You and What Army

WHAT'S IN A DREAM? ON CARL DREYER'S VAMPYR

     You always know when something seems dream-like, but precisely what makes it that way? I was thinking about this as I watched and soon became a little obsessed with Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr. The movie is very dream-like, and not just because all the action takes place in one night.  In a way, all movies are like dreams in that the viewer is borne along on an audio-visual narrative that he or she cannot control.  But what makes Vampyr dream-like and, say, Scarface from the same year not dream-like, isn't just a sense of the fantastical, but subtler aspects such as discontinuity, disembodiment, and distortion.
     The film's protagonist, Allan Gray, wanders into the small French town of Courtempierre, a real place where the film was shot entirely on location, and checks into an inn. As the introductory intertitle puts it, the shiftless Gray had become "a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred," thereby setting the tone for the whole film. A few shots later, when a mysterious older man in a smoking jacket drifts into Gray's room, it's unclear to Gray whether it's a dream or not — and Dreyer makes sure that we don't really know whether it is either.
     It emerges that Courtempierre is besieged by a vampire and her minions who goad innocent people into suicide in order to enslave their now eternally damned souls. And so goes the rest of Vampyr, continually blurring dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, life and death; under the circumstances, the name "Gray" begins to make a lot of sense.
     (The original subtitle of the film was Der Traum des Allan Grey — how interesting, in light of a nightmarish film, to note the morphological and possibly etymological connections between the words "dream," "drama" and "trauma.")
    Myths, as Jung famously said, are the dreams of cultures, and Dreyer interweaves myth and dreaming very pointedly at the beginning of the film. An old man stands by a river bank, bearing a large sickle, an iconic symbol of death. The man clangs a bell, summoning a small rowboat, a very definite allusion to Greek mythology, and the way departed souls would summon the boatman Charon to ferry them across the river Styx. But as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that the boat was not taking the man to the underworld, it was taking him away from it. Gray has transgressed into a contemporary Hades that happens to be about 70 miles south of Paris. (In that sense, it anticipates another dream-like black-and-white film, Jean Cocteau's 1949 Orphée.)
    Another allusion to classical myth apparently happened by accident: Gray finds his way to a creepy abandoned mill and happens upon a strange man on the stairs; he asks the man about the sounds of barking dogs and crying children. The question was a reference to a scene that was cut from the film, but interestingly, the growling of the three-headed dog Cerberus and the wailing of innocent children are the first two things that Aeneas hears when he enters the underworld with the Sibyl.
     But what really makes Vampyr dream-like is the way it's photographed. For one thing, there are almost no establishing shots, which is just like the cinematography of dreams. Then there are the film's exteriors, which were shot in the pre-dawn hours to get an ineffable spectral quality and even then, literally shot through a layer of gauze. The general visual timbre is fuzzy, twilit, shrouded in fog that encroaches on and infiltrates the frame.
     Vampyr embraces not only the look of dreams but their logic: Dreyer pointedly includes strange details but doesn't always follow up on them: a locket passed from a dying man's hand, a disfigured blind man babbling at the top of the stairs, shadows of a large dance party playing on a white wall. The transitions sometimes seem arbitrary, just as in a dream. Either that or the film eliminates transitions entirely, leaving details and linkages by the wayside — one moment, Gray is being greeted by the innkeeper and the next he's asleep in bed. The discontinuous time is matched by an equally discontinuous space: as Gray moves through various buildings, angles and physical space don't match up from shot to shot and it's difficult to get an accurate idea of the layout of any structure he's in. The mind strains to make sense of space and narrative, just as in a dream, and thus producing a very similar sensation to dreaming itself.
     The film also has the disembodied quality of dreams: there are shadows or reflections of people, but we don't see any people; we hear children's voices but don't see any children. Sometimes the camera follows Gray's subjective point of view but then suddenly pulls away, looking at him objectively, something that happens so smoothly that you don't notice anything except an odd feeling of displacement. And in the most literal example of disembodiment, Gray walks out of his body – and then, in one of the film's most nightmarish sequences, observes his own corpse in a coffin. The next sequence depicts his point of view as he's carried in the coffin to a cemetery; he looks up at the world going by through a rectangular window, and the view is like a beautiful and yet horrific film within a film.
    Although that old theory about how most dreams are in black-and-white has been disproven, it's hard to imagine Vampyr having the same oneiric power in color.  Not that color was even an option in 1932, but in Dreyer's hands, monochrome is a palimpsest.  If all the colors were filled in, the film would lose mystery and menace.  It would lose the sensation of being once removed from reality, of being like a dream.  Besides, it's fitting that a vampire movie should have all the blood drained out of it.  Same with the sound — Vampyr was shot in three different languages and to make the production easier, there is extremely minimal dialogue.  Just like in a dream.
     The analogy between death and sleep is eternal and elemental. Just as the vampires are aware they're dead and yet can't truly die, Gray is aware that he might be dreaming and yet can't wrest himself from sleep. After he slays the vampire, Gray and his lover cross the river (Styx) and run through a forest and reach a clearing just as the sun's first rays greet the morning — the time when we awake. The dream is over.  Gray has completed a, well, archetypal Jungian journey.  But we don't see him wake up.  He's stuck in the dream.  And maybe so are we.

WHAT'S UP WITH THIS VINYL FAD?

    So what's up with this vinyl fad?
    A while back I threw a party at my apartment. A few guests noticed that I had a vinyl copy of George Harrison's 1970 masterpiece All Things Must Pass. "Oh, can we play this?" they asked. "Sure," I said, "that's a great album, but let's just play the CD." But they specifically wanted to play the vinyl, even though a CD was so much easier and no one at such a loud party could possibly tell the difference anyway, much less care.
    My party guests are not alone in their vinyl fetishism. Nielsen SoundScan says vinyl LP sales were 1.9 million in 2008, which is the largest total since they began recording sales in 1991. (Although remember, vinyl was already well on its way out in 1991.) Vinyl sales are expected to hit 2.8 million this year.
    But why?  Vinyl fetishists rave about the "warm sound" of LPs, but could most of them — at least any of them over age 25 or so — really tell the difference between an LP and a CD in a blindfold test? And even then you'd need a high-end stereo rig to truly appreciate the distinction. Yes, commercial MP3s sound noticeably bad, but again, most people probably could not tell the difference between a vinyl pressing and a FLAC, AAC or 256 bit-rate MP3.
    Sometimes, yes, the CD version sounds worse than the vinyl — but that's not the fault of the CD format, that's the fault of cheap, lazy, disrespectful record companies who won't shell out for a proper CD mastering. (Try an A/B test of the old and new issues of Beatles CDs and you'll hear the difference between good CD mastering and bad.)
    And vinyl fetishists conveniently leave out the fact that LPs have surface noise, clicks, pops and outright skips, which are far more of an intrusion on the listening experience than any perceived shortcomings of the CD. They'll say the pop and clicks have "become part of the music for me." Well, guess what: They aren't really part of the music. It's noise, the thing you least want in a recording.
    So why the vinyl fetish? Well, one attraction is the ritual.  Playing a record involves carefully, reverentially removing the record from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable and gently lowering the needle onto the spinning platter.  It's a process, more involved than sliding a small, shiny disc into a black box or pressing your index finger to an iPod.  It's a pain in the neck for the casual listener, but for the big-time music fan, it reflects a level of engagement and reverence in keeping with their devotion.
    Then there are folks, mainly collectors, are literally so heavily invested in vinyl that they can't stop now.  Other people just like retro technology, others enjoy the association with DJ culture.
    But I think there are larger, deeper forces at play here. The other day, I was listening to the NPR show On the Media, and they did a piece about why a lot of people are resisting getting vaccinated for H1N1. Here's what Ben Goldacre, a physician and the author of the "Bad Science" column in the UK's Guardian newspaper had to say:

"I think in some respects, also, it’s kind of an act of protest on which people can take a stand. When the MMR vaccine scare really kicked off in the U.K. in 2002, it was shortly after we were sort of going off to wars that were very, very unpopular, and I think, in some respects, people might have felt, well, there’s nothing I can do to stop my country bombing, but I can take a stand on vaccines. It almost becomes a kind of poetic response to unrelated problems."

    So maybe this vinyl fetish thing is along the same lines, where people are redirecting rebellious feelings away from what they have no control over — whether it's mismanaged corporate bail-outs, endless, misguided wars, or the incessant baying of stump-ignorant teabaggers — and towards something they do have control over: their own consumer choices. Maybe the vinyl fad is a backlash against overwhelming corporate power.  The t-shirt pictured here, which is actually available for sale, says it all.  Is buying vinyl really just a feeble little attempt at sticking it to the Man?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

     As noted previously, Chris "Second-Craziest Person in Cable News" Matthews is extremely obsessed with pronouncing Dick Cheney's name correctly. He's very proud of the fact that he knows the right pronunciation and you don't. And the other day, November 17th, he finally had a kind of grand mal fit about it.
    Matthews was in the middle of a conversation with regular guests Democratic party strategist Steve McMahon and former McCain operative Todd Harris about Cheney endorsing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in her bid for the governorship of Texas, when Harris made the grievous error of pronouncing it Chainy.  Hilarity ensued as Matthews grew more and more incensed about Harris' mispronunciation.
     From the MSNBC transcript:

MATTHEWS: Why do you mispronounce—why do you mis—Steve—I mean, Todd, why do you mispronounce Cheney‘s name, on purpose or what?

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: You know...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: His name is Cheeny.

HARRIS: Yes, I know that. Well, I know that you pronounce it that way.

MATTHEWS: But why do you call him Chainy? Why do you call him Chainy?

HARRIS: Why do you call him Cheeny?

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: It‘s his name.

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Yes. No. Well, I‘m not sure that...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: I don‘t understand why you go with the—you‘re going with some sort of other pronunciation.

    Every time it says "(LAUGHTER)," that's Harris trying to smooth over the fact that Matthews is a nutjob with OCD, chuckling in order to buy time for thinking about how to get past this insane line of conversation.
     A few minutes later, as they closed the segment:

MATTHEWS: We‘re going to help you with that pronunciation of the former vice president‘s name.

HARRIS: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MCMAHON: Cheeny. Cheeny.

MATTHEWS: Right. Thank you. Look it up. As we always say, look it up.

THE GIMME SHELTER YOU DIDN'T SEE

    Gimme Shelter is generally considered one of the best rock documentaries ever made, perhaps one of the best documentaries on any topic. Turns out a lot of interesting footage wound up on the cutting room floor. We now know this because the recent reissue of the Rolling Stones’ iconic live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out includes a 27-minute documentary of the same name, cobbled together from Gimme Shelter outtakes. In one scene in Gimme Shelter, Mick Jagger changes his shirt backstage; what the new film reveals is that Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix were in the room too, geeking out over Keith’s new see-through guitar. So there’s an important artistic lesson here: You don’t need to put in all the good stuff. (And, as freakishly long as this post is, I did cut out some good stuff.)
     As portrayed by the filmmakers (the brothers Albert and David Maysles, and editing director Charlotte Zwerin), Gimme Shelter was about the end of the Stones’ 1969 American tour (and, by accident, the end of the Sixties). The Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out documentary is specifically about the late November 1969 Madison Square Garden concerts that were recorded for the album. As with any Maysles production, nothing comes on a platter; you have to look actively, and if you do that, you will be rewarded, because Albert has a knack for pointing the camera at the most telling thing in the room. Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out is a pretty loose patchwork, but it’s edited into something resembling a shape, and it tells a somewhat different, much more light-hearted story than Gimme Shelter. It’s also got a dandy punchline.
    Even more than Gimme Shelter, the performance footage here emphasizes Jagger flapping about the stage like an ecstatic rooster, outfitted like a hippie superhero; the silliness of it is completely overshadowed by the fact that Jagger is vastly more joyous than satanic, exhorting the shaggy audience into ever-higher states of abandon as the band kicks out an ingeniously shambling boogaloo.
    Keith Richards gets his star turn too: at Muscle Shoals Studios after the Garden shows, while they were working on Sticky Fingers, he plays a soulful, George Jonesy number on piano. (Like an apparition from the past, the Stones’ former keyboard player and then stalwart roadie Ian Stewart walks behind him as he finishes, and Keith peers back at him, seemingly seeking his approval.)
     Curiously, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor are almost completely missing from the film; one has to wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that neither of them are in the band anymore. By contrast, drummer Charlie Watts, who is still in the Stones, gets as much face-time, possibly more, than anybody.
     Charlie’s best (and worst) moment is an abortive photo shoot for the album cover on a foggy, deserted stretch of English motorway in winter, somewhere outside of Birmingham, weeks after the tour ended. It’s the same shoot that briefly opens Gimme Shelter, but here we get much more of a sense of what actually went on. Gamely dressed up in medieval garb, Charlie totes guitar cases while astride an adorable donkey. A small photo crew and Mick Jagger look on. “Get rid of the ‘elmet,” Jagger commands. Along for the ride is American journalist Stanley Booth, who would go on to write one of the definitive books about the band and a classic of rock journalism, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. It begins raining and they beat a hasty retreat to Mick’s white Bentley. The scene is bleak, pathetic and funny, like something out of Beckett, but it wouldn't have worked in the film.
     It’s also revealing to note the songs they perform: “I’m Free,” “Under My Thumb,” and “Satisfaction,” all of which didn’t make the album, probably because those early pop songs didn’t quite fit the new, hip-rootsy Stones that Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out sought to portray.
     Compared to the meticulously choreographed stadium concerts of today, the informality of it all is shocking – check out Charlie screwing around on the drums in the darkness behind Mick and Keith while they do “Prodigal Son” acoustic-style, or the way Keith abruptly stops playing at the top of the final verse, momentarily flustering Mick. Then Mick announces “Spider and the Lady” but then Keith begins playing a different song. “No,” Jagger announces, “we’re going to do something else,” and they kick into “You Gotta Move.” This is in front of 20,000 people, one of whom is Janis Joplin, smiling and bopping in a huge furry white hat. Before the show, Mick Taylor and Keith busily tune their guitars, a mindless task no major rock musician has done in 30 years.
     The Maysles subtly signal the end of the concert by an exquisite shot of Mick hurling a basket of rose petals out in the crowd, the traditional ending for “Street Fighting Man,” perfectly bearing out Stanley Booth’s description of this very same incident: “Then he sailed the basket of red rose petals high out over the crowd where they hung for a moment. Then they started slowly to descend, floating on the high ringing howl that was rising from the crowd.” (Those words blew me away when I was ten years old and still do.) Then a beautiful accident, as Jagger strides off stage, slo-mo, toward the camera in his Uncle Sam top hat, just as the film in the camera runs out in a hot yellow blaze. Show over.
    There’s a postscript, a scene at a helipad on a pier on San Francisco Bay. The Grateful Dead are there, cavorting in zonked-out hippie fashion, waiting for an overdue helicopter. Jagger comes sweeping in, surveys the unruly scene. and says with amused disbelief to no one in particular, “What is going on?” He gets the lay of the land from a chuckling and ultra-mellow Jerry Garcia, attired in an outtasite lavender wool poncho, and chats warmly with Ian Stewart. The vibe is sweet and playful.
     The chopper won’t arrive until 2:00. "Right, film people, let’s do something!" Jagger proclaims.  "We’ve got ten minutes."  He pulls some hippie chick aside and imperiously directs the cameraman (probably Albert Maysles) to go "Tighter tighter tighter tighter tighter tighter" on her face, adorned with a groovy beaded headband and massive square shades. He plants a kiss on her forehead and steps away. Then he orders Charlie, poor, long-suffering Charlie, "Do the same thing as I did. Kiss the young lady, please."
     Watts demurs. "Love is much more of a deeper thing than that," he replies, with mock hauteur, although he clearly kind of means it too. "It's not flippant, to be thrown away on celluloid. No."
    Jagger laughs at his disobedient drummer. "OK," he says sheepishly, straight to camera, "we cut."
    And then they headed off to Altamont.

ROBYN HITCHCOCK IN NOWHERE-LAND

    It was fitting that a Robyn Hitchcock DVD arrived in the mail the same week as the Monty Python documentary debuted on the IFC channel — I'd bet a dead parrot that the two share a lot of the same audience.  Both Hitchcock and Python cloak a certain degree of self-revelation in a dense, droll smokescreen of Anglocentric absurdism, but to his credit, Hitchcock has occasionally let down his guard, most notably on his 1984 album I Often Dream of Trains.
     Stark, drumless and acoustic-flavored, its relatively straightforward lyrics a far cry from the obfuscatory non sequiturs that would soon characterize Hitchcock's songwriting for years to come, I Often Dream of Trains has become a cult favorite — and on the 25th anniversary of its release, why not indulge in the current vogue for replaying one's old albums in concert?  Hence the DVD I Often Dream of Trains in New York (out November 10th on Yep Roc).  But the concert — bare bones and shot on video — isn't the most intriguing part of the disc.
     That would be the lone DVD extra, a 12-minute short that Hitchcock made in 1984. "Beyond Basingstoke" isn't just a low-budget reverie, a hopelessly elliptical home movie by a playfully arty young man, a visual poem about Englishness, or a misty watercolor memory of the way we were; this amateurish little film is an evocative little memoir about creativity.
     Leading up to I Often Dream of Trains, Hitchock's life and career were between stations. He'd left his old band the Soft Boys but his bid for some sort of stardom, 1982's Groovy Decay, flopped aesthetically and commercially.  Now 30, Hitchcock felt alienated from both the severe post-punk musical landscape and the huge, glossy '80s mainstream sound.  And it was just a grim time, politically and culturally.  "[The 1980s] were a baleful future that we refugees from the 1960s were marooned in," Hitchcock once said.  "I never thought I'd get out alive, from Reagan, Thatcher and shoulder pads."  He was surviving by writing lyrics for former Damned bassist Captain Sensible — an amusing gig, but not what Hitchcock wanted to do with his life.  Hitchcock wasn't even sure he wanted to continue being a musician; he dropped music for a while and worked odd jobs, including a stint as a gardener and even — say it ain't so — a journalist.  He was nowhere, and nowhere incubated some of his best work.
    Not coincidentally, he's nowhere in "Beyond Basingstoke" too.  As recorded on grainy Super-8 film (by filmmaker, author and photographer Tony Moon), flickering early morning light plays on Hitchcock's much younger face (and vintage '84 haircut) as he sleeps or just daydreams out the window of a virtually deserted London commuter train a lot like the one in A Hard Day's Night.
    Although the soundtrack doesn't include the title track of I Often Dream of Trains, the film is clearly a companion piece to the song — the tip-off being that it depicts, well, dreaming and trains.  The song begins, "I often dream of trains when I'm alone/ I ride on them into another zone." Which recalls Hitchcock's description of his working style: "You put yourself in a void.  Once you're in that kind of a void, all sorts of things become possible."  Funnily enough Basingstoke is the last stop on the line before the countryside gets rural.  So "Beyond Basingstoke" is about getting to that place, or, rather, lack of place.
    Nothing much happens in "Beyond Basingstoke" — truth be told, it's kind of dull.  But that becalmed sensation is exactly what it often feels like when you're actually hatching something.  The soundtrack — some lustrous and meditative guitar playing somewhat undercut by some spoofy, murmured monologues about an invisible chemical and an unusual erotic encounter — is like the relentless subconscious buzz behind even the most uneventful moments, when nothing outwardly seems to be happening, or even trying to happen.
     Breakthroughs often come when you're just spacing out, peering out of the window of a train — or standing in the shower, washing your hair, and suddenly it occurs to you what you want to say about a 25-year-old short film by an erstwhile alterna-rock demigod.  Sure enough, Hitchcock emerged from that lacuna in his life and career with I Often Dream of Trains.  As he says during the concert film, the genesis of that album was "a place that was not so much a refuge as a crucible."  But for an artist, perhaps the distinction is meaningless.

JFK MEETS GEORGE ORWELL AT THE LIBRARY

    I recently visited the JFK Presidential Library near Boston and discovered something subtly disturbing. The first thing you see on the tour is a short video presentation in a little theatre. It opens with audio of Kennedy saying these insightful words:

"Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Mythology distracts us everywhere.  For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

    That's more relevant than ever, and I was so struck by it that I went back and recorded the passage on my iPhone.  Then when I got home I looked up the quotation so I could find out when and where he said it, which turns out to be a commencement address at Yale on June 11, 1962.
    The funny thing is, that's not quite what Kennedy said.  What he actually said was:

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.  Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears.  We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations.  We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  Mythology distracts us everywhere."

    Those are the same sentences, but rearranged, and it eliminates a slight hitch in Kennedy's delivery.  Granted, it doesn't change the meaning or substance of Kennedy's statement, but that little bit of Protools magic strikes me as a little creepy in a 1984 kind of way.  All presidential libraries are exercises in vanity and revisionist history but it really makes me wonder what else they manipulated.  (And let's not even get into the irony of our most mythologized president decrying mythology in a place that exists solely to perpetuate his myth.)
    And what about Bush 43's presidential library? Are they going to edit his 2003 State of the Union speech so it doesn't include the lie about Iraq trying to buy yellow cake uranium?

MILES DAVIS: LIVE IN EUROPE '67 DVD

    Like any credible person, I dig Miles Davis.  But I particularly dig his quintet with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. "All-stars" is not nearly the word — these guys turned out to be a Mt. Rushmore of modern jazz.  So it was really exciting to hear about Live in Europe '67, the DVD that's included in the soon-to-be-released 71-disc (!) The Miles Davis Complete Columbia Album Collection.  After many years of listening to their music, I could finally see these guys play!
    Live in Europe '67 is in black-and-white video but both concerts — October 31st in Stockholm and November 7th in Karlsruhe, Germany —  are well shot and the remastered sound is very good. (There are no plans to release the DVD separately, so if you don't have a pal at Sony/Legacy or don't want to shell out the 300+ simoleons for the box, even though it's an excellent deal, you can also watch it all on Youtube, but picture and sound quality are both sorely lacking.)  I've gotten kind of obsessed with it.

     When Live in Europe '67 was filmed, the Davis band was headlining a European package tour tour with Sarah Vaughan, Archie Shepp and Thelonious Monk — a mindblowing bill.  It must have been a pretty weird time for Miles Davis though.  His friend and former bandmate John Coltrane had died that summer, he'd endured some serious health problems, he was going through a divorce, he'd recently turned 40, free jazz was the "new thing" but it wasn't his thing, and his records weren't selling as well as they used to.  Davis also happened to be making some of the most brilliant music of his career, with a recent string of incredible studio records:  ESP (1965), Miles Smiles (1966), Sorcerer (1967), and Nefertiti (1967), cut with four younger musicians who challenged and inspired him like few had before.
    All kinds of revolution was in the air — this was just after the "Summer of Love" when Sgt. Pepper ruled the pop charts and psychedelia began radicalizing popular music.  Out there in the world, racial unrest was raging even as Thurgood Marshall had been named the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court.  To different degrees, African-Americans, gay people, young people and women were all experiencing a heady rush of both liberation and rage.
    All of that was the volatile backdrop for changes within Davis’ quintet, which had formed in 1963.  Up until ‘67, Davis had made the band play relatively genteel takes on the standards and Davis originals that his previous quintet had covered.  But by the fall of '67, this line-up was well seasoned, they now had an extensive catalogue, virtually all of which they'd written themselves, and each of them had received rapturous critical acclaim.  Carter, Hancock, Shorter and Williams had graduated to another plane of music-making and were tired of playing music the old way.  It was time, as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would say, to release the hounds.

     Both nights, an announcer introduces each musician as they walk on stage.  Carter, nearly as tall as his bass, is a saturnine figure with a whisk-broom mustache; Shorter immediately exudes a sweet and unassuming manner; Williams appears even younger than his 21 years; Hancock looks like a divinity student. Everyone is in tuxes with bow ties except Davis, who sports a light-colored pinstripe suit with wide lapels, a handkerchief jutting from the pocket, a fancy watch popping up past his sleeve; he is, as always, impeccably stylish.
    Other than that, there's no ceremony about taking the stage.  Davis doesn't acknowledge the audience or even the band; he just steps to the mike and begins playing the head of the first tune, even as Carter and Williams are still getting settled; nonetheless, everyone jumps right in and it's off to the races.
    Both sets open with "Agitation," Carter and Williams playing at blazing speed, with Hancock playing desolate, Debussy-like chords that paradoxically seem to accelerate the music.  Out of nowhere, Williams presses out a swelling snare roll and everyone shifts into a relaxed swinging rhythm.  Dramatic shifts like that are the rule: At the Stockholm show, everyone stops as Hancock completely breaks the momentum with a very bleak, eerie solo on "Agitation."  Carter craftily eases it into a swinging rhythm that Williams soon latches onto – it’s really brilliant.  They don't do nearly the same thing days later in Karlsruhe, so how did they know to stop for Hancock’s solo in Stockholm?  Put it this way: there’s a reason they called one of their albums ESP.
    They pull this tempo/rhythm magic trick constantly, whether at the top of a solo or at some mysterious point within it, spontaneously changing direction en masse, like a school of fish. The band called that approach "time, no changes," which essentially means that the progressions were in the rhythms and not the chords.  Instead, the band riffed off of a kind of communal tonal center, following the soloist; that requires phenomenal concentration, sensitivity and teamwork to pull off.  Watching the musicians in this trance-like state — in particular, Shorter plays as if deep in prayer — is a great cue for how to get into this music.
    They're playing large auditoriums before seated audiences of well dressed northern Europeans, with blinding bright TV lights and big '60s cameras cluttering the stage, but it seems to have zero effect on their staggering intensity and focus.  During Shorter's solo on the Karlsruhe "Footprints," the camera pulls right into Hancock's face as he lays down sparse but strategically propulsive chords, profoundly thoughtful and deliberate.  The way he lays his hands on the instrument, it's more like he's feeling its aura than actually playing it.
    This is a far cry from any of their previous live recordings. For one thing, Williams is explosive, chopping up the rhythms, dealing out thunder and lightning with a plangent bass drum and cymbals, his left stick dancing on the snare like a bead of water on a hot skillet.  And while Davis still calls for older tunes like "Walkin'" or "'Round Midnight," the band deconstructs them at breakneck bebop-velocity tempos – way, way faster than the originals Davis recorded over a decade before with a much different band.  It's more like "Sprintin'."  It's as if they were in a hurry not to get to the end of the tune but to get to the next kind of music.
    The Stockholm show in particular is shot fairly claustrophobically, favoring very long close-ups of the musicians' faces, particularly Shorter and Davis.  And that’s good, because that's where the action is — their faces.  During a solo on the Stockholm "Footprints," Shorter shudders with passion just before peeling off a quiet, fleeting little lick; that’s not something you’d catch on record, and it's just so heavy and intense.  It’s funny how many of the profile shots of Davis with his horn look like potential album cover photos.  Look at Carter's wonderfully equine face, impassive, as both sets of fingers seemingly dance to their own tune, producing a blazing yet steadfast anchor. And check out Williams' fierce expression as he unleashes salvo after salvo of bass drum and cymbal bombs, determined to kick this music a little further down the road.
    The cinematography is pretty straightforward but you can still catch interesting little moments, like Davis' odd tic of pressing his index finger to just in front of his right ear and shaking his head after he finishes a solo or when, in the midst of the Karlsruhe "I Fall in Love Too Easily," Davis seems transfixed by the huge, vivid shadow of Williams on the curtain, his arms flicking out at the flapping cymbals. Later in the set, during "Walkin'," Hancock sits with his hands resting on the keys, and you can see he’s as alert and engaged as he would be if he were playing; when Shorter walks away from the mike, Hancock seamlessly kicks into an uncanny imitation of what Shorter just played, with Davis observing from a distance, index finger resting pensively on his embouchured lips.
    Interesting that Davis generally plays short solos, and when he's not playing, he walks off stage.  And yet his sensibility, not to mention his huge charisma, looms over everything, beginning with the band's cool, austere intensity.  As they play this fast, intricate music, no one seems to tap their foot or sway or snap their fingers while the other musicians are wailing away.  They're heads-down, eyes-down, locked in their own five-way world. There are almost no breaks between tunes, leaving little space for applause, so the sets unfold like one long suite.  They're in, as jazz critic Frédéric Goaty says in the set's liner notes, "a state of grace."
    Part of what was revolutionary about this band was that the usual foreground/background dynamic is compressed or even inverted::  Hancock and Williams (and, more subtly, Carter) don't play behind the solo, they play with it.  Liberated from comping or timekeeping, the rhythm section is incredibly expressive, which not only means that you can tune in to any of the players at any time and hear something really exciting, but that you can listen to the entire band through the prism of any instrument that’s playing at the time, a Cubist jazz.  It all fits together, a sprawling, loose but ingeniously interlocking sound, something the frequent montage effects of the Karlsruhe footage seem to be emphasizing.  Listen to the way Hancock plays spare chords to offset Williams' busy drumming, and never drifts much lower than the middle of the keyboard, allowing Carter to fill out the low end.  Both Davis and Shorter play elliptically, allowing plenty of space for all the wild invention exploding behind them.
    And that ties in to what was happening in at the time – the "new thing," i.e., free jazz.  Davis' quintet certainly wasn't playing free jazz, but it wasn't bebop either.  Some have called it "freebop," but that's a hideous term.  Suffice it to say, it was one of those rare middle ways that are more fascinating than the extremes, pushing the envelope with style and precision, experimenting with form instead of dispensing with it.  The approach influenced everything from the dense, prodigious jamming that would soon dominate heavy rock to late-'90s jungle techno.
    Miraculously agile and telepathic, Davis' "second great quintet" had taken the "time, no changes" approach as far as they could take it.  And when artists as protean as those guys have taken something as far as it can go, you just know something else exciting is about to happen.  Sure enough, when he got back from that '67 European tour, Davis added electric guitar and then electric keyboards to his music and changed his approach to arranging – distorted electric keyboard would pick up the guitar chords and also play more or less in unison with the bass, and there would be a definite backbeat and a blues flavor; you could kind of dance to it.  Fusion was born, and Davis never returned to the electrifying acoustic music captured on Live in Europe ‘67.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

     Chris Matthews is the second-craziest host on cable news, and he has a number of strange, almost OCD, tics that he repeats endlessly on his MSNBC show Hardball.  One thing he does a whole lot is gloat about how he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's name correctly.
    You see, the former vice president says not "Chainy," but "Cheeny."  Matthews rarely fails to mention Cheney's name without signaling that he's taking special care to pronounce it right, pausing briefly before emphasizing the name and then smugly looking at the camera as if to say, "Go ahead, I dare you to tell me I'm saying it wrong."  He really loves the fact that he knows how to pronounce "Cheney" and you don't.
    But often, that's not enough for Matthews, and that's when he sanctimoniously reminds his audience that he knows how to pronounce Dick Cheney's name correctly.  He never gets tired of it.

September 7, 2006
"And on Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney, that‘s how he pronounces it, exclusively on Tim Russert‘s Meet the Press."

October 25, 2006
"…he was deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney, that‘s how I like to pronounce it, on domestic policy."

June 21, 2007
MATTHEWS:  Thank you very much, Jeremy Bronson.  Let‘s bring in Ron Christie, a former aide to Vice President Cheney, and Robert Raben, former Clinton assistant attorney general.  You like that pronunciation, don‘t you?
RON CHRISTIE, FORMER ADVISER TO VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY:  I do.  And you do it every time.
MATTHEWS:  Well, it‘s the way the family does it.

March 16, 2009
"Former vice president Dick Cheney—that's how he pronounces his name…"

March 24, 2009
"The on-going story of Dick Cheney—by the way, that‘s the way the family pronounces it, Cheney, in that Dickensian fashion."

May 21, 2009
"Back to today‘s main event, President Obama versus former Vice President Dick Cheney, and that‘s how the family pronounces it, that Dickensian way, Cheney."

May 22, 2009
Matthews discusses the controversy about how to pronounce "Cheney" and cites an NPR interview with Liz Cheney and another one with Lynne Cheney.

June 18, 2009
CHICAGO TRIBUNE COLUMNIST CLARENCE PAGE: And you are right.  Cheney is the original pronunciation.
MATTHEWS:  It‘s the correct pronunciation.

July 15, 2009
"By the way, the name is pronounced “Cheeney.”  Just ask him."

July 23, 2009
"Cheney—that's how you pronounce it…"

August 31, 2009
"We know where Dick Cheney stands. And that's how you pronounce his name, by the way, Cheney."

September 4, 2009
"It‘s pronounced “Cheeney,” by the way."

September 28, 2009
"Up next:  Could we see another Cheney in public office?  Actually, she pronounces it Cheney, unlike her dad."

September 29, 2009
"…daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney. He pronounces it differently."

September 30, 2009
"…the Cheneys—rather the Cheney and the Cheney—they pronounce their names differently…"

CHRIS MATTHEWS: AMERICAN PSYCHO

    Let's see… what fresh idiocy has Hardball host Chris "Tweetybird" Matthews perpetrated lately?
    Well, Tuesday night, Matthews ridiculed GQ magazine for its choice for ninth place in its ranking of the 50 most influential people in Washington.  "And here's where the list gets really limp and, to be honest, ridiculous," Matthews opined.  "Former vice president, out-of-office politician… Dick Cheney."  Then, after a round of commercials, the generic bumper back into the show features President Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, and… wait for it… Dick Cheney — you know, "the "former vice president, out-of-office politician" who actually doesn't matter anymore.  (Cheney is also featured in another bumper for the show too.)
    Later in the show, Matthews weighed in on some key upcoming races, calling the governor of Texas a "wackjob" and hoping Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison wins the open Senate seat there.  He went on to openly favor several other candidates in other races before coming to the race for the US senate Democratic primary in his home state of Pennsylvania. "I'm not taking sides on that one," he said, "because I would love to moderate that debate." Huh, so Chris Matthews pulls punches for the sake of advancing his career?  What other journalistic compromises has he made in his own self-interest?
    Finally, Tuesday night's show also featured this gem from Matthews: "You say Rush Limbaugh, I say phone sex with a traveling salesman.  Think about it."  Um, I'd rather not think about it, Mr. Matthews.  Because you are absolutely insane.

GARDEN PARTY: ARETHA AND METALLICA AND SIMON AND GARFUNKEL

    There's a couple of crazy-big concerts happening at Madison Square Garden later this month with some wild line-ups. I wonder how many dozen people in the country would be happy to catch all the bands on those bills? Metallica and Aretha Franklin playing the same show? That's nuts.
     I thought I'd try a parlor game of guessing who the special guests will appear with. Here are my best educated guesses. Anybody else care to weigh in?

• Smokey Robinson with Stevie Wonder (don't forget the Motor City!)
• Lou Reed with U2 (U2 makes a point of their appreciation of the Velvet Underground and covers Reed's "Satellite of Love")
• Bonnie Raitt with Bruce Springsteen
• Jackson Browne with Bruce Springsteen (note that Browne and Raitt rocked with Bruce on the No Nukes concerts at this same venue 30 years ago)
• Sting with Bruce Springsteen (the two dueted on "The River" on the Human Rights Now tour in 1988)
• Dion with Paul Simon (Simon is a big fan of doo-wop and other old-school NYC rock & roll)
• James Taylor with CSN (mellow, if formerly drug-addled, birds of a feather)
• Jeff Beck with Eric Clapton (fellow Yardbirds!)
• Van Morrison with Bruce Springsteen (I'm really guessing here but Morrison's influence on Bruce is strong, so it would make sense)
• Jerry Lee Lewis with U2? (They did dip into that roots bag for the awful Rattle and Hum)  Or maybe with Clapton? (He probably grew up on Jerry Lee, just like his peers in the English rock aristocracy)