Universal has found its director for international thriller "The Sigma Protocol": Berlin prizewinner Jose Padilha.
The studio is in final negotiations with the helmer of "Eilte Squad," the action movie that won the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin International Film Festival, to direct the Robert Ludlum vehicle.
The studio is planning on a summer shoot.
"Sigma" is based on Ludlum's final complete novel, which was published after the prolific author's death. Like the Jason Bourne franchise, another big Uni property, the story involves a modern-day man on the run in Europe from a series of international assassins and agents.
The two plots differ sharply, though, with the latter using a World War II conspiracy and Nazis as a plot hook.
Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, who penned "Iron Man," are signed on to write the script.
"Squad," which IFC released stateside, centers on a battle between police officers and drug dealers in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The Gersh-repped director also is attached to direct the thriller "The Willing Patriot" for Warners and the drug tale "Marching Powder" at Plan B.
28.1.09
Mirah - (a)spera (2009)
(a)spera, the fourth solo album from Mirah, is the long awaited follow-up to 2004’s highly acclaimed C’mon Miracle (KLP160). Known for her explorative approach to her own brand of independent music making, Mirah’s voice now brings us a new vision of the truths of our times. The songs on (a)spera strike a bold path across a landscape of dynamic and varied melody forms. Mirah’s strongest asset, her sincerity and the care she takes in placing herself within her music, is offered without compromise.
This brave trek through a fragile ancient forest unfolds revealing the destruction wrought by cruel conquest, recalls the relics of a love never realized, and decries the loss of ancient wisdom. We sing for death and the living which stays alive, navigate our relationship to our ceaseless wants as resources disappear, hold on strong to love in a sinking world.
Mirah lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a songwriter, performer and producer. In a constant search to expand her tender repertoire of American folk songs into a larger context, her recordings seek to find the magical amity between explorative percussion, orchestral sounds and elements of rock and popular music. She has been involved with the K Record label since 1999, touring internationally and producing a steady stream of albums. Her new album (a)spera, a soundtrack for the voyage of our entwined destinies, is slated for release on March 12, 2009
Again teaming up with Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mt. Eerie) for three of the 10 tracks, she also enlisted the engineering prowess of fellow Portlanders Tucker Martine (The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Laura Veirs) and Adam Selzer (Norfolk and Western, M. Ward) to complete this beautiful voyage. Featured musicians include Chris Funk (of The Decemberists), Tara Jane O’Neil and Lori Goldston.
27.1.09
John Updike, Author, Dies at 76 (The New York Times/AP)
NEW YORK (AP) -- John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir ''Self-Consciousness'' and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for ''Rabbit Is Rich'' and ''Rabbit at Rest,'' and two National Book Awards.
Although himself deprived of a Nobel, he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.
His settings ranged from the court of ''Hamlet'' to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by ''penny-pinching parents,'' united by ''the patriotic cohesion of World War II'' and blessed by a ''disproportionate share of the world's resources,'' the postwar, suburban boom of ''idealistic careers and early marriages.''
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.
But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it ''to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.'' Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's ''chuckling whir'' or look to the stars and observe that ''the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.''
In the richest detail, his books recorded the extremes of earthly desire and spiritual zealotry, whether the comic philandering of the preacher in ''A Month of Sundays'' or the steady rage of the young Muslim in ''Terrorist.'' Raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa., where the Lord's Prayer was recited daily at school, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.
''I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe,'' Updike told The Associated Press during a 2006 interview.
''I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'''
He received his greatest acclaim for the ''Rabbit'' series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry ''Rabbit'' Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.
''The tetralogy to me is the tale of a life, a life led an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation,'' Updike would later write. ''He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important.''
Other notable books included ''Couples,'' a sexually explicit tale of suburban mating that sold millions of copies; ''In the Beauty of the Lilies,'' an epic of American faith and fantasy; and ''Too Far to Go, which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban couple with parallels to Updike's own first marriage.
Plagued from an early age by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, he found creative outlets in drawing and writing. Updike was born in Reading, Pa., his mother a department store worker who longed to write, his father a high school teacher remembered with sadness and affection in ''The Centaur,'' a novel published in 1964. The author brooded over his father's low pay and mocking students, but also wrote of a childhood of ''warm and action-packed houses that accommodated the presence of a stranger, my strange ambition to be glamorous.''
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the ''chastely severe, time-honored classics'' he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his ''wooden Harvard chair,'' cigarette in hand.
While studying on full scholarship at Harvard, he headed the staff of the Harvard Lampoon and met the woman who became his first wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington, whom he married in June 1953, a year before he earned his A.B. degree summa cum laude. (Updike divorced Pennington in 1975 and was remarried two years later, to Martha Bernhard).
After graduating, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University. During his stay in England, a literary idol, E.B. White, offered him a position at The New Yorker, where he served briefly as foreign books reviewer. Many of Updike's reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White's stepson, Roger Angell.
By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, ''The Poorhouse Fair,'' soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, ''Rabbit, Run.'' Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike's ''natural talent'' was exposing him ''from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise.''
Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its ''cultural hassle'' and melting pot of ''agents and wisenheimers,'' and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a ''rather out-of-the-way town'' about 30 miles north of Boston.
''The real America seemed to me 'out there,' too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape,'' Updike later wrote.
''There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.''
Ostara - The Only Solace (2009)
“Another neo-folk masterpiece from Richard Leviathan and friends, Ostara’s latest release continues their tradition of provocative lyrics backed by deceptively gentle melodies.” (ReGen Magazine)
“After two excursions into the field of alternative guitar rock, the British-Australian formation around Richard Leviathan has remembered its true strengths and, with ‘The Only Solace’, has produced a breathtakingly beautiful neofolk album which catapults OSTARA right back to the spearhead of the genre.”
Ostara have been able to render historical topics like resistance movements in The Third Reich into acccessible, yet intelligent folk-pop songs’ (Will Stone, Terrorizer Magazine)
Cotton Jones - Paranoid Cocoon (2009)
New link
It was a tough blow to Page France fans last year when bandleader Michael Nau quietly led the band out behind the barn with a shovel and a headstone. Luckily for us though, he’s back with a new project, and he’s brought along longstanding PF key contributor Whitney McGraw for the ride. The “new” band, Cotton Jones, is releasing their first LP, Paranoid Cocoon, early this year, a copy of which I just managed to swindle out of Suicide Squeeze Records. In yet another early addition to the 2009 canon of great music (I am still convinced this is going to be one of the best years for music ever) Paranoid Cocoon sets the bar pretty high for February through December.
For all intents and purposes, Cotton Jones seems like an older and less cheerful Page France. Nau’s nasally bawl has lost some of its childish naïveté, and comes across as a little more mature but sadder for its lost innocence. “Gone the Bells’” melancholy country twang makes it immediately apparent that Nau has “gone through some shit.” The tune feels like it could be the last track played for all those lost souls crying in their beers at bar close. The song’s lyrical refrain of “I was looking for your heart/through the flowers in the park” evokes the kind of images of hopelessness and regret that tend to find their home on the lonely barstool. In “Gotta Cheer Up Now” it sounds like Nau has done just the opposite of cheer up, wailing on the edge of despair over a gloomy keyboard beat. (Incidentally I love sad music so these happen to be two of my favorite tracks.)
Some of the greatest songwriters in history have been miserable ones (Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, etc) and in this respect Michael Nau’s pain is our gain. Though I feel for the guy, I can’t help but admire the anguish he has channeled into his music. “Up A Tree (Went this Heart I Have)” finds him with a Lee Hazelwood-esque baritone that isn’t so much full of dread as it is under dread’s grinding boot heel. Lyrics like “Come the light… through the forest of my blues/someone I know… had a foot inside my shoe” are evidence that the young artist is as opaque and allegorical as ever. Though oftentimes people find Christian allusion in Nau’s words, he denies this intent. If you try hard enough you can still find these themes, but overall it seems that Nau has reined in these impulses in his writing. “Cotton and Velvet” is a fantastic example of a complex and lyrically dense love song, without all the spiritualism that is often attributed to his work.
By the album’s closer “I Am The Changer,” it doesn’t seem like Nau has yet achieved the catharsis of his misery. Though like his earlier work, Nau once again makes himself the main character in his song, his character is still one who is paralyzed with grief, waiting for the train to come and then declining to get onboard once it does. In regard to this album you could say that the train represents happiness, and in this case Nau has steadfastly refused to embrace it.
I honestly hope for the best for Michael Nau’s personal life. Until it gets better though, I hope that he continues to channel it into gorgeously sorrowful music as he has done with Paranoid. Though it may be too early to tell, after a few listens this record has affected me more than any that Page France ever released. CULTUREBULLY
TV on the Radio - "Heroes" (stream)
Link
If TV on the Radio have heroes, it's pretty clear David Bowie is one of them. The Brooklyn band's apparent debt to Bowie's late-1970s work with Brian Eno is well-documented, and Bowie himself sang on my favorite TV on the Radio album to date, 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain. Such reverence is evident in TVOTR's cover of Bowie's legendary "Heroes", which is set to appear on War Child charity compilation Heroes and sticks pretty closely to the original. After a stripped-down opening, heavy drum programming covers the song, while the guitars fade deeper into texture than the rhythmic chug of the 1977 version. Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe's falsetto-prone voices won't make you forget Bowie, but still, this version will help me to forget the Wallflowers' Godzilla-soundtracking attempt. Oh fuck, now I just made myself remember it. PITCHFORK
26.1.09
Andrés Calamaro - Nada se pierde (2009)
La octava, y penúltima, entrega de las grabaciones inéditas con las que celebramos el décimo aniversario de EFE EME, es Nada se pierde, de Andrés Calamaro. Un disco para coleccionistas que recoge materiales diversos e inéditos del rockero más importante en nuestro idioma. Ya sabes, te lo puedes descargar completamente gratis.
Encarando ya la recta final, la octava entrega de la colección de "discos virtuales descargables", con la que EFE EME celebra su décimo aniversario, presenta Nada se pierde, un álbum de Andrés Calamaro que agrupa materiales inéditos procedentes de diversas épocas: directos, ensayos, trabajos en estudio, versiones de temas propios y ajenos. Algo así como un nuevo volumen de las añoradas Grabaciones encontradas. Un lujo contar con Calamaro en esta colección.
Texto: JUAN JOSÉ ORDÁS FERNÁNDEZ.
Quizá debido a su descomunal pulso creativo, no suele repararse sobre la condición de trotamundos de Calamaro. Poco se medita sobre su espíritu de viajero musical, especialmente si tenemos en cuenta que su carrera ha sido una odisea homérica marcada por la aventura musical.
Fraguado en dos grupos clave de la vecina-lejana Argentina como Raíces y los Abuelos de la Nada, el joven Calamaro tuvo tiempo para entregar sus primeras composiciones y crecer al calor de la experiencia con la que los curtidos miembros de dichas formaciones le amamantaron. Es exactamente en ese punto en el que se vislumbran las cualidades compositivas del por entonces teclista y ocasional vocalista. Piezas de perfecto pop como "Mil horas" engrandecerían el cancionero de los Abuelos de la Nada mientras, a la vez, prenden la mecha de un universo personal que dinamitaría años después.
Sus primeras obras en solitario se sucederán como un muestrario del crecimiento artístico y personal del músico. Discos que mejoran en concepto y destreza autoral según se suceden y que acabarán por beneficiarse de la guitarra de Ariel Rot, con el ex Tequila dejando su impronta en los dos mejores trabajos de la primera etapa creativa de Andrés: Por mirarte y Nadie sale vivo de aquí.
La temprana década de los 90 es testigo de la llegada de Andrés Calamaro a España, tentado por las posibilidades que le puede ofrecer el país de sus adorados Gabinete Caligari y Joaquín Sabina. Los Rodríguez será el grupo que el músico formará junto a dos ex Tequila como eran Ariel Rot y Julián Infante a las guitarras y el batería Germán Villela, siendo complementados por el legendario y fallecido Guillermo Martín al bajo, puesto que finalmente recaería en las manos del también excelso y fallecido Daniel Zamora.
La maquinaria Rodríguez calentó motores y arrancó pronto a nivel underground, aunque el éxito masivo se les resistió hasta el punto de que Andrés meditó seriamente la posibilidad de regresar a Argentina y finiquitar su aventura española. Pero los esfuerzos de la banda tuvieron su recompensa y con la edición de Sin documentos se coronaron como el grupo del momento. Al famoso disco y tema título le seguirían muchos más singles de éxito y Palabras más, palabras menos, un trabajo que remataba la faena y ponía punto y final a una discografía sobresaliente, de la que no conviene dejar de lado Buena suerte, su explosivo debut.
Tras la inmolación de Los Rodríguez, Calamaro ya era considerado una gloria nacional, una adopción de oro. Él se dejaba querer y devolvía el cariño a sus seguidores iniciando en 1997 la segunda parte de su trayectoria en solitario con Alta suciedad, una lujosa colección de canciones que elevaban el rock español a nuevas cotas de calidad, ingenio y oficio. Grabado con músicos de renombre como Steve Jordan, Charly Drayton o Marc Ribot entre otros, Alta suciedad presentaba una producción mimada por Joe Blaney y preparada para, esta vez sí, explotar con todas sus consecuencias. El rock en castellano era reinventado por el argentino en su concepto, sonoridad, propuesta e intenciones, llegando a alcanzar el olimpo de la canción popular mediante “Flaca”. Sin fronteras, navegando entre el funky, el pop o el rock and roll, fundiendo géneros al son de una riqueza instrumental exquisita y una voz personal, con estilo y variedad, capaz de clavar la lírica más trabajada que jamás hubieran disfrutado oídos castellanos, sólo a la altura de vacas sagradas como Serrat o Sabina, en un disco que es no sólo uno de los más grandes de la historia del rock en español, sino del rock universal.
Tras un tour en el que se hizo acompañar por una banda de lujo en la que destacaban su compadre argentino Gringui Herrera y el nunca olvidado Guillermo Martín a las guitarras, Candy Caramelo al bajo y el Niño Bruno a la batería, el torrente creativo de Andrés comienza a hervir, a supurar un magma que con el trascurso de los años se tornaría en estallido volcánico.
Honestidad brutal sería el disco doble que vería la luz en 1999, poco después las míticas fechas españolas durante las que telonearía a Bob Dylan. Pese a su longitud, se trató de un trabajo del que no sobra absolutamente nada, una particular y heterogénea mezcla entre Blonde on blonde y Blood on the tracks cuyo leit motiv es el dolor sentimental y donde Calamaro exhibe un trabajo vocal descarnado, áspero, real y sincero. Mientras las letras sangran, el autor ofrece una interpretación profunda. Pese a su formato, Honestidad brutal parece aún más espontáneo que Alta suciedad. Sigue tratándose de una obra de sonido cuidado, cocinado en distintos estudios a cargo de Joe Blaney, pero la variedad se multiplica y el furor creativo comienza a romper. La espontaneidad y crudeza de "El día de la mujer mundial" o "Paloma" encuentran su lugar en la colección, exactamente igual que díscolas canciones como la brasileña "Los aviones", o nuevos juegos con viejos amigos como el reagge de "Veneno" o el funky de "Más duele". La expansión de Andrés como autor musical al margen de géneros avanzaba décadas en un único disco que, más que un disco, es un muestrario certero de emociones: melancolía, euforia, pero siempre la pérdida. La paleta con la que había pintado Alta suciedad se extiende con sabiduría pero con aún más inmediatez si cabe.
Tour y descanso. En 2000, Calamaro inicia un encierro que le alejará de la mirada pública durante un periodo en el que se dedicará en cuerpo y alma al oficio de componer. Dicha estancia monacal en el templo de la canción se vuelca en El salmón, un quintidúple CD que recoge grabaciones registradas en su estudio casero, siendo algunas de ellas retocadas en estudio profesional para su planteamiento comercial. Alejado de la orfebrería musical para centrarse en la materia prima de la canción, El salmón pecaba de un acabado espartano en consonancia con el espíritu libre que permitía que locuras, esbozos y grandes temas convivieran de forma conjunta en una obra cuya mayor virtud y defecto es el mismo: la libertad. Gemas reconocidas como "El salmón" y diamantes por descubrir como "Lorena" forman parte de una colección extensa de grabaciones tan inconexas como conectadas por su propio entorno.
El tira y afloja que siguió a esos años entre Andrés y la industria se saldó con diversas grabaciones regaladas a los fans gracias a la red de redes y con el retorno del músico al negocio mediante El cantante y Tinta roja, dos discos producidos por Javier Limón en los que Calamaro abordaba la canción popular hispana con esmero, regalando en el primero de los dos citados tres temas inéditos. Ambos trabajos conforman una dualidad y merece la pena escucharlos seguidos entendiendo que estamos ante un cantante que se enfrenta a un desafío. Fue en el impás entre ambos discos, concretamente en 2004, cuando Andrés regresó a los escenarios con la Bersuit como banda de acompañamiento y transformado en artista multitudinario, capaz de llenar enormes recintos dejando como testimonio El regreso, un directo espectacular al que pronto se uniría Directo en Buenos Aires, un cuidado DVD en vivo. Asimismo, 2006 vería a Rot y a Calamaro compartir escenario en seleccionadas fechas donde repasaron un repertorio lleno de temas de sus propias carreras solistas y, cómo no, de Los Rodríguez.
El siguiente paso sería polémico, pues su retorno al estudio para registrar composiciones propias vendría a estar tutelado por la leyenda argentina Litto Nebbia. El palacio de las flores no sería el disco de retorno que muchos esperaban (y para el que habría que esperar un poco más), sino un trabajo artesano mano a mano con Nebbia en el que no habría desentonado el nombre del productor como cofirmante. Arreglos delicados y canciones extremadamente inteligentes con el mejor cargamento lírico de Andrés desde Honestidad brutal conformaban una obra de categoría (y hermosa portada) que se alejaba de la inmediatez a favor de lo que había que contar, cómo y porqué. Belleza estética, plástica, vertida en formato sonoro. Paladear El palacio de las flores merece tiempo, degustarlo y perderse en su ornamentada producción y mezcla, ir más allá del efectivo e inmediato single ("Corazón en venta" obró como tal).
El 2007 sería el año del retorno del Calamaro más clásico, del arquitecto del rock, del artesano del pop. Con el apoyo de Cachorro López (ex Abuelos de la Nada) parió La lengua popular, una nueva línea de meta para el argentino, una nueva paleta cromática que remitía lo justo al ayer y miraba de frente a nuevas sonoridades. Donde antes había reggae ahora hay cumbia, el rock arquetípico vuelve a remozarse con guitarras duras, los ritmos golpean más vivos que nunca. La lengua popular tenía gancho, fuerza y honestidad, claro que sí. Tras la edición del “souvenir” audiovisual que retrató el minitour que coprotagonizó junto a Fito y Fitpaldis, Andrés se metió entre pecho y espalda una extensa gira por España y Sudamérica que le llevó a disfrutar –una vez más– de su estatus de artista reconocido, querido, demandado y absolutamente influyente.
NADA SE PIERDE, EL DISCO
Por Juan Puchades.
Si eres de los que, como yo, disfrutó con los dos volúmenes que a mediados de los años 90 Andrés Calamaro publicó bajo el nombre de Grabaciones encontradas, Nada se pierde es tu disco. Sí, porque aquellos añorados CDs que no tuvieron continuación –El salmón fue otra cosa: cubría un mismo periodo compositor-grabador– tenían la gracia, y la magia, de presentarnos a Calamaro en sus diferentes facetas: la del explorador musical, la del compositor, la del investigador un poco enloquecido, la del intérprete de temas ajenos... Eran, tal vez, discos no muy recomendables para oyentes poco predispuestos a dejarse sorprender.
Así que si eres es de estos últimos, lo mejor es que no te molestes en descargarte Nada se pierde, un disco que recoge ese espíritu maravillosamente libre y que incluye desde temas grabados en directo (o en pruebas de sonido) en 2007 y 2008 con geniales lecturas de "Los mareados" y "Jugar con fuego", a instrumentales sin fechar como "Jamming with myself vol. 1 y 2", con Andrés desarrollando su faceta más negra, jazzera y funk. O podemos recordar aquellos directos de 1999, en plena gira junto a Bob Dylan y escudado por Guille Martín y Candy Caramelo, en la interpretación magnética de "I Can´t help falling in love" (¡Sí, Elvis está vivo! Pero, por favor, fíjense en la interpretación vocal: si aquella noche Dylan lo estaba escuchando, igual se le cayeron las pelotas al suelo). O rememorar, de aquel mismo periodo del 98-99, cuando atacaba con frecuencia el "Una noche sin ti" de Burning, aquí en una sentida toma acústica, diferente a las eléctricas que tenemos archivadas en nuestras colecciones de piratas calamarianos.
Como recordando sus raíces en el rock argentino, Nada se pierde también nos permite disfrutar de "Bajan", tema de Luis Alberto Spinetta que Calamaro borda en esta versión cegadora de 1999, registrada al acabar las sesiones que darían lugar a Honestidad brutal; "Pato trabaja en una carnicería", de Moris –la única canción de las aquí incluidas editada anteriormente, en el single en edición limitada (¡450 copias!) "Loco"–; y, por último, "Mejor no hablar", tema de Sumo, el grupo que lideraba el fallecido Luca Prodam.
Andrés, incluso, nos invita a compartir un "Días distintos" grabado en Tablada 25 durante un ensayo, uno de esos momentos en los que los músicos construyen en la intimidad de cuatro paredes las canciones que llevarán al escenario. Por haber, hasta hay acidez sonora, para abrir y cerrar el disco: Primero él solo en Camboya ("Up in the morning"), y al final ("Slave driver", de Marley según la versión de Taj Mahal) con su banda en una prueba de sonido.
Vala la pena adentrarse con calma en Nada se pierde (Calamaro lo guarda todo, podríamos añadir), un regalazo inexcusable para los seguidores de Andrés. Una golosina para disfrutar tranquilamente, para saborearla y ampliar la mirada más íntima sobre un músico que siempre se ha negado a ser, exclusivamente, el cantante dorado que se escucha en la radio y los videoclips.
Damien Rice (La Trastienda, 25 de enero)
Hace unos cinco años había estado escuchando mucho el disco "O", del irlandés Damien Rice. Confieso que esas canciones acústicas, confesionales, emocionales e íntimas, muchas veces me pueden, más allá de que note los truquitos y trampas para atrapar al oyente desprevenido. No sólo la conocida "The Blower's Daughter" --de hecho, cuando se hizo famosa por la película "Closer" terminó por cansarme, algo así como una versión "grown-up" del "You're Beautiful", de James Blunt--, sino temas como "Delicate", "Volcano", "Cold Water" y especialmente "Cannonball". Pasó el tiempo y me olvidé de Rice. Sacó otro disco en 2006 ("9") que me interesó muy poco y sí escuché un poco más su álbum en vivo, "Live From The Union Chapel" (Link).
De hecho, me enteré a último momento que venía y decidí ir a verlo dos días antes, por nostálgico que uno se va poniendo con el tiempo. Y el show fue realmente bueno. Una vez superado el caótico "seating arrengement" que se dispuso en La Trastienda (quisieron configurarlo como un teatro, pero se les complicó), Rice subió al escenario solo con su guitarra y entregó una actuación notable.
El tipo, dijo luego, estaba de vacaciones por América del Sur y decidió pasar por acá y tocar. Le dijeron que enero era pésimo porque no había nadie, pero el lugar estaba lleno por un público algo extraño, al que definiría como una mezcla entre turistas y gente que no suele ir a ver demasiados conciertos de rock. Sabían las letras de memoria, se reían con sus historias en inglés. No sé, tal vez contrataron a un par de escuelas bilingües para llenar la sala...
Lo de las vacaciones viene a cuento porque Rice no trajo nada más que su guitarra. No había otros instrumentos, ni pedales, las luces eran mínimas y cuando se le rompio una cuerda a su guitarra se tomó cinco minutos para cambiarla solo. Pero me da la impresión que eso agregó al clima del show: íntimo, desprovisto de esas cuerdas y efectos que a veces "engolosinan" sus canciones, crudo, efectivo, emocional, gracioso.
Hizo todos esos clásicos que nombré y otras canciones más nuevas. Dos grandes momentos fueron cuando hizo apagar todas las luces para cantar, si no recuerdo mal, "Cold Water" (corríjanme si fueron y me equivoco), la que enganchó con pasajes del "Hallelujah", de Leonard Cohen (sí, es de Cohen, no de Jeff Buckley...) y el otro cuando cantó "Cannonball" con los micrófonos apagados. Si bien la acústica de La Trastienda no es ideal, la potencia de su voz trascendió esas limitaciones.
No me interesó tanto el jueguito de hacer subir gente al escenario a cantar coros ni la "actuación de irlandés borracho" que hizo al final para cantar una canción, cabaret-style. Pero fueron pequeños, para mí, deslices, en una noche que me sorprendió y que me pareció por momentos brillantes.
El tipo no será un gran guitarrista --cuando intentó hacer algo distinto a su rasgueo habitual la pifió feo--, pero toca su instrumento con una pasión y una potencia que terminan invadiendo los sentidos del espectador. Y su voz es su gran elemento: la maneja como quiere, estirando y deformando las frases, acercándose y alejándose del micrófono, pasando del susurro al grito casi desesperado y volviendo enseguida.
Un gran show que pasó así, casi por lo bajo, en una Buenos Aires en la que parece no estar pasando nada...
PD. La foto no es del show de acá... es que era tan íntimo todo que me molestaba ver los flashes de los que sacaban fotos y filmaban todo el tiempo, y preferí abstenerme.
Sleeps In Oysters - We Kept The Memories Locked Away Like The Beetles Of Our Childhood, Or How To Appreciate Someone Who’s Always Around (2008)
Link
Bridging the gap between folk and electronic, without veering anywhere near clichéd folktronica, Sleeps In Oysters are warm as a sunny summer’s day out in the fields and sweet as the smell of dust as its starts to rain.
Sounding like an unlikely cross between Múm, Pram, Efterklang and The Books, Sleeps In Oysters create miniature nursery rhymes made up of all sorts of sonic junk, painstakingly collected and assembled, then polished and cherished into wonderfully layered shimmering little vignettes. Spoken words land on vocal harmonies, glitches crawl beneath deconstructed beats, music boxes fly over ponds of found sounds to form exquisite backdrops to the band’s broken stories of insects, animals and, it appears, humans.
Sleeps In Oysters are Lisa Busby and John Harries, from London. Here, they apply their own vision of a world where anything and everything is possible. Their pop songs are acoustic and electronic in equal parts, but they do not suit any particular categorisation, least of all the folktronica tag that has been generously applied to the band’s work recently. Sharing a common aesthetic with the likes of CocoRosie or The Books, where songs are formed of apparently decaying components, their compositions are heart warming in their disarming simplicity and innocence, and fascinating by their flamboyant intricacy.
It is very easy to loose oneself in the meanders of the pair’s songs, so wide and rich are their soundscapes, and so chaotic are their song progressions. Nothing is straightforward here. Instead, Busby and Harries collect miniature sound forms and snippets of melodies, which they then stitch together to form organic little constructions. Songs like the twin set Moths’ Wings For Lisa/Moths’ Wings For John, which bookend this record, or the wonderful My Heart, A Hive For Bees and The Birds, The Bees, The Bells And Richard Brautigan, are all gracefully intricate and dreamy, with melodies that jump and pop like kids in a toyshop, orchestrations that appear on the brink of disintegrating at any moment, and Busby’s vocals in turn neat and clearly defined or twisted and child-like. The Tiny Lives Of Flies and No Time Like The Spiders Pt. 2 appear more straightforward at first, the latter would even pass for a proper pop song, but scratch the surface a little and the sweet lunacy that inhabit the rest of the songs becomes obvious once again.
We Kept The Memories… is a wonderfully poetic and delicate record, made by people who have a rare flair for the unusual. They do not seek it though, but process it naturally, which means that, far from sounding contrived or forced, the music of Sleeps In Oyster flows freely and sounds totally effortless.
The CD version, limited to 250, numbered copies, comes packaged in a handmade fabric sleeves, the disc itself, and the accompanying set of postcards, are wrapped in individual paper sleeves and are tied with string and sealed. Getting to the CD takes a little while, but the reward is well worth it! THEMILKFACTORY
Las nominaciones al César
The nominations in the main categories:
Best Film
The Class - Laurent Cantet
I’ve Loved You So Long - Philippe Claudel
Public Enemy Number One - Jean-François Richet (FOTO)
Paris - Cédric Klapisch
The First Day of the Rest of Your Life - Rémi Bezançon
Séraphine - Martin Provost
A Christmas Tale - Arnaud Desplechin
Best Actor
Vincent Cassel - Public Enemy Number One
François-Xavier Demaison - Coluche, l'histoire d'un mec
Guillaume Depardieu - Versailles
Albert Dupontel - Love Me No More
Jacques Gamblin - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Best Actress
Catherine Frot - Le crime est notre affaire
Yolande Moreau - Séraphine
Kristin Scott Thomas - I’ve Loved You So Long
Tilda Swinton - Julia
Sylvie Testud - Sagan
Best Director
Rémi Bezançon - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Laurent Cantet - The Class
Arnaud Desplechin - A Christmas Tale
Martin Provost - Séraphine
Jean-François Richet - Public Enemy Number One
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Benjamin Biolay - Stella
Claude Rich - With a Little Help From Myself
Jean-Paul Roussillon - A Christmas Tale
Pierre Vaneck - Love Me No More
Roschdy Zem - The Girl from Monaco
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Jeanne Balibar - Sagan
Anne Consigny - A Christmas Tale
Edith Scob - Summer Hours
Karin Viard - Paris
Elsa Zylberstein - I’ve Loved You So Long
Best Debut Film
Home - Ursula Meier
I’ve Loved You So Long - Philippe Claudel
Anything for Her - Fred Cavaye
Versailles - Pierre Schoeller
Best Documentary Film
Her Name Is Sabine - Sandrine Bonnaire
Hollywood, I’m Sleeping Over Tonight - Antoine de Maximy
The Beaches of Agnès - Agnès Varda
Tabarly - Pierre Marcel
Country Profiles: Modern Life - Raymond Depardon
Best Foreign Film
Eldorado - Bouli Lanners
Gomorrah - Matteo Garrone
Into the Wild - Sean Penn
Lorna’s Silence - Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
There Will be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson
Two Lovers - James Gray
Waltz With Bashir - Ari Folman
Best Male Newcomer
Ralph Amoussou - With a Little Help From Myself
Laurent Capelluto - A Christmas Tale
Marc-André Grondin - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet - La belle personne
Pio Marmai - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Best Female Newcomer
Marilou Berry - Vilaine
(“Nasty”) Louise Bourgoin - The Girl from Monaco
Anaïs Demoustier - Grown Ups
Déborah François - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Léa Seydoux - La belle personne
Best Original Screenplay
Marc Abdelnour & Martin Provost - Séraphine
Rémi Bezançon - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Dany Boon, Franck Magnier & Alexandre Charlot - Welcome to the Sticks
Philippe Claudel - I‘ve Loved You So Long
Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu - A Christmas Tale
Best Adapted Screenplay
Eric Assous, François d'Epenoux & Jean Becker - Love Me No More
Clémence de Biéville, François Caviglioli & Nathalie Lafaurie - Le crime est notre affaire
Laurent Cantet, François Begaudeau & Robin Campillo - The Class
Abdel Raouf Dafri & Jean-François Richet - Public Enemy Number One
Christophe Honoré & Gilles Taurand - La belle personne
Best Original Score
Jean-Louis Aubert - I’ve Loved You So Long
Marco Beltrami & Marcus Trumpp - Public Enemy Number One
Michael Galasso - Séraphine
Sinclair - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Reinhardt Wagner - Paris 36
Best Production Design
Thierry François - Séraphine
Emile Ghigo - Public Enemy Number One
Yvan Niclass - Home
Jean Rabasse - Paris 36
Olivier Raoux - The Children of Timpelbach
Best Cinematography
Laurent Brunet - Séraphine
Robert Gantz - Public Enemy Number One
Eric Gautier - A Christmas Tale
Agnès Godard - Home
Tom Stern - Paris 36
Best Editing
Laurence Briaud - A Christmas Tale
Robin Campillo & Stéphanie Léger - The Class
Sophie Reine - The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
Francine Sandberg - Paris
Hervé Schneid & Bill Pankow - Public Enemy Number One
Best Costume Design
Madeline Fontaine - Séraphine
Pierre-Jean Larroque - Female Agents
Virgine Montel - Public Enemy Number One
Nathalie du Roscoät - Sagan
Carine Sarfati - Paris 36
Best Sound
Jean-Pierre Laforce, Nicolas Cantin & Sylvain Malbrant - A Christmas Tale
Olivier Mauvezin, Agnès Ravez & Jean-Pierre Laforce - The Class
Jean Minondo, Gérard Hardy, Alexandre Widmer, Loïc Prian, François Groult & Hervé Buirette - Public Enemy Number One
Daniel Sobrino, Roman Dymny & Vincent Goujon - Paris 36
Philippe Vandendriessche, Emmanuel Croset & Ingrid Ralet - Séraphine
Best Short Film
Les miettes - Pierre Pinaud
Les paradis perdus - Hélier Cisterne
Skhizein - Jérémy Clapin
Taxi Wala - Lola Frederich
Une leçon particulière - Raphaël Chevènement
Entrega de Premios FIPRESCI 2008 + Avant Premiere de "La sangre brota"
El lunes 2 de febrero, a las 20, en la Sala Leopoldo Lugones del Teatro San Martín, se entregan los Premios FIPRESCI a las mejores películas argentinas e internacionales y preestrenamos "La sangre brota", de Pablo Fendrik. Todos los lectores del blog interesados en concurrir, pueden mandarme sus nombres (no seudónimos, ni anónimos, ni aliases esta vez, ya que hay que ponerlos en una lista!). Lo envían en un comentario --yo lo publico, o no, como prefieran, o les confirmo por email si me lo mandan-- y los anoto para dos personas. Hay un límite de entradas, así que apuren. Cuando se corta, se corta...
Entrega de Premios FIPRESCI y pre-estreno de:
En el marco de la entrega de los Premios FIPRESCI a las mejores películas estrenadas durante la temporada 2008, se proyectará, en carácter de estreno nacional, La sangre brota, del reconocido director Pablo Fendrik.
La entrega de premios se realizará el lunes 2 de febrero a las 20 hs en la Sala Leopoldo Lugones del Teatro General San Martín. Luego de la misma se dará paso a la proyección de la película.
(Av. Corrientes 1530, 10º Piso, Cap. Fed.)
Se ruega puntualidad.
(Una vez colmada la capacidad de la sala, de 220 butacas, no se admitirán más espectadores)
Las películas nominadas, por orden alfabético, son:
MEJOR PELICULA ARGENTINA
Historias extraordinarias, de Mariano Llinás
La mujer sin cabeza, de Lucrecia Martel
Leonera, de Pablo Trapero
Liverpool, de Lisandro Alonso
Los Paranoicos, de Gabriel Medina
MEJOR PELÍCULA EXTRANJERA
Batman: el caballero de la noche, de Christopher Nolan (Estados Unidos)
I’m not there, de Todd Haynes (Estados Unidos)
Naturaleza muerta, de Jia Zhang-ke (China)
Shara, de Naomi Kawase (Japón)
WALL-E, de Andrew Stanton (Estados Unidos)
FIPRESCI Argentina está integrada por:
Greg Copeland - Diana And James (2009)
Link
A mere 26 years have passed since Geffen Records released the Jackson Browne-produced debut album by Greg Copeland, Revenge Will Come, including Copeland's best-known composition, "El Salvador," a song that took on the administration of President Ronald Reagan and its Vietnam-like policy of support for the right-wing regime in that Central American country. (The song was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary.) The rest of Revenge Will Come was a rocking singer/songwriter effort, with Danny Kortchmar's guitar leading driving songs like "Full Cleveland." Unfortunately, the album, which sounded at the time like an auspicious beginning to Copeland's career, did not sell. Copeland returns, again under Browne's aegis, with Diana and James. (Browne is the executive producer this time, and the disc is being released by his Inside Recordings label.) The rock style is gone, replaced by country-folk arrangements and a sound that will be practically unrecognizable to the lucky few who bought Revenge Will Come. "The Only Wicked Thing," for example, has a Western swing feel, while "I Am the One" sounds like old-timey country. "Typical" boasts a pedal steel guitar that makes it sound like traditional country, and "Palace of Love" is a Mexican-flavored ballad sung as a duet with violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The tunes, all written by Copeland, constitute a song cycle about the necessity of love as a bulwark against life's vagaries, told in imagery that mixes rural references and Los Angeles scenes. Copeland sings them in a wheezy croak that lends gravitas to the sentiments. He remains a thoughtful writer, even as he remains in the shadow of his mentor, Browne. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Complete list of winners at 15th annual SAG Awards
Cambia, todo cambia. Salvo "Slumdog Millionaire"... Fuck!
Movies:
_Cast: "Slumdog Millionaire."
_Actor in a leading role: Sean Penn, "Milk."
_Actress in a leading role: Meryl Streep, "Doubt."
_Supporting actor: Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight."
_Supporting actress: Kate Winslet, "The Reader."
_Stunt ensemble: "The Dark Knight."
Television:
_Drama series cast: "Mad Men."
_Actor in a drama series: Hugh Laurie, "House."
_Actress in a drama series: Sally Field, "Brothers & Sisters."
_Comedy series cast: "30 Rock."
_Actor in a comedy series: Alec Baldwin, "30 Rock."
_Actress in a comedy series: Tina Fey, "30 Rock."
_Actor in a movie or miniseries: Paul Giamatti, "John Adams."
_Actress in a movie or miniseries: Laura Linney, "John Adams."
_Stunt ensemble: "Heroes."
Life Achievement: James Earl Jones.
25.1.09
The evolution of the urban bushwhacker (Los Angeles Times)
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Animal Collective, Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes celebrate the primitive and the past, but they sure do sound like the future.
By Ann Powers Pop Music Critic
One way to stay sane in the big gray city is to seek out the wilderness pulling at its seams. In Los Angeles, it's easy. The chaparral pokes through everywhere, throwing tumbleweeds into car lanes; coyotes cross into our gardens at night. The shift in attention can seem harder in older, denser spots like New York, but even there, undomesticated life has a way of wriggling forth -- hermit crabs and jellyfish have recently surfaced in the toxic silt of the Gowanus Canal. ¶ Pop music in the age of the universal download is a lot like a megalopolis: sprawling, chaotic, seemingly without borders. Innovative but mercenary power-players peddle corporate pop in its financial centers. Elites -- blockbuster rock stars, divas, record producers of note -- clink their glasses together in gated communities. Scrappy newcomers and forgotten elders squat in the tenements, hoping for a break. ¶ And then there are the urban bushwhackers: creative people determined to carve some space out of the concrete where something might grow and they might be able to wander a bit.
Since the 1960s, these folks have often been called "hippies," though that term is too specific, and carries too much historical weight. Younger practitioners, including California Summer of Love revivalists such as Devendra Banhart, Jonathan Wilson and the Entrance Band; Oregonian country fuzz rockers Blitzen Trapper; and Atlanta post-punks Deerhunter modify countercultural visions to suit a more pragmatic age.
Think of urban bushwhackers as those sea creatures in the chemical mud, with both the inner city and the outback in their DNA. They're different from the back-to-the-land pastoralists who decamp to yurts in New Mexico. What urban bushwhackers share across the generations, whether they've ridden in Ken Kesey's bus or danced at Burning Man, is an understanding that new technologies can be useful in pursuit of an idyllic vibe.
That's why they don't think it's weird to accessorize a thrift-store dress with an electroluminescent wire necklace. And it's why the musicians among them are leading a trend that feels like the future, even as, on the surface, it celebrates the primitive and the past.
Welcome to the cult
Animal Collective, Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes are three leading urban bushwhackers. They're among the most cultishly followed indie acts -- the prolific Animal Collective's eighth studio album, "Merriweather Post Pavilion," is earning wide praise as a front-runner for best recording of 2009, while Seattle's Fleet Foxes and Wisconsin's Bon Iver topped 2008 critics' lists with their debut releases.
These three bands differ somewhat in sound, lifestyle and approaches to music-making. But their popularity can be attributed to the same thing: the ever-renewable urge within the middle class to step away from the timetables of life and find a different source of meaning. Going off-trail is an apt metaphor for what earlier generations thought of as shedding the gray flannel suits. Moguls don't wear suits now, but they'd never enter a space where their cellphone reception might be endangered. Urban bushwhackers try to imagine that space, even though they often use laptops and sequencers to do so.
Animal Collective's career has been characterized by forays into the brush. Since evolving from a bunch of childhood friends into a band around a decade ago, the group became strongly identified with the East Coast avant-rock scene and the more scattered "psych folk" trend. Its sound is hard to describe, let alone classify; it pulls from post-techno dance music, world rhythms, harmony groups and playful 1960s folk-rockers like the Holy Modal Rounders.
The band's sound is as intentionally bewildering (and goofy) as its members' silly stage names (Avey Tare and Panda Bear, for example), and its fanboy followers have turned the game of this music into an obsession. Fans hail AC shows as near-religious experiences and pore over their recordings as if they were I Ching oracle tosses.
The AC catalog may overflow with tangential forays that will interest only true believers. But such undirected play is what bushwhacking is all about.
Like the Grateful Dead, AC fetishizes process over catchiness. This band likes to stretch time and get lost. Its huggy psychedelia doesn't stimulate nostalgia for the hippie era as much as for the early days of raves and Ecstasy, when the drugs made you want to cuddle and the beats per minute were transcendently intense.
There was something deeply insular about rave culture -- it was a very white, middle-class, college kid thing. AC suffers from this limitation too. Focusing on one another, these four former prep-school buddies mostly have rejected the pop path of imagining a world that's open to all.
“Merriweather Post Pavilion” goes beyond this closed universe by turning Animal Collective's experiments into gelatinous but still graspable song forms. Choruses, hooks and harmonies that undeniably smack of the Beach Boys make it feasible for songs like "My Girls" and "Brother Sport" to get played on the radio. AC's members, all around 30 now, are learning how to focus. Finally, they've made an album in which even nonbelievers can lose themselves.
Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver have no trouble attracting new followers. Their music is as ordered and pretty as AC's is unhinged, though it's also polarizing and intense. Both hail from regions where country and city meet and meld. Seattle, home to Fleet Foxes, is well known as a place where outdoorsiness and nerdy cosmopolitanism collide. Eau Claire, Wis., where Justin Vernon began Bon Iver as a solo project (he's now formed a band), is a small town, but it's also home to several colleges.
If Animal Collective's musicians are bushwhackers who bury their tracks, Fleet Foxes, a quintet led by 22-year-old Robin Pecknold, are the kind who carefully carve trail markers. The band is still riding the ripples caused by its self-titled summertime debut -- the influential webzine Pitchfork recently named it the album of the year and the band played Jan. 17 on "Saturday Night Live."
Like their fellow Seattleites who've perfected latte art, Pecknold and his friends are artisans. "There's no digital effects on the record, there's no synths," Pecknold told an interviewer on the jambase.com website last July. "All of our amps and guitars are old. We didn't really care how it ended up sounding, production-wise. We just wanted it to sound good, but not too tricky. Not too much we couldn't pull off live. Less than half the record was recorded to tape at studios, but most of it was done at my house with Pro Tools, like, not really caring what it sounded like at all."
The hitch is the mention of Pro Tools. The band's focus on harmonies that are reproducible in concert evoke the second golden age of white-guy harmonizing -- not the doo-wop era but the end of the counterculture, when longhairs like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made singalongs into anthems. Yet, as recorded by producer Phil Ek using up-to-date studio tools, the Fleet Foxes' sound doesn't merely mimic the period it so strongly recalls.
As realized through Pecknold's serious, deliberately archaic songs, it takes on timelessness as a subject. Reimagining the folk-pop of the late 1960s, a subculture that used contemporary pop tricks to conjure dreamed-up versions of earlier styles like Appalachian folk balladry and medieval madrigals, Fleet Foxes ends up in a space between or beyond epochs -- a very cyber-age thing to do.
Soulful sound of isolation
Justin Vernon, when he became Bon Iver, went out to the woods, Henry David Thoreau-style, to clear his head. Like Pecknold, though, he was able to take Pro Tools with him. "For Emma, Forever Ago" is a collection of tracks he made in his parents' hunting cabin outside Eau Claire in the dead of winter. The romance of his isolation has helped him attract listeners, but it's what he did with the little bit of technology he could haul with him that makes his music so startlingly rich.
Bon Iver's new EP, "Blood Bank," expands on the layered vocals and ambient sonic pathways Vernon laid down on "For Emma," and proves that Vernon isn't just a novelty artist. Now working with a small band, he widens his path in several directions. The title track is a sexy little story of a coupling that comes after a donation to the Red Cross; it's fairly conventional. But on two other tracks, the piano-driven "Babys" and the Auto-Tuned "The Woods," Vernon shows that for someone committed to the semirural life (he's an avid hunter) he's blessedly uninterested in isolating himself.
A dense keyboard cacophony forms a base in "Babys," Vernon's slightly horror-stricken song about the urge to procreate. It sounds as much like a foray into classical minimalism as a pop song. And "The Woods," the EP's high point, seems almost like an answer to Kanye West's exploration of Auto-Tune, “808s and Heartbreak” -- a welcome antidote to the geeky white-boy supremacy of indie rock.
Built around a four-line poem about trying to mellow out, and a melody that sounds more like contemporary R&B than folk-rock, "The Woods" grows more and more intense as Vernon adds layers of his Auto-Tuned voice. "I'm building a still to slow down the time," he croons, using the resolutely rural image of a whiskey shack; but the sound is slyly urban, the sensual roar of a self-styled soul man. Making explicit the connection between country and soul, Vernon makes a claim for the title of most forward-looking urban bushwhacker yet.
Erik Davis, the writer whose work might best capture the complexities of the urban bushwhacker world, recently wrote a column for Arthur magazine in which he played with the idea of embracing the economic slowdown.
"Slow time could be seen as elastic time," he wrote. "Once you slow down enough, you can see all the things that need help and care, and you have more time to attend to them, and more time to creatively respond to difficulties and constraints. If the slowdown is not too catastrophic, it will carve out more room in time and space for individuals and communities to take responsibility for their lives and localities and for some of the myriad grass-roots solutions that already exist to take root."
This might be the real calling of the bushwhackers: to respond to the impending scarcity that's come hand in hand with cultural acceleration by taking up their tools and making a new path. There's an aspect of escapism to what they're doing. But pushing through the underbrush, they've found a way to breathe.
ann.powers@latimes.com
Diego Lerman ganó uno de los Premios Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers
Los Angeles, CA (Park City, UT) – Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) today announced the winners of the 2009 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards. The four winners were selected from 12 finalists by members of an international jury which included: Ira Sachs, Yesim Ustaoglu, Katherine Dieckmann, Fernando Eimbcke, Sebastian Cordero, and Ronan Bennett; and a Japanese Jury that included Masato Harada, Bong-Ou Lee, and Hiroyuki Takazawa.
These annual awards were created in 1996 by Sundance Institute in partnership with NHK to celebrate 100 years of cinema and to honor and support emerging independent filmmakers. Each year the Award supports winners from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) in realizing their next projects. The four winners are presented with the award at the annual Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony on Saturday, January 24.
The winning director from each region will receive a $10,000 award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights upon completion of their project. NHK is Japan’s largest broadcaster with five 24-hour TV and three radio channels. In addition, the Sundance Institute staff will work closely with the award recipients throughout the year, providing ongoing support and assistance in seeking out opportunities to finance and distribute their projects.
The winning filmmakers and projects are: Diego Lerman, CIENCIAS MORALES (MORAL SCIENCES) from Argentina; David Riker, THE GIRL from the United States; Qurata Kenji, SPEED GIRL from Japan; and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, EVOLUTION from France.
“We are thrilled by the quality of this year's winning filmmakers, all of whom embody what the award is about. In an extremely competitive year, these projects are exceptionally original and challenging," said Alesia Weston, Associate Director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, International.
“The Sundance/ NHK award is part of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program's year-round commitment to support singular voices in world cinema,” added Michelle Satter, Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. "We expect that the vision and innovative storytelling of this year’s four winners will resonate far beyond their countries of origin."
Past recipients of the Sundance/NHK Filmmakers award include: Alex Rivera, THE SLEEP DEALER (USA); Miranda July, ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (USA); Andrucha Waddington, THE HOUSE OF SAND (Brazil); Lucrecia Martel, LA CIENAGA (Argentina); Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, WHISKY (Uruguay); Walter Salles, CENTRAL STATION (Brazil); György Pálfi, TAXIDERMIA (Hungary); Fernando Eimbcke with LAKE TAHOE (Mexico); The 2008 recipients were: Alejandro Fernandez Almendras, HUACHO (Chile); Braden King, HERE (USA); Aiko Nagatsu, APOPTOSIS (Japan); and Radu Jude, THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (Romania). Recent winners Kanji Nakajima with CLONE RETURNS THE HOMELAND (Japan) and Cruz Angeles with DON’T LET ME DROWN (USA) will premiere in competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
The Winners of the 2009 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award are:
Diego Lerman/CIENCIAS MORALES (MORAL SCIENCES) (Argentina) – During the last years of the military dictatorship, a sexually repressed school monitor in Buenos Aires indulges in a strange compulsion, allowing her dark desires to compromise her role at the school.
Born in Buenos Aires, Lerman’s first feature film, TAN DE REPENTE (SUDDENLY) won more than 30 international prizes, including the Silver Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival, The Jury Special and the Public Awards at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival and Best Film and Best Actress in La Habana International Film Festival. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and was selected for New Directors New Films and Karlovy Vary. His short films include LA PRUEBA (1999) and LA GUERRA DE LOS GIMNASIOS (THE WAR OF THE GYMS) selected for both the Locarno Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His documentary SERVICIOS PRESTADOS premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2008.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic/EVOLUTION (France) – A group of young boys who are isolated from the world act as guinea pigs in a series of bizarre medical procedures intended to trigger a reverse evolutionary step. EVOLUTION depicts the attempts of one young, unruly test subject as he seeks to escape experimentation and recall his clouded past.
Hadzihalilovic studied cinema at La Fémis, the French state film school. In 1990, she founded the production company, Les Cinémas de la Zone with Gaspar Noé, through which she produced the films CARNE and I STAND ALONE, as well as her own short films. In 1996, she produced and directed the short film MIMI, which was shown at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, Cannes and Toronto. Her first feature INNOCENCE (2004) won numerous awards, including Best First Film at San Sebastian Film Festival, and Best Film and Best Photography at Stockholm Film Festival.
David Riker/THE GIRL (USA) – A young, single mother from South Texas is thrown into an unexpected and life-changing journey when her attempt to smuggle immigrants across the border ends disastrously, leaving her stranded with a young girl from southern Mexico.
Riker is a New York-based filmmaker currently living in Mexico. His debut feature, THE CITY (LA CIUDAD) won awards at the Havana, San Sebastian, and Human Rights Watch International Film Festivals. Riker received the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival as co-writer of the feature film SLEEP DEALER. He attended the 2007 Screenwriters Lab with THE GIRL and is a recipient of the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Annenberg Fellowships.
Qurata Kenji/SPEED GIRL (Japan) – Nijiko, a gifted speed skater, runs through the world at full speed, leaving her friend Mitsuo in her wake. When Nijiko mysteriously disappears, Mitsuo learns what it means to look out for someone in love and prayer.
Qurata Kenji started making films in 1992 and established the production company EGT in 1993. Qurata produced commercials, developed projects for late night TV, and was involved in the development and production of various feature films, including SEISHUN DOROBO (YOUTH ROBBER), MYSTERY OFAKANE-CHO, YUREI SHOJYO GAKSHOU DAN (THE GHOST CHOIR GIRLS). He went on to direct promotional and concert videos, as well as establishing Coyote, a cooperative for the development of films.
NHK
NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) is Japan’s largest broadcaster. Since 1925, it has continued to offer fair, impartial reporting and high quality programs, earning the viewers’ trust as the nation’s sole public broadcaster. Through its five 24-hour TV channels (two terrestrial/three satellite) and three radio channels, NHK provides programs of all genres from news and education to sports and entertainment, and serves as the hub of Japanese visual culture. NHK’S arts and entertainment satellite channel, which
was introduced in 1989, broadcasts more than 600 high quality international films each year. In order to contribute to the development of film culture and the promotion of cultural exchange, NHK is devoted to
supporting burgeoning filmmakers who have the potential to guide the industry’s future development. Along with the “Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award,” NHK also produces the “Asian Film Festival” which offers opportunities to emerging film directors in Asia.
Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award
The Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award was first established in 1996 by Sundance Institute in partnership with NHK to celebrate 100 years of cinema and to honor and support emerging independent filmmakers whose originality, talent, and vision we believe will contribute significantly to the future of world cinema.
Since 1981, the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program (FFP) has supported more than 450 independent filmmakers whose distinctive, singular work has engaged audiences worldwide. Program staff fully embrace the unique vision of each filmmaker, encouraging a rigorous creative process with a focus on original and deeply personal storytelling. Each year, up to 25 emerging filmmakers from the U.S. and around the world participate in a year-round continuum of support which can include the Screenwriters and Directors Labs, Composers Lab, Independent Producers Conference, ongoing creative and strategic advice, significant production and post-production resources, a rough-cut screening initiative, a Screenplay Reading Series, and direct financial support through project-specific grants and artist fellowships. In many cases, the Institute has helped the Program’s fellows attach producers and talent, secure financing, and assemble other significant resources to move their projects toward production and presentation. In 2008 the FFP launched the Creative Producing Initiative, a yearlong Fellowship program for emerging independent producers, which will include a Creative Producing Lab, industry mentorship, and financial support.
The 2009 Sundance Film Festival Sponsors help sustain not only the Festival but also the year-round
programs of the non-profit Sundance Institute. Their support is crucial to the Institute's mission of nurturing independent artists, inspiring risk-taking, and encouraging diversity in the arts. This year's Festival Sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors - Entertainment Weekly, HP and Honda; Leadership Sponsors - American Express, Delta Air Lines, DIRECTV, Google, Microsoft Corporation and; Sustaining Sponsors - Blockbuster Inc., the National Milk Mustache "got milk?"® Campaign, Le Tourment Vert Absinthe Francaise, L’Oréal Paris, The New York Times, Ray-Ban, Sony Electronics, Inc., Stella Artois®, Timberland, and Utah Film Commission. Sundance Channel is the Official Television Network of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
The Sundance Film Festival is the premier showcase for U.S. and international independent film, held each January in and around Park City, Utah. Presenting 120 dramatic and documentary feature-length films in seven distinct categories, and 80 short films each year, the Sundance Film Festival has introduced American audiences to some of the most ground-breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Trouble the Water and Central Station. www.sundance.org/festival
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a not-for-profit organization that fosters the
development of original storytelling in film and theatre, and presents the annual Sundance Film Festival.
Internationally recognized for its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Angels in America, Spring Awakening, Boys Don't Cry and Born into Brothels. www.sundance.org
The Von Bondies - Love, Hate And Then There's You (2009)
Link
In the five-plus years since the recording of their second album, Pawn Shoppe Heart, the Von Bondies have replaced two key members, lost their deal with Warner Bros., and seen frontman Jason Stollsteimer beaten to a pulp publicly by scene rival Jack White. By all rights, they should be packing it in, so their third album's vitality is a welcome shock. Over punchy, driving riffs and crackling drum work, Stollsteimer howls like a guy with much to be pissed about, while the sharp production and dark pop hooks offer a vision of garage rock that's more grand than grimy. SPIN
"The Reader": crítico vs. guionista
En "The Guardian", el crítico Peter Bradshaw destrozó la película de Stephen Daldry "The Reader", cuyo guión fue escrito por el reconocido autor David Hare. El propio Hare le respondió brutalmente a Bradshaw. Y ahora es Bradshaw el que recoge el guante y sigue la discusión, que me parece interesante. En la nota de Bradsaw hay links tanto a su crítica como a otras críticas, y también a la respuesta de Hare. En inglés, claro...
By Peter Bradhsaw
Some weeks ago, I wrote about Stephen Daldry's movie The Reader, the story of Michael, a teenage boy in 1950s Germany, who has an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, who likes him to read aloud to her. He discovers in later adulthood that this woman had kept from him a terrible secret. She was a camp guard at Auschwitz.
In my review, I absented myself from the broad critical consensus that this film was a good thing. Despite the supremely high calibre of its contributors - and with Kate Winslet as star, Stephen Daldry as director and David Hare as writer, this surely is a triple-A-team we're talking about - I felt it was a glib, facile film in which the Holocaust is questionably invoked to lend depth to a tale of titillation and sentimentality.
This view was contested in our letters page by Professor Julian Dodd of the University of Manchester and in today's paper you can read the transcript of an onstage discussion with David Hare himself, the film's screenwriter who adapted the original novel by Bernhard Schlink, hosted by my colleague Michael Billington. In this, Hare gives my review a withering response, which I confess, on first reading, put me in mind of the maxim of the author, comedian and Palestinian activist Jeremy Hardy: sarcasm is the highest form of wit - I don't think.
As far as The Reader goes, I am certainly in a minority, but not a minority of one. Here you can read Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.
Admirers of the film raise what they see as the film's central issue. In Germany, ordinary people with ordinary lives, people who did not have devil-horns and a tail - ordinary, decent people like you and me, in fact - were effectively complicit under various levels of coercion in various levels of evil. I agree with what I take to be David Hare's point that this is a profoundly important question in European history; it is, in part, the question that Hanna flings at her judge: "What would you have done?"
But The Reader does not seriously engage with the question. In invoking the Holocaust, it bites off much more than it has any intention of chewing. Hanna's sympathetic ordinariness is lavishly established, but what exactly she is supposed to have done at Auschwitz and how exactly she feels about it later is cloudy. In fact, the issue becomes hardly more than a tragi-historical style accessory to a sexy and sad love story - allegedly made more poignant by Hanna's illiteracy - and whose ultimate importance turns out to be Michael's own personal journey of emotional healing in middle age.
Hanna, tremendously played by Winslet, is apparently guilty of monstrous acts, and the discovery of this guilt initally appears to supercharge the film with drama and importance. But we never get to see what exactly these monstrous acts were; she never shows any clear sign of understanding or repentance, and her silence on the subject of anti-Semitism is not challenged or even noticed. She is ashamed of her illiteracy - but not, it appears, particularly ashamed of having been a Nazi camp-guard. Even her final devastating act doesn't make her feelings entirely clear.
Now, Hanna's behaviour may have been entirely typical of those guilty of lower-level war-crimes. Like Hanna in the movie's trial-scene, they might have maintained a manner of bafflement and pain and defensiveness. Hanna was, after all, obeying orders. People like Hanna might well gone into a kind of denial, a willed amnesia - but there is no reason for a cinema audience to share that condition, however gallantly they sympathise with her illiteracy or need for love. I am here incidentally sticking to the idea that Hanna Schmitz is a fictional creation, entire of herself, despite reports that in Bernhard Schlink's original novel she may have been based on the real-life Buchenwald guard Ilse Koch. Reading about Koch is certainly a bracing lesson in historical reality after watching The Reader.
Of course, I wouldn't want Kate Winslet to play the part like a snarling Nazi, goosestepping back and forth across her apartment like Freddie Starr. The subtlety and clarity of her technique is a marvel. It always is. And this role, along with her performance in Revolutionary Road, lands a mighty double-whammy. But I couldn't sit still for the way her character's guilt-free vulnerability was romanticised and permitted to loom larger on screen than her (sketchily conceived) involvement in Auschwitz.
Professor Dodd, in his interesting and measured letter, says that the film's point "lies in demonstrating that vulnerability can play a part in leading one - anyone, perhaps - to commit acts of barely comprehensible wickedness." Perhaps so. But if by "vulnerability" we mean Hanna's illiteracy, well, it does not appear to be that which led her to acts of wickedness. It is rather that her continuing shame at this illiteracy leads her to confess, in court, to a specific wickedness of which she is in fact innocent. So as well as being beautiful and possessed of a pathetic yearning for literature, she has been wrongly convicted.
Brooding on The Reader after seeing it, I found myself thinking of CP Taylor's 1981 play Good, now filmed with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs. That is a play about how ordinary, decent people could allow themselves to be gathered up into Nazism, how they could find themselves donating their own reputations and modest achievements to shore up the Nazi power structure. That was a play which wanted to investigate the question of how ordinary people become evil - but unlike The Reader, Taylor's play ultimately wants to look evil in the face. He shows how people's ordinariness does not exempt them from seeing the truth about themselves: that it is the vanity and weakness and smugness that is present in all people - from the highest to the lowest, from the nicest to the nastiest - that makes them eligible for fascism. That is their "vulnerability".
And as it happens, I also can't help remembering David Hare's plays Plenty and Licking Hitler, whose power and subtlety far exceeded the contrived mawkishness of The Reader - plays which show how the past (specifically the past experience of World War Two) lives powerfully and vividly and relevantly in the present.
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