Glass Shallot by Adam Baer | Adambaer.com

Never Byrne-d Out

In the course of interviewing David Byrne for this short piece about his design work and music in May's Departures Culturewatch section, I realized that Shallot friend Hillman Curtis had done a really cool commercial (embedded above) for Byrne's joint album with Brian Eno "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." For people who aren't in the know (which could have been me if I had not done this piece, sadly), the album has been freely streamable on the Web for some time. For those who like to hold amazing design in your hands and play with dice, you can still buy a Sagmeister-designed Deluxe (CD) Package that includes an original Hillman Curtis film about the album as well as a full book and other goodies (watch a video that explains the contents here). 

Byrne told me the following about why the duo decided to offer the album in these different forms. "We had both been thinking about the changes the music business has been going through," he said. "There are now many more ways that musicians can get their messages across than before, though the industry typically lags behind. We decided to try some of those out for ourselves by initially selling the record exclusively through our website and allowing people to stream the whole album if they simply wanted to hear what it was like.  It just seemed obvious. I wanted to sing these songs more, so I asked my booking agents to book some tours -- so that kind of gave the project an endpoint -- and the only way to get the music out to people before the tour started was to make it available online.  That said, there are many among us who still love a physical object. A well-designed package can enhance the experience. It used to be that an eye-catching package helped sell a record: it would shout at you like a box of laundry detergent. But I don't think CD package design is meant to do that anymore. Now it's more about adding another layer to the experience. I'd worked with Stefan (Sagmeister) many times before, so he was a natural choice."

Other questions broached in my interview included prompts about the joy of performing.  "At my age and situation, I don't need to tour simply for financial reasons (though I do make money touring)," Byrne said. "Though I would love to believe otherwise, I don't think touring sells many records either. I do it for two reasons: it's immensely pleasurable these days and because I can (immodestly, I can say that I do know how to perform and put on a show). The show we've created -- the band, crew, singers, dancers, choreographers, etc. -- is like nothing I've ever done before, so though half of the show consists of older material, it's been placed in a new context. At some point, performing changed from being a thing that I psychologically had to do into something that was actually pleasurable. Some edge in my demeanor might have been lost with those changes, but songs from that period remain, so the edginess can be dredged back up."

Byrne, as the article points out, also writes the music to the HBO show Big Love (coming back soon), which actually opens with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys's "God Only Knows," so I was curious as to how he might add music to such a thoroughly branded motion picture experience.  "It's an interesting show and doing a score like this allows one to exercise some musical muscles one doesn't always use," Byrne said. "It's good to stretch oneself sometimes, to get out of a comfort zone, which forces some kind of creative response. Initially I thought I'd try to base much of the music on Mormon hymns -- not use them but write in that style. Having seen the 1st season, I sensed that many of the characters felt that their behavior and decisions were based on deep spiritual beliefs -- as wacky and unusual as some of it might seem to us. I therefore imagined that hymn-type chord progressions and melodies would hint at this spiritual underpinning without saying it out loud. The hope was also that this music would also help one empathize with the characters, even, or maybe especially, with some of the more extreme ones. Music can hint at their motivations and justifications, where their hearts are despite what we see them doing. Well, in the end, that approach only worked a few times: it tended to draw attention to itself and to draw you out of the intimate scale of the drama. That music tended to pull you back to a God's eye view of things -- yes, music can do that. So, in the end I had to use other muscles and write some other material that was subtler, more character driven."

Intriguing, especially for film music buffs (of which there are few, apparently). More au courant, perhaps, was Byrne's answer to my question about how he and Eno both influence(d) each other.  He answered: "The process of using the recording studio as a writing tool was something a few of us learned from Brian. Not that he was the only one to do it, but they way he encouraged us in Talking Heads (and myself) to start from zero and create new tracks was something we were ready for...it was the right idea, the right nudge, at the right moment. It wasn't that strange, really, as it basically was taking the writing process, which usually goes on in one's head, hidden, invisible, or little my little with a guitar in hand and some notepaper in front, and it made it all -- the creative process -- explicit, visible, and most important for potential collaborators, available for others to enter into. How did Talking Heads and myself influence Brian? I think we encouraged him to be a little more funky, more groove oriented."

dfw

"There's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20's that it just doesn't change anything. And that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don't really have a brass ring. And I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what one chases. There are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can be, the redemptive quality of art, and you know, kindness to animals. All the cliches that we can invoke. But ...the people who most interest me now are the people who are old and who have sort of been through a midlife criss. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones. But I'm also not getting ready to jump off a building or anything."

David Foster Wallace, 3/27/97

yvette siegert: benching books from times square with zeal

Yvette Siegert, the young and exceedingly talented Columbia instructor, poet, and New Yorker editorial staff member, has finally been given a public forum in the form of, yes, a blog. New Yorker blogs may be obvious references, but what you should know about Siegert, the author of The Book Bench, is that she's not only a voracious and reliable book-scene correspondent; she's eminently qualified to tell us the backstories behind the books while remaining highly literate in the world literature field and so damn likable that you would never go wrong following her advice about what to read. Way to go, New Yorker! You've got a blogger who will literally change the way the magazine reaches the online book world and the readers to whom it caters. See The Book Bench as soon as possible, and watch for much, much more from Shallot friend Siegert.

this country is funny!, or why the kennedy center honors is crap

Last night, for the thousandth time in Oprah knows how many years, the Kennedy Center Honors award show--in which a lame cultural center with Presidential branding puts living celebrities in royal wax to be lovingly caressed forever--aired on national television. I'd love to see the ratings, given how the strike's certainly hurting TV. This year CBS won the gig. And who can blame them for going after it? It's easier than picking off with a .22 Starbucks-deprived writers in organized lines to buy their family's one meal of the day outside a Studio City taco stand. Or something.

The Kennedy Center clearly seems like the Smithsonian of the performing arts to too many people. But in typical Shallotosian fashion, I'm here to dispel that myth. Not only does the Kennedy Center present merely decent--and some great--concerts and shows in an ever-inventive cultural world (i.e. the National Symphony is no LA Phil, and I'd sooner hit up any house in NYC for something truly worthy than jet down to Foggy Bottom for some stuffy Washington run of whatever). The KC presents this work with a semantic tie to the government. Whether it's because it receives so much national funding or simply because of its name and location, many Americans consider the Kennedy Center the definitive word on what's what in the performing arts (and they've probably never been there.). Hey, George Bush is in the audience! (And it's not a tractor-pull.)

This year, to be fair, the teary eyed tributes went to some well-deserved culture-makers. Scorcese--say what you will about how he can't end a movie: the guy pretty much exemplifies the American dream, and he can do just about anything with a scene. (Although, it's always much better when DeNiro, Keitel, and some of his other super-talented friends get to liven up his frame. Let's just say, for the record, that Matt Damon and Marky Mark don't really substitute into that equation too well despite all The Departed's "acclaim," such as it was at the moment of the film's release.) But at least Scorcese is a scholar of his trade and something of an original. And at least Bob DeNiro made every audience member swoon with his small gestures of man-love, sending deep appreciation through the air with wireless precision in every micromove of his hard-won Downtown NYC mouth-wrinkles.

The question with this segment of the show is why the cognitively delayed Cameron Diaz opened the Marty-love session and continued to narrate his life-montage. Cameron Diaz? For one role in Gangs of New York? If you're trying to make a statement about how the younger generation cares for Marty, get Leo. Get him! Go! I know he's probably holed up with some coked-out model halfway across the world shooting someone else's movie about organized crime in a green world--but Something About Mary's JT-loving Goofball doesn't deserve the gig just because she looks OK in a party dress. But again: The Kennedy Center knows very little about which it speaks, and they probably just thought: This is TV! Let's get us a Big Star! You know, A Blonde Charlie's Angel! That she really had nothing to do with Scorcese's career clearly wasn't an issue.

What? No Keitel? Pesci? Bob Dylan? No Spielberg, Jack, or Daniel Day Lewis? (Assuming they would even come if asked--and sure, they probably were.) Coppola was fine, but he recently told a major magazine something sorta not so nice about Marty. Awkward. Plus, he really didn't seem like he wanted to be there. A private island, winery, or plate of bucatini was calling. But then you remember: Francis finally has a new "independent" movie coming out. Better make nice with the Amirricans. There's no way in hell that he really thinks Goodfellas is better than the Godfather.

Then, in proper Kennedy Center fashion, a lot of time went to a comedian. Granted, the comedian--Steve Martin--deserved an entire two-hour show devoted to his oeuvre. But the KC always loves it some comedy and then short-ends the director or composer on the bill. In this case, the KC programmer-on-crack really disappointed with Steve Carell and his try-too-hard facetiae winning the chance to intro Martin. I'm sorry: He was funny in the 40 Yr Old Virgin, but this Office crap--to say nothing of his "I"m a comically awkward leading man in rom-coms who looks like the male version of Ellen Degeneres" thing--hardly qualifies him to speak about arguably the most original humorist of the past 35 years. But let's face it: Who wants to fly out from LA to DC for a night? Marty Short made a brief appearance in a terrible tribute to Martin's trash-SoCal vaudevillian history--but he should have been the one speaking. Or how about Carl Reiner--director of The Jerk? Where was Victoria Tennant? Goldie Hawn? Billy Crystal? Danny Ackroyd? Where was David Remnick from the New Yorker reading from Martin's new memoir? Instead, the KC just put on a "so bad it's highbrow" interpretative dance with long-legged Rockette-types to symbolize Martin's achievements. I dug the Scrugs banjo bit. But there should have been someone up there with some conceptual-humorist weight on that stage. Someone with some literary acumen. Again, KC, why can't you do this right? You're on network TV now!

But the evening didn't improve with its tribute to pianist Leon Fleisher. A classical kid raised by two New York concert pianists, I always felt like I knew Fleisher. Like he was the powerful alpha force in my family who had taught my Dad how to play Brahms, roar, and eat steak, and I had just yet to meet him. But then I did meet him. In Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, where my parents had fallen in love and I spent some time as a teenage violinist. It was a dark and stormy night. For reals: My friends and I were running home from a concert in a deluge, and Fleisher picked us up in his ratty Subaru for a ride back to the dorms. I felt like I was in a Werner Herzog movie.

Later, at Peabody, as a violinist, some of my best pianist friends studied with the Godfather of the ivories. He was omnipresent if usually invisible on the campus and a best friend of my violin teacher, the estimable if lecherous Berl Senofsky. I attended music theory classes hearing the pounding tenths of his students in the background and returned to my room across the plaza to listen to his recordings of the Brahms D minor. But he never felt to me like he was a part of the real Peabody--the majority of the students were mediocre for conservatory level musicians, and the orchestra never rivaled that of Juilliard or even the Manhattan School, to say nothing of the Curtis Institute, where Fleisher also taught--with, it must be said, performer-pedagogues at a level of achievement that matched his better. Mostly, Peabody was full of so-so brass players, violinists without the star-virtuosity to win major jobs or solo gigs, and lots of really undereducated opera singers along with the occasional star pianist and freak harpist.

That said, the KC decided to honor Fleisher--via a slick Yo-Yo Ma delivered speech--with a (quite condensed) short film about his early success, the loss of his right-hand dexterity (to focal dystonia), his comeback, his Peabody teaching career (one line), and then a performance of perhaps Beethoven's worst work--the Chorale Fantasy--as played by perhaps Fleisher's least emotional student Jonathan Biss (a guy who never attended Peabody). In front of the still-remedial Peabody Orchestra!  C'mon. Let it be said here: Peabody is really close to D.C. in a lot of ways. This was political. And convenient. And Biss: Ok, he hits the notes, but when I think of Fleisher I think of masculine power. Brahmsian world-shaking power. There were other pianists for this job. I'm thinking they were just booked. But why mention Peabody and then show Biss as if he attended the school? Bizarre. Tangential but still had to be noted.

It was obvious: So much about this show had to do with availability and bad image-conceptualizing. I won't even get into why Diana Ross--honored much more appropriately by SNL's Maya Rudolph every now and then as we snore--was allowed to share the stage with the aforementioned monuments of the arts. And I'll leave alone Brian Wilson. Ok, I won't: Lyle Lovett singing God Only Knows? Hootie and the Blowfish? Could we find people with less of a right to re-image the Beach Boys? Even Paul McCartney and his little mandolin would have been better. (Though, who can afford him?)

The point of all this rambling is that the KC--and let's not forget that Caroline Kennedy, its gleaming honorary daughter, now introduces this comedy of errors --really needs to step it up if it wants to follow through qualitatively on the notion that it's America's premiere cultural presenter. Many of us know it's not. But fine, keep the charade alive.

Just try harder. Be smart. And for fuck's sake, if you're gonna celebrate someone like Steve Martin, get out of your highbrow box that tells you stiff, leggy dancers loosely interpreting Martin's past might seem like a good idea and put something up there with some substance and wit. Last night's show just phoned it in at a time when live TV programming  from the nation's party-town capital really had a chance to beat  its competitors during a WGA strike.  Maybe it won the numbers--that's not my field. But it sure as hell didn't deserve them.

A New Definition of Eco-Conscious

There was a time when Umberto Eco meant the world to me. I was a young college student, flooded with the "brilliance" of the postmodernists, and eager to lap it up. But I always found it sort of funny, all this meta-thinking about meta-thinking, all these linguistic symbolisms and academizing of pop culture. I even remember a friend and I mocking the titles of our new university classes: "Towards realizing deconstructionist comprehensions of the French fry's representation in popular culture as a symbol of both deliciousness and death." '"The Popular Semiotics of "Is": "To be" in our political theater." You get the idea.

At any rate, Umberto Eco was often our voice of reason. He took the postmodern movement somewhere sensible. He made us laugh, he laughed at himself, told great tales, and he qualified what soon became a rampant nonsense-parade.

So I wanted to like his new book: "Turning Back the Clock: Hot wars and Media Populism." That's why I reviewed it in today's S.F. Chronicle Book Review. But things didn't go exactly as planned.

Have a read:  "Eco takes critical look at war, Mel Gibson in 'Turning Back'," San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2007

margot at the wedding -- and in the sun

So, the main subject of this story,  submitted to the Sun before this weekend, offered similar quotes to another paper that got the scoop over the smaller kids yesterday (the result? some fast omissions by a great editor -- this isn't a unique problem). Still, I think the story's worth reading if you're interested in films about borderline writers and their brethren--though I won't blame you if you're not!

Noah Baumbach On Family Island, New York Sun, 11/12/07

style for sale

If you know LA, you know that Angelenos  go ga-ga for Eames chairs or any semblance of the fact that they have so-called mid-mod style (even though, I'm told, the mid-century revival is "so over."). I am not, I should admit, a card-carrying member of the mechanized mid-mod subculture (i.e. those who buy mass-produced items that lose their individuality when everyone has one), but dammit if you won't find a Herman Miller fiberglass shell-rocker in my East Side living room. So, when Modernica put on its annual warehouse sale today in the warehouse district, I trudged on down, both to perhaps look for a new find and to observe my fellow consumers in their natural habitats. It was a sight: hipsters everywhere bonding over the desire for molded fiberglass and Noguchi coffee tables so they could all share the same interior design. Five young men about my age were so impressed with my find (four rich, teal side-chairs which I've now decided to sell, they look so inappropriate at my true mid-century dining table) that they began to speak to me about what I do for a living, and how we're "all so similar" (I'm a software designer, said one, I'm a producer, I'm a musician, I'm a writer; We are all cool enough for this furniture!). Below, find some imagery of the experience, including a shot of the hardest working man in mod furniture sales: Sam, the guy who was switching Eiffel bases off some chairs and replacing them with rolling bottoms or wooden legs at the speed of light with one straight-edge screwdriver (god forbid one of us ends up with the shell we want on a substandard base). Oh, and you could also enjoy with your furniture gluttony Saturday an electronica-spinning DJ and free drinks all while being sold on a slew of new lofts just off the 5 freeway in an area that wouldn't even amount to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 15 years ago, it's still so raw and devoid of human character. View on, and decide whether or not we were buying the chairs or the chairs were buying us.

a smartphone for a wedding planner? who wins?

This is a real ad from the LA Craigslist pages:

"I need a Verizon treo 700. You need a Wedding Day Coordinator.

I'm a wedding and event coordinator - you can look up my services at silvercharmevents.com/star.html - and I'd like to trade a day-of coordination package, worth $600, for a verizon or unlocked Treo 650 or 700. The treo can be used, but it has to be in good condition. My day-of coordination package includes the wedding rehearsal, as well, and I'll thrown in travel for anywhere in the 818, 323 or 310 area codes. Thanks!"

Do your best not to fall for her offer. One thing we don't need in LA is yet another wedding planner with a fully functioning Treo.

returning thoughts

Heaving breasts, the color rosa, the pig-centric kitchen prowess of Mario Batali (if he were the world's *second* most gorgeous woman): The most striking aspect of Pedro Almodovar's Raimunda in “Volver”--other than her physical exquisiteness-- is that she is a person—not just a woman—who moves forward, no questions asked. Forget returning: Raimunda is progressing.

Much has been written about Almodovar and his love for women—I personally enjoy this proclivity of his as I do his fascination with the dead. And much has been made of his problem with men (see Anthony Lane; note: usually love his reviews, this one not so much). But gender arguments aside, Almodovar has written a character that can weather insanity-inducing winds, rape, incest, worse, loss, and then the ultimate shock: seeing it happen to her daughter. Raimunda may live in a land that only Almodovar could create, but she is very much of our time and place. It seems fitting that the people I gel with best now are the pro-active, the surviving, the people who get things done and take care of even the dirtiest business. The ones who forge on despite petty, negative obstacle-characters or terrifying news. Avoid confrontation? You’re not one of these people. Leave things unsaid, conflicts unresolved, people you love on hold? You, too, don’t apply. You don't treasure life, and you'll be remembered that way. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you--or that I'm someone who should even say such a thing--only that I know I loved Volver because I am psychologically attracted to those men and women who are more Raimunda-like than those who aren't. The reasons are personal, but my point here is to say that Almodovar has--yes, as many critics have written--created yet another fiction that only he could dream up, in a place that only could exist in his head,  but that his is also the best fiction: the type that feels real, of this earth. Raimunda is, underneath it all, a brave life-lover who only wants her serving of it with all the trimmings, and that's what Volver's about. Our new reality. Ghosts, fucking, cancer, and insanity included. (If only Clive Owen's character in "Children of Men" could have met her when their fates crossed in filmland. Maybe at an awards show...)

new york times glosses up crazy david lynch

If enlightenment and, well, Bliss, overtook you as you read this weekend's New York Times story on David Lynch and his "shockingly peaceful" life as a proponent of Transcendental Meditation, I'm sorry to say that the puff piece completely missed the mark on this extraordinarily creepy marriage. Instead, it chose to gloss over the Absolutely Cultyclimate of Mr. Lynch's attempt to snatch the brains of  young people--especially those with means--who just perpetually want to learn a little about their favorite movies. Want a trustworthy first-person account of Inland Empire's finest and the cool buddies he's mind-melded with over at the Maharishi's? If world peace is the only thing driving David Lynch, Tom Cruise is, in fact, my long lost alien Messiah.

You read it here first:  Lynch Mob.