Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Beeswax/ Mumblecore

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Watched — in pieces, on my laptop via Netflix, starting with a misbegotten attempt to watch on the Airtran flight — Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax.  This is my favorite of the probably three movies of his I’ve seen.  He’s the standardbearer for the so-called Mumblecore movement.  I read an interview where he genially complained about the label, which he aptly compared to “shoegazer” (these were British bands influenced by American indie and My Bloody Valentine like Ride, Lush, Chapterhouse, Pale Saints, Slowdive) as an unwanted tag:

I certainly have no love for the label. I think it’s a real problem with trying to get people out to this film. It’s just a nasty term, like “shoegazer.” It’s the kind of thing where some of that music might be horrible, and some of it might be great, but if you just see the word “shoegazer,” it doesn’t exactly make you want to listen to it. It’s just an absurd concept. I’d like to think it won’t be with me for the rest of my days, but we’ll see.

Bad luck for Bujalski to get saddled with such a stupid but catchy label.  (It comes out of a now-diminished meme of spinning out increasingly absurd subgenres of hardcore punk, e.g. homocore, metalcore, grindcore.)

The other mumblecore films I’ve seen were appealing in their slice-of-life realism, focus on the trivial everyday, and naturalism — shades of Mike Leigh, Eric Rohmer — but are were a bit irritating too in their somewhat too-comfortable match with 20-something slacker Brooklyn/Somerville lifestyle… a bit too unambitious and navel-gazing… Beeswax is a more interesting movie and actually does remind me of Rohmer, it could in fact be a Moral Tale like that series of his, with the “moral” or ethical topic in question that of, perhaps, getting involved with others’ business, as in “mind/none of your your beeswax.”  (With a suggestion of the stickiness of other peoples’ business?– is that the etymology?*)  Part of what makes it more appealing is a fuller sense of grown-up lives and real things at stake; the twin sister protagonists seem to be about 30 and the plot, such as it, revolves around the Austin thrift/vintage store one of them owns and a fight she’s having with her business partner, who may be planning to sue her for breach of contract.  There’s still an interest in dating/sex/romance but it forms more of a backdrop to career/vocational problems and concerns; jobs are not just the places people go to worry about their love life.  Thus the title, I suppose: beeswax = business = what matters to you or concerns you personally; for Tilly, literally her business or store.

One striking thing about the movie is its representation of disability.  The twin who owns the store, played by Tilly Hatcher, is in a wheelchair and can’t use her legs.  What’s so unusual is that this never really comes up as a explicit topic or issue.  There’s a scene where she’s kind of stuck and has to flag down a pedestrian to help her get her wheelchair out of the trunk of her car; I briefly thought, as if this were a thriller, “oh gee, is this guy going to attack her?” — it effectively raised the topic of the everyday problems, risks, and vulnerabilities Tilly has to face, but in a very casual way.

A sex scene was even more surprising — it’s not at all explicit, but does show what needs to happen for a sexual encounter and the adjustments that need to be made to the usual routine with two non-disabled people.  I was almost wincing, I guess out of anxiety that the guy would react in a bad or shaming way (although he’s actually her ex, so knows what to expect); she’s also, although not unattractive, very far from a typical ingenue in a sex scene, with powerful arms and shoulders from wheeling herself around.

It made me miss Austin a bit.  Tilly’s store is an actual Austin boutique I remember, Storyville.  The movie is saturated with that bright Texas light.

*”none of your beeswax”: Eric Partridge apparently reports that

It seems that none of your beeswax, meaning none of your business, was originally a line spoken by the character Nanette in the musical No, No, Nanette (Youmans, Harbuch and Mandel, 1925). This catchphrase enjoyed a brief vogue in the later 1920’s. It is cited as children’s slang in a couple of later references mentioned by Partridge. There are no suprises as to its origin; beeswax is simply an obvious pun on the word business.

NYRB Classics remainders at Harvard Book Store

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Other than the four pairs of pants at Banana Republic for $105, my main Xmas shopping in Cambridge involved remaindered NYRB Classics editions in the basement of the Harvard Book Store.  They must have 30 or so titles down there, mostly for $5.99, some a dollar more.  I love these editions and find them very seductive: the packaging’s great, cool introductions by interesting authors, and you feel that you can take a chance and are likely to find something good.

These are the ones I got (on three different trips, I kept adding more):

  • The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant (two copies, one a gift)
  • The Diary of a Rapist by Evan S. Connell
  • The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (a gift for my aunt)
  • The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
  • Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon
  • The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon
  • The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
  • The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese
  • Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

So far of these I’ve read Rogue Male, a 1939 British thriller somewhat along the lines of The 39 Steps, made into a 1941 Fritz Lang film called Man Hunt.  It’s pretty great, kind of a cross between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.  The narrator is a British man of honor & means who, for somewhat mysterious reasons, has gone off on his own on a quixotic attempt to assassinate a foreign dictator (presumably Hitler).  He’s captured, beaten and left for dead but somehow manages to escape.  Back in England, the operatives of the foreign state cannot afford to allow him to live.  The ensuing manhunt culminates in our hero hiding like a badger in a secret little den he’s constructed in the woods in Dorset.  A minor slip-up puts one of the operatives on his tail and he ends up seemingly trapped in his den.  Interesting things going on with animals and animality; he hunts the dictator like a big-game hunter, and then in turn he is like an animal in his lair, he reverts to his animal instincts, of course; his only friend is a feral cat; and, in a bizarre turn of the plot I won’t fully give away, he uses the body of an animal as a weapon in a ingenious way.

At some level I feel this novel has a family resemblance with something like the Wind in the Willows in its romanticizing of a wild rural England and the snugness of a little hideaway where one can hide away from prying eyes…

Holiday reading: “the Leopard;” Soup or Macaroni?

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I finally got around to reading this, my copy of which (not this edition!) I think I picked up at the last-day MLA book exhibit firesale a year or two ago.

The Leopard‘s author Giueseppe di Lampedusa died in 1957 at age 60 having failed to find a publisher for this, his first and only novel, based on the experiences of his great-grandfather, a Sicilian aristocrat going through the Italian unification (Risorgimento) of a century earlier.

I found it really amazing.  A very beautiful and sensual novel, amazing at the sentence level, developing a tension-filled sense of a way of life about to collapse.  Also very ironically funny.  And fascinating as a historical novel and an experiment in evoking a vanished way of life.

This was one of my favorite passages.  The Prince is serving a feast to some of his family and neighbors who are initially concerned that he might begin the meal with soup:

The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself.  But rumors of the barbaric foreign usage of serving insipid liquid as first course had reached the major citizens of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this.  So when they lackeys in green, gold, and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering mound of macaroni, only for the twenty at table avoided showing their pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica from affectation, and Concetta from lack of appetite.  All the others, including Tancredi, showed their relief in various ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo.  But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations.

Good manners apart, though, the appearance of these monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked.  The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

…Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry and greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbor Angelica, but he realized at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reservation about reviving this fantasy with the pudding.

Brilliant!  Maybe I especially enjoyed this passage in this holiday season of gorging ourselves on feasts — none unfortunately of this kind of macaroni.

The soup vs. macaroni dilemma is a nice minor example of the kind of tension that suffuses the novel more broadly in its superb evocation of a culture in crisis and about to undergo a profound transformation, with much more at stake than the contents of the first course primo.  This is interesting: “After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it” (wiki): the novel was a memorial, then, of a way of life and its material embodiment the palace, constructed after its destruction.  This illuminates maybe the novel’s most amazing scene, when Tancredi and Angelica wander through the palace, besotted with mostly-suppressed desire, exploring lost corners and passageways of the palace and uncovering, among other things, a hidden repository of remnants of the “obscure pleasures,” “bizarre extravagances,” “sleeping embryos” of a pre-nineteenth-century erotic life that has been put away into storage: little whips and other accoutrements of an 18th-century predecessor’s secret boudoir. “Tancredi was afraid, also of himself; he realized he had arrived at the secret nucleus, the center from which all the carnal agitation with the palace radiated outward.”  Di Lampedusa wrote this novel after his family’s palace had been bombed and its layers of history, containing these secret histories of desire, had been revealed and destroyed, so the novel becomes an obsessively-detailed memorial to this inheritance.

I have not seen the Visconti adaptation of the novel since high school or something and don’t really remember it.  (I probably saw it at the Brattle Theater.)  But The Leopard is probably a strong contender for the question, which literary masterpiece’s adaptation is itself a stand-alone masterpiece?

By the way, the recent movie I Am Love would be another possible cinematic accompaniment to The Leopard –something to watch after a great Italian meal.

Princess Mononoke, Touchez Pas au Grisbi

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Two movies this weekend…

With the kids, Miyazaki’s The Princess Mononoke, which I’d always remembered as his best.  We’d held off for several years on showing it to the girls, making do with My Neighbor Totoro, Koko’s Delivery Service, Ponyo in the theater last year, and, more recently, Spirited Away, the latter of which is closer in spirit to Mononoke.  I actually think Mononoke was after all pretty heavy for young 7-year-olds… it’s an intense movie with a lot of violence, horror, sorrow and rage.  James Cameron ripped it off so heavily for Avatar, Miyazaki should get a tiny cut of the profits (enough to fund several of his movies, probably).  And actually, in practice I felt about it somewhat as I did about Avatar, that the long final Lord of the Rings-esque battle for the soul of nature becomes somewhat enervating, a bit too much.  The first 3/4, though, is sheer brilliance, an amazing, mind-bending, moving merging of Disney animation, Japanese manga, Tolkein, Japanese myth, in the service of pondering modernity’s costs and the possibilities of living in a non-exploitative relationship to nature.  In this world gods and demons are real, often impossible to tell apart, and must be fought, killed, prayed to, thanked and blessed, sometimes in succession.

C&I’s favorite part were the little ghostly forest creatures, I forget what they’re called, the evanescent white specters whose faces spin around like dials or children’s toy rattles.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi.  (a.k.a. something like “Don’t Touch the Loot.”)  This 1954 French noir, a come-back for the at-the-time washed-up Jean Gabin, & one of the early movies of the lovely Jeanne Moreau (she’s the brunette above).  This is really great… obviously heavily influenced by American gangster movies, but v. French with wonderful cinematography capturing shadowy early 1950’s Paris.  Gabin plays an aging gangster Max who has made what he hopes is the final big score — 20 pounds of gold from the Orly airport, we never learn much more about the heist — which will now allow him to retire.  My favorite scene is the one where Max brings his somewhat hapless buddy Riton, whom he calls Porcupine Head, to his secret apartment to hide out for a night (some goons are after him).  Max lays out the bedding, fluffs the pillow, gives Riton a pair of neatly folded p.j.s, but only after sitting down for some white wine and biscuits with pate.  It’s so charmingly French… they take the meal very seriously.  (There’s a lot of talk about food; Max explains at one point that if he and Riton stick around for their girlfriends’ burlesque show, they’ll have to stay up past midnight, and then take the girls out for onion soup and then sex — he’s way too sleepy for any of this.)  When Max brings out the p.j.s, I half-expected him to toss Riton a teddy bear too: it’s a very cozy little hideout. The bond between Max and Riton goes far deeper than any erotic link between the gangsters and the flighty molls; the dames are always enjoining them to stay up too late and run around town for onion soup, when they’d much rather be making a snack alone together in their p.j.s…

Best bit from the DVD extras: the guy who plays one of the young gangster associates of Max and Riton explains that he was filming Grisbi outside Paris at night and some other movie during the daytime, I forget where, but he had to take a flight back and forth.  The director pointed out to him that there was no way he could keep up this schedule for 10 days, but he responded that he was already in the scene, what else could they do?  So they added in a scene where inexplicably, Max stops the car and pushes him out to the side of the road, whereupon he kicks the dirt angrily.  The actor points out that there was absolutely no point to or explanation for this, it was just an expedient to get him out of the scene so he could get some sleep.

Waka Waka– Shakira’s and Zangaléwa’s

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I’ve listened to Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” at least 30-40 times in the past week.

Celie and Iris play it over and over and my response to it has passed through various phases.

My reaction:

  • Listens 1-5:  This song is sort of dreck.
  • 6-10: But very catchy.
  • 11-15: Now I’m really getting sick of it.
  • 16-20: Oh god, please no, not this again.
  • 21-25: [eyeing sharp instruments to gouge out my ears]
  • 26-30  Weirdly coming out the other side and starting to kind of enjoy it again.
  • 31-40  The song feels natural, inevitable, beyond judgment, part of the environment

They are doing some kind of school dance to the song tomorrow morning, so this may end soon.

The backstory to the song is kind of fascinating.  It’s basically a cover/rip-off of this absolutely great, beautiful Cameroonian song:

Wikipedia explains that

Tsamina or Zangaléwa is a 1986 hit song, originally sung by a makossa group from Cameroon called Golden Sounds who were beloved throughout the continent for the dances and costumes. The song was such a hit for Golden Sounds that they eventually changed their name to Zangaléwa, too. The song pays tribute to African skirmishers (a.k.a tirailleurs) during WW II. Most of the band members were in the Cameroonian Army themselves[1] and used make up, fake bellies, and fake butts for comic relief.  The song was used extensively in the frontlines by the Nigerian Army during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). It was also popular in some Nigeria schools as a marching song in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The Nigerian Army Band, The Mercuries, based in Kaduna also did cover this song in the 1970’s on live Television appearances.  The song is still used today almost everywhere in Africa by soldiers, policemen, boy scouts, sportsmen, and their supporters, usually during training or for rallying[1]. It is also widely used in schools throughout the continent especially in Cameroon as a marching song and almost everyone in the country knows the chorus of the song by heart.

What gets fascinating is that the song is apparently — or is sometimes turned into — an anti-militaristic anthem:

The men in the group often dressed in military uniforms, wearing pith helmets and stuffing their clothes with pillows to appear like they had swollen butts from riding the train and fat stomachs from eating too much. The song, music historians say, is a criticism of black military officers who were in league with whites to oppress their own people. The rest is Cameroonian slang and jargon from the soldiers during the war.

According to Jean Paul Zé Bella, the lead singer of Golden Sounds, the chorus came from Cameroonian “sharpshooters who had created a slang for better communication between them during the Second World War”. They copied this fast pace in the first arrangements of the song. They sang the song together for freedom in Africa.

So… it kind of makes sense, a little bit, as an African World Cup anthem — with the literal opening lines, “you’re a soldier, choosing your battles,” turned into a metaphor for football.   To re-deploy it in this way, though, sung by a blonde from Columbia, scrubs it all of its cultural specificity, history, and pointed political significance.

The comments thread on Youtube is interesting; I’ll cite a few:

beautiful. so much better then shakira’s version. shakira is someone i can’t really relate to africa.. but this.. this is perfect.

This song isn’t about ‘singing good’. It’s a chant, a protest song, a empowering tune, a cheer for your cause. You want to hear this from ‘the people’, and not from a individual artist. Shakira’s song is nice, but in a stadium, you just want to scream it.

shakira didn’t do anything wrong – it’s actually even admirable. It’s just that we hate her ignorant fans – but lets get it straight – it’s not her fault who listens to her.

I dislike how Shakira lied, and said that she made up this song. However, I do think that she’s gotten the ORIGINAL song a lot of good recognition. People who actually give a crap about Africa and their culture will definitely pass by here.

Celie and Iris have stayed out of the controversy.  They just listen to Shakira’s version 24/7 and work on their dance.

Now, if only I can convince the girls to dress up for the performance “in military uniforms, wearing pith helmets and stuffing their clothes with pillows to appear like they had swollen butts from riding the train and fat stomachs from eating too much.”   If I do, I’ll be sure to get a photo…

Cranston Stop Signs

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This article cracked me up.  It is so Rhode Island/Providence (Cranston adjoins Providence).  It turns out that of the 2500 stop signs in Cranston, about a quarter of them are unauthorized.  Rogue stop signs.  People just put them up, I guess.

No one is sure who put them up or how to rectify the problem… Mr. Livingston said it was likely that some residents put them up without permission; Mr. Cipriano said former mayors might have circumvented the City Council and directed that the signs be put up as a way to curry favor with constituents…. The city is now trying to figure out what to do with people who recently received a ticket, Mr. Cipriano said. Some believe that a judge could vacate the citation if it was issued within the last year.

Some people in New England think Providence is just a charming little city with two good universities and excellent restaurants, but it’s a deeply corrupt place.  (Yes, I’m annexing Cranston into a Greater Providence).  When I lived in Providence, in an apartment on Wickenden Street, my landlady had this awful, creepy handyman who I was never thrilled had a key to my place.  One day his photo turned up on the cover of the ProJo — turned out he was a city cop who had been receiving bribes in some ornate kickback scheme involving something about police escorts for parades (?) if I recall correctly.

It’s just a somewhat lawless, do-it-yourself kind of town.  I can completely envision local mayors and city councilmen paying off constituents owed favors with stop signs for their street.  There’s probably at least one garage that specializes in manufacturing forged signs.

The funny thing is that I now wonder if a rogue Rhode Island stop sign may have played a role in the only significant car accident in which I’ve ever been involved.  I was driving my old rust orange Tercel shitbox, R.I.P., with our friend Mike, coming back from the liquor store where we’d gone for some beer, I think.  This may have been 1996 or so.  All of a sudden we slammed into what turned out to be a very expensive Jaguar.  The Jaguar got one scratch; my Tercel’s right axel snapped in two.  I pointed out to the cop (not my handyman) that the stop sign I’d run was nailed to a tree and, because of all the snow in the road, was yards away from the street and hard to see.  I think he bought it, because I never seemed to get any insurance penalty for the accident.

Now I’m convinced that this was a totally unauthorized sign some Providence old lady with connections had gotten her son to nail up on the tree.  Vindicated!  I now consider myself to have a perfect driving record going back 15 years.

Montreal: Bagels, Otto Dix

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So, I am not going to write about my entire trip to Montreal now, just two details.

  • Montreal Bagels.  I learned about the Montreal Bagel phenomenon a month or two ago when I read a review of a new “Montreal-style” bagel place in NYC.  Hmm, cannot seem to find that review now but here is a 2009 article about Montreal vs NYC bagels.  We were at a gathering in the Mile End neighborhood and our host Jesse said we could get some at midnight nearby.  I think he recommended Fairmount but we accidentally ended up at St. Viateur instead (I believe they’re within a block or so of one another).  We got a dozen, all four of us had one fresh from the brick oven, and then John and I had the rest for snacking in our hotel room.  I have to say, in some ways it feels that the Montreal bagel is simply a bad, imitation bagel: not boiled but baked, and a bit sweet, it has some qualities in common with a generic mass-produced bagel from Einstein Brothers or the like.  And yet, I did really like the St. Viateur bagel.  It’s thinner, sesame (for some reason sesame is the standard; St. Viateur said they order some absurdly large amount of sesame seeds per day, I forget the amount), and straight from the oven it was really delicious; not very sweet but with a hint of pastry taste.
  • Otto Dix show at the museum.  This blew me away, especially the Der Kreig [War] series of prints he made in response to his experience in the trenches in WWI, modeled after Goya’s “Disasters of War” series.  These are devastating and just amazing.  A body in pieces found in the ground; soldiers in various scenes with prostitutes; wounded soldiers with faces distorted and ravaged; soldiers advancing in gas masks looking like frightening ghosts; a soldier in the trenches eating a meal, oblivious to the skeleton next to him.

The show has the complete set (I think?) on display and it was amazing to walk through the entire sequence.  The sections of his work on prostitutes and “sex murders” were also gripping and quite disturbing.  Especially creepy was one painting of Dix himself walking in a predatory manner after a prostitute.

After 1933 he moved to a house on a lake and of necessity began focusing on landscapes and other less confrontational or challenging kinds of work.  I found those paintings sad, because not very interesting to me; they felt entirely compromised, although maybe there are other ways to think about them.

Family Movie Night: “The Thief of Bagdad”

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1940 British Arabian Nights fantasy film produced by Michael Korda, directed by Michael Powell and others.

Conrad Veidt is the evil (and scary) Gran Vizier Jaffar; Teenage Indian actor “Sabu” as the lovable thief Abu.  It reminded me of The Wizard of Oz in certain ways (the music, the cheesy yet magical special effects, the all-out fantasy unconstrained by naturalism).  When Abu goes to capture the All-Seeing-Eye jewel from the head of the statue in the temple on the highest mountain in the world, it feels very much like Dorothy and the gang’s infiltration of the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West — and in fact the guards seemed like they could have been re-using the Flying Monkey uniforms.

Scariest moment (for me): when the Sultan is embraced by the very erotic multi-armed blue statue belonging to the Grand Vizier, which proceeds to pull out a dagger and stab him in the back of the neck.

Race, ethnicity and accents are all quite confusing.  The princess, originally supposed to be Vivian Leigh but played by the English June Duprez, has a father (the Sultan) who’s almost Dickensian.  Why are they British?  This seems pretty typical of movies of this era, though.

When Abu is flying, holding onto the ponytail of the Djinn of the lamp, Iris remarked that you could see the string holding them up.  This didn’t seem to bother her at all.  The Sultan flying above the city on the magic horse was really kind of… magical.  You can feel the excitement of these early special-effects experimenters figuring out how to do these tricks for the first time.  The flying horse, the scary murderous statue, the All-Seeing-Eye, the flying carpet — all seem linked to movie-making as arts and gadgets of spectacle and illusion.  The foolish Sultan prides himself on possessing the world’s greatest collection of toys, and he trades his daughter away for the flying horse — he seems like a Hollywood mogul.

Looking at some online reviews, I think it was a mistake for us to see it as a Netflix on-demand movie; everyone raves about the spectacular beauty of the technicolor, and I don’t think this came through fully.  I’ll see it again on DVD at some point.

The Flatlanders in Bloomington

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We saw the Flatlanders last night: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely.

The show was scheduled to begin at 7:30 and there did not seem to be an opener, so we got there at 7:45, figuring we’d still need to sit around for a while.  Apparently they’d been on for 15 minutes already.  The show proper was over by 8:50 or so, first and final encore concluded by 9ish.  Wow, that was one early show!!  I guess that’s what you get with 65-year-old (ish) musicians.  Hey, I was happy to get to bed by 10 on a school night myself…

I interviewed Jimmie Dale Gilmore for an article in 1991 when More a Legend than a Band was released.  If I understand correctly, these were sessions from the 1972 album that was never released: Wikipedia tells me that “the planned album, All American Music, was all but scrapped, being released only in a small run on 8 track tape in order to fulfill contractual obligations.”  Jimmie Dale was totally charming and fun to chat with at the time.  He looked kind of wan and greenish on stage, I hope life on the road is not wearing him down too much.   He did always have this ethereal-mystic vibe, only buttressed by the long grey ponytail these days.

I also just learned from Wikipedia that Joe Ely sings backup vocals on the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” — I had no idea!

I’m a bit unclear about is the respective histories and drawing power of the three solo artists. My impression is that both Ely and Hancock had bigger names in the 70s and 80s but that Jimmie Dale experienced more of a revival in the 1990s.  Is this true?  I am going to forward this to George in hopes of getting a clarification: check the comments.

Anyway, we enjoyed the show.  It was pretty Nashville, slicker and less “alt-country” than you might have thought.  Gilmore’s “Dallas” for example, which is spooky and otherworldly in the 1972 recording, was more of a lively, upbeat bluesy stomp.  They have this extra lead guitar player who cracked me up.  He looks a bit like Jon Lovitz and kind of lurked behind the three, and then occasionally when he got a solo he’d sort of creep to the forestage with an insinuating kind of movement — “here I come again!” — and a lot of shoulder shrugging.  It kept making me giggle.

An enthusiastic, but modest-sized crowd (very few below age 50 or so, and more than a few over 80, I’d guess).  I wonder if “the Flatlanders” may have lesser name recognition than the three solo artists at this point…

More on “Meet Me in St Louis”

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Pulling together some of the things I gleaned from the DVD extras:

  • The movie was adapted from a series of New Yorker sketches by a writer named Sally Benson (who wrote Shadow of a Doubt for Hitchcock!) about her youth in St. Louis.  A lot was invented and added (including the drama of the potential move to New York, I think), but all of the children’s names are taken directly from her story and life; she was “Tootie.”
  • Already mentioned in a comment: in the original version, the lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” went like this, “…It may be your last…”  Like a Christmas horror movie!!  Judy Garland told the songwriter that people would think she was a child abuser if she sang that to Tootie, so he revised the lyrics.
  • The songwriter also commented that they had directions from Minnelli to write a song for the trolley scene “about a trolley.” They kept hinting to him, “does it have to be a song about a trolley?  Can’t it just be sung on a trolley?”  But he insisted.
  • The movie was a groundbreaking musical in the way all of the music is integrated diegetically, as part of the narrative itself (characters singing at a party or the like); I don’t think there are any songs that interrupt and stand apart from the narrative world of the story.
  • Margaret O’Brien explains that Garland seemed to feel a special bond with her as a child actor/star; Garland said something like “she has no life of her own, and I know what that’s like.”  (Garland was I think 21 at this point — she married director Vincent Minnelli a year later).  But O’Brien commented that this wasn’t really true; by this time, child labor laws had become routinely enforced in Hollywood; she always had a teacher present on set, rules were  enforced for the number of hours she could perform a day, and so on.  She said this was completely different from Garland’s experience as a child, kept up all night with uppers to perform.  Really sad.
  • Big debate over what it took to get Tootie to cry hysterically for that killing-the-snow-family scene.  Minnelli says that on O’Brien’s mother’s advice, he told her that her dog had been kidnapped and shot.   In her interview, O’Brien flatly denies this on the grounds that it would have been too sadistic, but my sense was that she might have misremembered and misunderstood, because Minnelli was clearly suggesting that O’Brien understood it at the time as a fiction and an acting exercise: he said she asked “was there a lot of blood?” (which sounds very Tootie) and then when she was ready, went out there and bawled.  She claims however that she had an ongoing competition with another actress (I forget who), and all her mother had to do was say “boy, so-and-so was really crying up a storm” and she’d rise to the occasion.  O’Brien also said that the hardest part of the Holloween scene was to act scared, because everything was so much fun, the mean old man was really nice, the supposedly fierce attack dog was a sweetheart, etc.  I would like to know more about her life… I hope she was not miserable as a washed-up child star.  [I could check this out although it sounds more like a factual resource/compendium than a narrative biography.]