworks are over. Probably just a bunch of mask-wearing looters burning shit.

But what we do have in this movie is an entertaining, well-paced pop-parable about the paralysis of fear (in a person, in a nation), and how that paralysis can be overcome. We also get a nakedly emotional Natalie Portman, an ugly & committed John Hurt, not to mention a compelling, conflicted Stephen Rea. Finally, not only does this movie stir up sometimes-volatile (if undeveloped) ideas — no mean feat within Hollywood’s constraints — it’s also a breakneck revenge story (V’s favorite movie, tellingly, is “The Count of Monte Cristo,” Alexander Dumas’ classic epic of vengeance).

Is it a bit clumsy, a bit hammy (the all-masked marching crowd scene at the end is a fat sack of corn), a bit blunt-force (think of the rain-cleansing scene with the fiery flashbacks; we get it, we get it), a bit reductive? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Are the brush-strokes broad, are the characters flattened? Another couple Yesses.

Why don’t these things bother me then? Well, they do, it’s just that to the extent that this movie is a parable, I receive it as such — and, like most parables, the aim here is the communication of ideas more than faithful mirroring of life’s layered complexities.

Put another way, I don’t read Animal Farm expecting the same layered psychological gray-area that I find in, say, Henry James or Alice Munro. And I don’t read James or Munro expecting the same stripped archetypes that I find in Animal Farm. I’m not saying this is either James or Orwell — far far fucking cry. But a film should be judged with its conventions in mind, and in this case, I was able to enjoy this thoroughly as the noirish swashbuckler political-parable it is and accept its shortcomings in other areas as part and parcel of its virtues.

To this extent, I’m reminded of horoscopes. Just as a horoscope, however flattened and simplistic, is useful inasmuch as it gets us thinking about ourselves, what we believe in, what we hope for, what we want — just so, this movie, with its welter of ideas offered (security, freedom, anarchism, art as necessary lie), does much the same. Provided, that is, we engage with it as thoughtful viewers, willing to relax, enjoy the Scarlet Pimpernellishness, suspend disbelief a little and put away our Bakunin & Marx (&, okay, lots of other books) for 133 minutes.

Oh and there’s lots of bloody Zorro moves.

And a yummy buzzcut Portman.

Go rent it.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007
   

“Away From Her” is set in Canada & based on an Alice Munro short story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” A woman, Fiona, (Julie Christie, pictured, radiant) starts exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s; she & her husband, Grant, cope with what follows.

The movie, like Munro’s best stories, is so honest and virtuosic in its exploration of human relations that it takes the wind out of you, like a slap to the chest. This is Munro territory — the complex & occasionally frightening range of emotions that live between people, never sentimentalized — and this movie maps that tract with the precision of detectives combing forests for boot prints.

The film does so many things well. For instance, the jagged sunken hull of the husband’s old infidelities hauled up and out of the deep by Fiona, glaring, rusted & clear, even while her other memories and faculties drift down deeper into murk. You’re never quite sure — as her condition worsens and she’s committed to a nursing home — how much of her discomfort around his visits is due to the pain of being reminded of her lost memory or the instinctive gut-reminder (divorced now from facts, made more primal for it) of pure pain this man, dimly remembered, caused her.

And then there’s the relationship she creates with a male patient, Aubrey, wheelchair bound and grumpy, not long after being committed. It’s a supporting & loving bond we watch develop, one whose intimacies the husband is forced to endure — and gradually accept and even encourage — with each of his bouquet-laden visits. As viewers we feel the tug of conflicting emotion, loyalties. First the husband, faithful & steadfast now but hurtful in the past. Then the wife, transferring affection to a new partner now that her old one belongs to another reality. No absolutes, no right or wrong, just the past and the present heaped together indissolubly and nothing to do but mortar new hearthstones atop the earth’s upheaval.

This is a rare kind of emotional portraiture so vivid & unsparing it hurts to keep your eyes on it for too long. And it only gets more blinding when Aubrey’s wife and Grant become involved — for reasons that are as much altruistic as they are emotionally & physically practical.

But for now I want to talk about Fiona. About Julie. About where she goes & what she leaves behind.

 (Read More . . .)