When I’m not working on Sneaky Dragon, working for a living or being a husband and dad, I like to do things. At which point you might ask:
WHAT IS DAVE DOING?!?
LISTENING: Jefferson Airplane, After Bathing at Baxter’s
Hippies! Jefferson Airplane’s follow-up album to the mega-hit Surrealistic Pillow is sprawling, self-indulgent and great. Besides the boring instrumental “Spare Chaynge”, and despite the unspoken intent to scupper their unwelcome and unhip popularity, the songs are really strong – even the instrumental freak-out “A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly” is good (probably because it’s short – unlike the nine minute yawn-fest “Spare Chaynge”). Commercially-speaking, the singles should have been “Wild Tyme” and “Watch Her Ride”, but you have to give it to the Airplane for releasing their greatest song, the bouncy and exuberant “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” as the first single. It did make it into the Top 50, but the song was long and kooky and probably ended their brief career as a pop group (“Armadillo!”). I have always loved how Marty Balin, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick sang together. They did not sing in harmony like the Beach Boys, but would wind their voices around each other in a what-the-hell, loose sort of way that really works when they’re on (but probably sounded like crap when they weren’t). Other great songs: Slick’s Joycean “rejoyce”, Kantner’s touching “Martha” and his epic “Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon”.
UPDATE:
WATCHING: Supernatural
As I wrote last time, I’ve been watching Supernatural, the strangely mopey horror/fantasy series. Well, I finished season 5, which was pretty good. The season arc intruded a lot more than it has in the past and the last few shows felt rushed, but there was a pleasing finality to the season. (WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER.) Sam agrees to become a “vessel” of Lucifer, that is allows Lucifer to inhabit his body in order to trick him and cast him back into the pit. However, Lucifer wins the battle of wills and Sam is lost inside him. Cut to the final sequence: Dean, Bobby and Castiel (the angel) confront Sam/Lucifer. Lucifer breaks Bobby’s neck, reduces Castiel to a fine, red mist and beats the holy Hell out of Dean. Just before he deals the final death blow to Dean something awakens the inner Sam and there is a long series of quick edits that take us from the beginning of the series to that final moment (and, oh, there are a lot of shots of the brothers looking dewy-eyed). This somehow empowers Sam to regain control. He opens the “cage” and leaps into the infernal pit, taking his hapless half-brother Adam, who has become the “vessel” for the archangel Michael with him. Dean is left behind, brutally beaten and alone. The body of Bobby lies nearby. THE END.
Or, at least, that’s where it should have ended. Just like Buffy should have ended after Season Five – the Glory season – when she sacrifices herself to save the Earth, Season Five should have ended Supernatural when Sam sacrificed himself (and redeemed himself) to save the world from the onrushing apocalypse. Where can you go after that? Everything else feels like a letdown in comparison. Sure, there are good individual episodes (like Buffy’s “Once More with Feeling” or “The Body” or “Weekend at Bobby’s” or “The French Mistake” from Season Six of Supernatural), but overall it starts to feel like one doughnut too many. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to watch Seasons Six, Seven and Eight because, you know, Sam and Dean are dreamy.
This is where it should have ended:
READING: Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne
Featuring one of my all-time favourite Trollope characters, Miss Dunstable, the obscenely wealthy heir to a medicinal liniment fortune, I’m onto (and finished) my seventh Anthony Trollope novel, the wholly wonderful Dr. Thorne. Strangely, a novel Trollope could never be truly happy with. One of his most popular novels – and the third in the Barsetshire series – the plot was suggested to him by his brother when Trollope was visiting his family in Venice. However, the plot is quite simple: Dr. Thorne raises the bastard child of his brother as his own daughter. Unwisely this illegitimate child, Mary, is allowed to play as an equal with the children of his friend, the squire of Greshamsbury, and, inevitably, the squire’s eldest and only son, Frank, falls in love with her. Of course, Frank is expected to marry well and marry money so his family do all they can to discourage this match. Can Frank be true to his Mary?
I’m not sure why it bugged Trollope that his brother provided the plot to one of his more popular novels. Honestly, plotting is one of Trollope’s last concerns as a writer. In fact, he does almost anything to avoid plot devices or leave his readers in suspense. It’s really Trollope’s absolutely spot-on characterizations of the people who populate his novels that captivate the reader.
I’d already read this novel, but it was quite a few years ago so not everything was fresh in my mind. As I read and began to remember scenes, I started to anticipate Miss Dunstable, the vivacious heiress of low birth, whose vast fortunes means she spends her days as a guest of aristocratic houses, the prey of impoverished and/or greedy gentleman willing to overlook her degraded origins and extreme advanced age (thirty) to get their hands on her dough. What makes me like Miss Dunstable is her inner strength and sense of fun. She is too smart for her snobbish hosts and with a mixture of wit and irony enjoys herself at their expense. She is one of Trollope’s typically nuanced portrayals of mid-Victorian women. He loves them and empathizes with them, but they’re not plaster saints and are both good and bad in their ways. I believe, but am not sure, that she will appear again in others of the Barsetshire novels. I certainly hope so anyway!
LISTENING: Prince and the Revolution, Parade: Music from the Picture Under the Cherry Moon
Is it weird that this is my favourite Prince album? It’s definitely weird that I like the movie a lot! (Well, according to some people, but they probably don’t like Magical Mystery Tour either, which makes them wrong, wrong, wrong.) Admittedly the film is a mess – self-indulgent and silly for sure – but that’s what makes it so great. If, like me, you love Prince’s music, it’s a pleasure to watch him goofing around with his friends for an hour and a half ‘cause, like, Jerome Benton! Strangely, the album is completely different from the film for the most part. Where the film is sprawling and loose, the album is as tight and sharp as its mechanical drum sound. In fact, I think this album is pretty revolutionary (ha!) in its marriage of a spare, almost robotic funk sound with psychedelic stylings. The secret sauce is Clare Fischer’s arrangements which always sound like they are going backwards to me. Best song: New Position. Worst song: NONE!!! How dare you even suggest that!
I was shocked a few years ago to discover that Clare Fischer was a member of the original Five Neat Guys – The Hi-Lo’s.
WATCHING: François Truffaut, The 400 Blows, Antoine and Colette (from Love at Twenty)
The greatest movie channel on television – TCM – is playing a bunch of Truffaut films every Friday this month. The first Friday featured all of Truffaut’s “Antoine Doinel” films, his semi-autobiographical series of films that started with The 400 Blows and continued for five films until 1979’s Love on the Run. I think it’s remarkable that not only did someone make five films about the same character, but they all feature the same actor as Antoine so we can see the character age from a child to a man. In the story Antoine is an unhappy boy living in poverty with mostly indifferent parents, suffering through the stupidities of school life. He acts out, runs away, steals, gets caught and goes to the French equivalent of reform school. It’s very touching though to see this young boy’s life and the film is not sensational at all – more matter of fact about it all. It’s also a chance to see places I’ve visited in Paris (Place de Clichy, Trocadéro, the Eiffel Tower) as they existed in the late Fifties. I can almost imagine Maurice Tillieux’s Gil Jourdan and Libellule walking those streets.
Antoine and Colette was a short film contributed by Truffaut to an anthology called Love at Twenty. Set a few years after The 400 Blows, Antoine is now a young man working for Phillips Records. He has achieved his childhood goal of working and living on his own. We do not see his parents in this film. Antoine sees and falls in love with a young woman at a Berlioz concert and the film is about their short, unsatisfying relationship. If you watch this film you will learn that young people went to sophisticated classical music concerts before everything was ruined by rock and roll and that they were natty dressers in those days with their suits and ties and nice dresses. We have definitely come down in the world. I would love to dress that way, but at this point it would be an affectation.
Ciao, Sneakers!