On the request of Jim Coudal (whom I'd like to meet someday) and following the canonical Daring Fireball, my 10 favorite western movies are, in order...
Conclusions? I like revisions of the genre rather than embodiments of it. Unforgiven is rightfully seen as the movie Eastwood only could have made in late middle age, a meditation on regret and the nightmares of a violent past. Last Picture Show asks "what if the frontier wasn't an opportunity but a dead end?" High Noon, Mrs Miller, and No Country, each more than 20 years apart from one another, all say that the town the hero normally saves deserves what it has coming. No Country for Old Men suggest "the town" might be the doomed entirety of America.
Is the Western America's herioc quest or is Acteonic tragedy? Probably both.
I came to westerns late. Don't know the famous lines, the legendary duels. I fed at the bratty trough of Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpaw instead of John Ford and Raul Walsh. The western was equal parts dated and iconic before I was born. I entered it from the back porch and will need to find my way to the parlor someday, navigating from backfield to farmhouse, from footnote to source.
Pachelbel's Canon. Where would weddings, high school graduations or any public celebration of passage be without it? You've heard it if you've ever played in an orchestra. Heck, you know PC if you've ever seen an orchestra. It's formal name is "Canon in D major", its composer a German named Johann Pachelbel. But if you say "The song you always here at weddings" most people will know what you mean.
That ubiquity is why I love Robert Redford's choice of the piece to bookend his directorial debut, 1980s Ordinary People. It's the first time I know of that the piece of classical music most yoked to celebrations has been the soundtrack to a divorce.
Redford adapted Ordinary People the movie from Ordinary People the young adult novel by Judith Guest. Both concern the autumn and winter's passing of a Chicago family in the wake of an older sons death and a younger son's suicide attempt. The project was an orchard of beginnings--Guest had won the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize (for best first novel by an American woman) four years earlier and Redford and star Timothy Hutton both received Oscars for their maiden trip in their respective screen roles.
Ordinary People itself is about one very sad march to an ending. The Jarrett family are in the early days of their own extinction as the sadness of the past reveals how ill-equipped they are to stand together in its aftermath. The clip I've included comes from the film's final scenes where the mother Beth Jerrett leaves the family and is not coming back. Pachelbel's Canon comes in at about 9:05 and is unmistakable
The same cannot be said for its composer. Johann Pachelbel enjoyed considerable fame in his lifetime (the Baroque music era of the mid 17th century) both as a musician and a teacher (several of his students were the siblings of J.S. Bach). But his music wasn't paid much attention by scholars until the early 1900s. Canon in D, the only canon Pachelbel ever composed, was thought to have been originally recorded for the wedding of Bach's older brother. A 1970 recorded by French composer Jean-Francois Pailliard brought it roaring back to popularity in the modern era.
It's hard to believe that music as widely known as Pachelbel's Canon needed a second chance at life. It's fairly unlikely also that Robert Redford knew this about it the piece when he chose it. Nonetheless the choice manages to both retell the piece's own story and add another dimension to Ordinary People's.
Redford selected the Pachelbel's Canon as the film's lead-in and coda. Like much great film music it doubles back on itself, commenting on the movie while still supporting its narrative. You might grin in recognition or nod when the piece underscores the film's opening, a reverent yet melancholy montage of the falling leaves of late fall. But when it reappears at the end, your face might twist.
Why is a canon associated so permanently with celebration and marriage concluding a story of a family's collapse? Perhaps the music hints at the ending also being about the rebirth of another family, between father and son, based on forgiveness more than regret. Perhaps Conrad and Calvin Jarrett have a another shot at a different kind of life. The canon that plays them off into that possibility certainly did.
DYK? The $50 million alocated for arts funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka "The Stimulus Package") is .0065% of the total. During The Great Depression, federal funding for the arts, via the Works Progress Administration, was .5% of the total, around a %100 difference.
A couple of times during this year's SXSW, I ran into Shani Harris Peterson, an Atlanta-based filmmaker and partner in the local production house Two Six Productions. Our mutual friend George Kelly introduced us.
Shani and I gabbed in large part about the Atlanta filmmaking scene (or what of it is not owned, lock stock and barrel, by Tyler Perry) which got me thinking about the Atlanta art scene at large. Which, unknown to me, is quite rich.
I can't tell you how thrilled I was to listen to this interview with Greg Sandow, longtime composer, music educator and critic who blogs about the future of classical music. While showing great respect for the mainstream institutions who program and promote classical music, he also advocates on behalf of judging an art form's worth by the levels of thoughtfulness and rigor with which both creator and audience engage. Simpler, it is possible to engage with The Sporanos like a sophisticated consumer of culture and with opera like a dodo bird. What matters is how we make the arts a meaningful part of our lives not how well we've done completing a canonical to-do-list of culture.
Dana Gioia, a very smart man with a very misplaced sense of cultural value, has spent his tenure as director of the NEA alternately lamenting that symphonies aren't shown on primetime television (as they were in the untouchable 1950s) and scolding Americans for not patronizing the arts as symptomatic of not caring about civic participation, physical fitness or the political process. The evidence in this last point is on his side. But as more forward-thinking minds like Sandow and Steven J. Tepperhave pointed out, engagement itself does not make value judgments. Passionate engaged fans of Coldplay are just as likely to be active citizens as passionate fans of Brahms.
What Mr. Sandow is saying, as I tried to in my book, is that snobbery will not serve us well. He may like classical music better than gangsta rap. I may prefer Salon over People. Those are issues of preference, not policy. If boundless interest in culture is out there (and it is. Ever spend some time here?), it's up to the producers and presenters of it to rally that interest around their own activities, to have the arts serve as a university,a place of learning, dialogue and contribution and not simply a house of worship.
At BEA this past week, I made the acquaintance of the Theater Communications Group, the publisher of American Theatre Magazine and a beautiful 10 volume set of August Wilson's Century Cycle. August Wilson, wrote ten plays, each focusing on the African-American experience of a different decade of the 20th century, and won enough Pulitzers, Tonys, and Drama Desk awards to make him one of the most celebrated dramatists in recent times. He died in 2005 from lung cancer.
My college roommate Justin introduced me to Mr. Wilson's work in college. Year later when I began attending theatre in earnest, I decided to make a life mission out of seeing all ten of his plays. When Fences, his 1950s play, went up at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in downtown San Francisco a few months ago, my quest had begun. I figured at that rate, I'd complete the cycle right around my 45th birthday.
Until now. This past weekend, I found out that Theatre Communications Group has an online database of what's going up at practically every theatre in America. A search on "August WIlson" yields 33 results, with 7 of the 10 plays going up somewhere in America this fall.
If I were crazy, I could buy a pile of cheap plane tickets and spend 6 months wolfing down the August Wilson decalogue. Or I could be practical and see whatever comes through town (Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the 1910s play, goes up at Berkeley Rep in December) whenever they get here. But really, when has I erred on the side of practical?
What a great service this is for steaming piles of nerddom like myself.
Lest you thought the National Portrait Gallery (my favorite museum in our nation's capitol) is all oil-on-canvas, dead-white-dudes-on-horses, their new exhibition is called "Recognize! Hip Hop in Contemporary Portraiture."
Since its inception in the late 1970s, hip hop has become hugely influential in America.
While images of hip hop performers are as pervasive in our culture
as the music itself, some visual artists have created powerful images that both
celebrate and explore the complexity of this creative form. The six artists and
one poet whose work is included in RECOGNIZE! have approached hip hop
culture through the lens of portraiture, and, in combination, their contributions
highlight its vitality and beauty.
How contemporary of them. I love it. They've even got a little flickr group going.
It's been a few years since I've been out that way but this may be a good reason to head back.
Trampoline Hall, a Toronto-based public series of lectures by non-experts (i.e. people who aren't qualified to talk about what they are talking about), will be arriving in San Francisco later this month.
The plug on Facebook describes it thusly...
The lectures are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes moving, and always
wildly unpredictable. Each talk is followed by a Q&A with the
audience which is usually also a lot of fun.
Sounds like just my kinda thing, I being the guy who downloads lectures for fun. Clearing Feb. 25th as we speak (via Photojunkie).
HI, I'M KEVIN SMOKLER. I'm a writer and public speaker based in San Francisco. I've been tapping out thoughts online since 2001 (RSS feed). Here's the easiest way to get in touch with me.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles edited and compiled by Jeff Martin. Essay by me on page 45.
