Ghosts

We all know the way that songs can haunt us our whole life where they can immediately invoke a time and place that's buried in memory. But Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large also examines how the songs sometimes haunt their creator.

Chasing Phantoms - From Del Shannon to Neil Young: "Runaway" and "Like a Hurricane"

When I was six and driving in the car with my parents, the radio often provided comfort either by giving me voices in the larger world beyond the roads we travelled, or music that could take me inside the world of the singer. For myself, the rock & roll I heard in 1960 was about finding a place, to paraphrase John Lennon, where I could go when I felt low. The songs of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly could reach out to the friendless and disenfranchised and invite us to to be part of something larger than ourselves. Even if their tunes were about heartache and loss, the mere sharing of that pain gave credence to the idea that one could transcend it because the music was about giving pleasure. In one of his last recorded songs, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," Buddy Holly playfully teases himself about how foolish he was to be driven crazy by the woman who abandons him. Not only does the singer survive the loss, he understands the price he was willing to pay in the process so he could move on. (It was only in real life, unlike in the nowhere land of the song, that Buddy Holly could lose his life in a plane crash he couldn't control.)

Common Ground

Our obsessions with pop figures sometimes takes on the staging of a turf war when it comes to defending their work against others who claim similarity. That was nowhere more than in the case of Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. When Lou Reed died last year it prompted Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large to examine the common ground occupied by both artists.   

The Wild Side: Lou Reed vs Frank Zappa

Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (illustration by Chris Grayson) 

It's curious how we recall certain moments only when death intervenes and creates a rent in our day. The sad passing of Lou Reed this past Sunday, at the age of 71, took me immediately to a typical party I attended as a teenager on a Saturday night back in the early Seventies. There's no significant reason to remember this party and I hadn't even thought about it since the night it happened. But that's what death does. It brings dormant moments back to life. On that evening, it was the first time I became aware of Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground. Their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, just happened to be playing on the turntable and I remember most the nursery rhyme beauty of the opening track, "Sunday Morning," the slashing guitar that droned under the driving beat of "I'm Waiting for the Man," and the pulsating intensity of "Heroin," where John Cale's shrieking violin seemed to create an electric blanket to surround Reed's determined voice and speaking for his heightened nervous system; the sensations brought on by milk-blood flowing in the veins (all of which made Steppenwolf's popular song "The Pusher" seem even sillier and more self-conscious by comparison). I also loved the Celtic melody that underscored "Venus in Furs" while the flattened out timbre of Nico's voice on "All Tomorrow's Parties" made me momentarily forget the party I was attending.

Sojourn Through the American Heartland

Usually when a Coen brothers' film opens, there's quite a fanfare among their followers. With their latest, Inside Llewyn Davis, it began that way and then it disappeared into history like its main character. Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large wishes that it had hung around longer.

The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

When David Bowie Is arrived last year at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, it was a great opportunity to let three of our reviewers from Critics at Large address from their specific area of interest which included fashion (Deirdre Kelly), music (John Corcelli) and cultural (Kevin Courrier).

David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

Robert Altman's America

Robert Altman's Nashville has only grown more relevant and prescient over the years and when it was re-released last fall by the Criterion Collection, Kevin Courrier talked about that relevance in Critics at Large.

An Ear to the Ground: The Criterion Collection Release of Robert Altman's Nashville

When he died in 2006, Robert Altman was one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic of contemporary American directors. Always with an ear to the ground, he didn't follow fashionable trends, or cater expediently to public taste. Instead, he was gallantly intuitive in an open quest for authentic engagement, the quality of which was often revelatory. Most movies over time – good and bad – fit comfortably into genres with recognizable rules that defined them as genre pictures, so we could easily distinguish a film noir from a screwball comedy. But Altman defied those categorizations by delving into exactly what makes a genre tick. He did this by stripping away a movie's pedigree without losing the flavour of the genre itself. Whether he was doing a combat satire (M*A*S*H), a western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), a detective story (The Long Goodbye), a murder mystery (Gosford Park), or stage drama (Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), Altman keenly re-defined our idea of what makes a genre picture by treating moviegoers, as critic Paul Coates once wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, as critics rather than consumers.

Jukebox Junkie: The Movie Music of Martin Scorsese

When music first began providing the dramatic underscoring of a movie, it was generally orchestral and followed the style of 19th Century romantic opera. By the Fifties and Sixties, however, pop music became more prominent in providing the inner voice of a new frontier in cinema. One of the most insistent directors using pop music is Martin Scorsese. Kevin Courrier writes about the peaks and valleys of his style of film scoring in Critics at Large.

Scorsese's Jukebox

John McCabe 'listening' to Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller

When author/critic Paul Coates first saw Robert Altman's seductive and allusive 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he was immediately struck by the director's compelling use of Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song" and "Sisters of Mercy." In his book The Story of the Lost Reflection, Coates wrote that Cohen's music, which wasn't composed for the film, seemed to come "from the inner voice to which the characters alone attend." The film's soundtrack, according to Coates, wasn't providing emotional cues to nudge the audience into whatever mood the picture was trying to impose on the viewer. Altman was instead letting the music speak for the unacknowledged inner lives of the characters on the screen. "[E]ven on the frontier, people walked around with headphones on," Coates observed. The audience at this movie, who in the Seventies did own records and even headphones, came to imagine that the gambler John McCabe was actually living out the experience heard in "The Stranger Song."

Revisionism: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

The history of The Beatles and Capitol Records has been spotty from the beginning when they first refused to released their albums in America. This past winter, Capitol put out a box set of their U.S. releases, which Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large, called a mixed blessing.

Bittersweet Symphony: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

This past Tuesday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' invasion of America in February 1964, Capitol Records released The U.S. Albums, a 13-CD Beatles collection that spans from 1964’s Meet The Beatles! to 1970’s Hey Jude. While many fans back in 2009 already shelled out a fair chunk of cash for the official U.K. remastered stereo CDs and the subsequent box set of the mono versions,The U.S. Albums can seem like a redundant cash grab. But these albums actually differed considerably from the band’s U.K. versions, including having different track lists, song mixes, album titles, and even cover art. For those of us who grew up in North America during the Sixties, these were the albums we knew, and the history we were familiar with. The albums presented here are also in both mono and stereo, with the exception of the embarrassingly fawning 2-LP documentary,The Beatles’ Story, and Hey Jude, a collection of mostly unreleased singles, which are in stereo only.

But there are a number of issues that bring a sour taste to this spirit of celebration. To begin with, Capitol had already released two box sets (The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 & 2) containing their first eight American albums a decade ago. So why didn't they just put out Volume 3 to fill out the rest? For those of us who bought those sets, we now have to repurchase them to get the remaining discs. On top of that, do we really need The Beatles' Story added instead of, say, The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which was only made available on LP? Hey Jude is also not a Capitol album, but an Apple product devised by then manager Allen Klein in 1969 after he'd negotiated a new contract for the band and wanted to massage the deal. The only reason it's being included here is because of the inclusion of tracks like "Paperback Writer," "Hey Jude" and "Lady Madonna." So why not then include in the box set Rarities (which is a Capitol release and collects the magical "There's a Place" and "Misery" that were missing on The Early Beatles, as well as "The Inner Light" (the B-side of "Lady Madonna"), and the rare promotional single "Penny Lane" that featured the French horn coda at the end)? But what is worse: Capitol has decided in this new box to largely ignore the original American mixes and use the 2009 ones instead. Even if the 2009 versions sound better, and they do, we are just re-purchasing what we already bought a few years ago. Whatever you think of the altered sound of the North American albums (with their added reverb, duophonic simulated stereo, and remixed songs), you're supposed to be paying tribute to one culture's way of hearing and remembering the past. As always, when it comes to The Beatles' catalogue, Capitol Records finds new and imaginative ways to botch things up. And they've done it right from the beginning just before the group landed in New York to change the world almost half a century ago. 

In 1964, America was within The Beatles' sights. It was the land of dreams. But it wouldn't be the land where they would go to be buried like all the other British acts. What stood in their way was Capitol Records who had been ignoring all their singles. The group lacked a foothold in the very country whose music made their own possible. The Beatles remained adamant, however, insisting that they weren't going to America until they had a #1 song there. Unfortunately, their manager Brian Epstein had already booked the band for The Ed Sullivan Show, North America's most popular TV variety show, in February, to follow with a concert in Washington, and a separate date at Carnegie Hall. Ed Sullivan had witnessed the delirious reaction to the group firsthand, when he was in the U.K. earlier in the year at Heathrow Airport. The Beatles were returning to a rousing homecoming after a show in Sweden. Sullivan was stunned at the furor and assumed it must be for someone from the Royal Family. When one of the kids told him that all the excitement was for this new pop group, Sullivan gambled that they just might grab the spotlight on his own show. He contacted Brian Epstein and booked them for his Sunday night program for three appearances – two live and one taped where the group would get paid $10,000.

The Beatles arrive in America

While all the deals were falling into place, The Beatles were playing a series of shows at the L'Olympia in Paris. But they found that there wasn't a mob of Brigitte Bardots chasing them through the City of Light, or young girls screaming their names. Instead, it was a collection of hysterical young boys. The ability to cross gender lines in their music, covering girl group songs especially, had now broadened their appeal beyond imagination, making it possible for Beatlemania to include everyone. One night, while coming home from their second show, they got the news they'd been hoping to hear, but never expected. As if by pure serendipity, plus some much needed luck, a song they released in England a few months earlier, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," had just gone to #1 in the United States. It was no less ironic that the song's title seemed an enticing invitation. It was as if an appealing stranger was calling out to you from across the water.

Written and recorded in the late fall of 1963, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was the greeting card that made Beatlemania an international phenomenon. "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You" had prepared British audiences for this pure explosion of happiness. But never before had vocal harmonies, so rich in texture, been delivered with such volume, such determination, and such ecstasy. Composed by Lennon and McCartney in the den of Jane Asher's home on Wimpole Street, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was written by two men, who described their method, as closely playing into each other's noses. According to Gordon Waller (of Peter & Gordon), who was present the day Lennon and McCartney wrote it, Lennon was on a pedal organ and McCartney on piano. When McCartney hit a chord on the piano, it immediately grabbed Lennon. The two men kept finding lost chords that became a perfect fit for their song. As they wrote, they kept reaching the peak of pop's greatest appeal: the joy of surrendering to irresistible and fleeting elation. "It was, and remains, a great song, a joyous, reassuring sentiment riding gently atop an exuberantly beautiful melody," Martin Goldsmith wrote in The Beatles Come to America. "The words may be simple, but they express tender longing and the heartfelt magic of human touch in a sentiment both innocent and profoundly worldly." 

Part of the song's greatness did lie in the smooth transitions between the descending phrases that begin the song, when the singer starts to tell his girl what he wants her to know. At which point, according to Goldsmith, "the melody leaps up an entire octave to land joyfully on the word 'hand,' the punch line of the song. The first lines are all breathless anticipation, and when the central idea of the lover's message is delivered, it comes bursting out in a manner that transcends everything that comes before." Their fifth single was hugely anticipated in Britain with advance orders of over 940,000 two days before it was released on November 29. The factory pressing alone was an unprecedented 500,000 copies in pre-release. A week after "I Want to Hold Your Hand" hit the shops, it entered the UK pop charts at #1, where it would stay for six weeks. By the end of the year, it sold 1,250,00, making "I Want to Hold Your Hand" the second-highest top selling single of the year – right behind "She Loves You." 

Journalist Tom Wolfe once proclaimed that The Beatles wanted to hold your hand, while The Rolling Stones would burn down your town. Besides deliberately misreading the song, in order to indulge in self-conscious literary hyperbole, Wolfe misses the point. If you were to superficially compare "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to, say, The Rolling Stones' cover of Muddy Waters' classic "I Just Want to Make Love to You," The Beatles appear to be catering only to teeny-bopper conventions. When The Stones perform Muddy Waters, the sentiment is blatant, so deliberately clear, that there's no room for romantic mystery. "I Just Want to Make Love to You" is as dynamically straightforward a blues song about the satisfactions of sexual intercourse as you're likely to find anywhere. But "I Want to Hold Your Hand" carries much more of an emotional charge because it expresses and explores the anticipation of romantic excitement just before consummation. Their song communicates the exhilarating expectancy of sex, while delving into the beguiling bliss of imagining such carnal pleasures existing. The Beatles make it very clear that holding your hand is only the beginning of the story.

Dave Dexter Jr.

Despite the thunderous reaction to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in Britain, Dave Dexter Jr., the A&R executive at Captiol Records in the United States, wasn't impressed. An exasperated Brian Epstein, having seen Dexter turn down every early single including "Please Please Me" and "She Loves You," demanded that Capitol Records' president Alan Livingston listen to the record himself, which eventually led to it finally being released. Despite all of Dexter's dismissals, the November 27th issue of Variety stated that the tune had been receiving large advance orders in Britain, forcing Livingston to reconsider the decision of his A&R expert. It's likely that the reason Livingston had trusted Dexter's judgment to this point was that Livingston's own musical background was equally limited. This was a man known specifically for creating Bozo the Clown, and producing children's records by Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny (with one composing credit for Tweety Bird's "I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat"). But did this ignominious oversight spell the end of Dave Dexter Jr.? Hardly. He was instead promoted to the status of issuing all The Beatles' singles and albums in the U.S. Besides picking and choosing what he deemed to be good singles (regardless of what was released in Britain), he issued albums contrary to The Beatles' U.K. originals. So the first American Beatles album he titled Meet The Beatles!, which contained most of the songs from the Beatles' second album, With The Beatles. He added the single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," its B-side "This Boy," plus "I Saw Her Standing There" (from their first U.K. album Please Please Me). Furthermore, Dexter gave himself a production credit (as he would on the next six bastardized U.S. releases). His "production" work consisted of adding reverb echo to George Martin's clean mixes and taking the mono mix of original U.K. singles to create a fake stereo sound. He did this by recording two mono versions together, slightly out of sync, then adding echo, and calling it Duophonic.

DJ Carroll James and Marsha Albert

When "I Want to Hold Your Hand" became The Beatles' first #1 song in America, it might not have ever happened if it had not been for the American TV network coverage of the mass hysteria over their show at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth in the late fall of 1963. Marsha Albert was a teenager in Washington D.C., who just happened to see the film clip, and became so taken with their music that she phoned her local radio station, WWDC. She asked the DJ if he could play something – anything – by The Beatles. Carroll James, the DJ who took the call, was hardly a rock fan. (His taste that ran towards the current jazz pop of Nat King Cole.) He wasn't even the least bit aware of The Beatles. But he was curious enough to try and hunt down one of their songs. On a station break, he happened upon a copy of the British import of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." On a whim, he invited Albert to the station to introduce it on the air. Marsha excitedly arrived at the station to read an introduction that James had written on the back of a traffic report. Within moments, she helped launch The Beatles into the consciousness of the nation’s capital. After playing the song, James asked listeners to call in with their own responses to "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The switchboard went berserk. There wasn't a free line anywhere as people swarmed to express their enthusiasm. Not only did James play the song within the next hour, he played it every night that week while announcing it as a WDDC exclusive.

When Capitol Records caught wind of the flurry of activity at WDDC, they faced a curious problem. Although company President Alan Livingston was set to issue “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” finally overruling Dave Dexter Jr., Capitol wasn't planning to do so until January. Because of the huge demand inspired by WDDC's daily broadcast of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," they moved the date up to December 17 in the U.S. Nobody was prepared for the explosion of interest. After all, the last American #1 for a British act had been The Tornadoes with "Telstar" in 1962. Before that, you had to reach back to the non-rock of Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" in 1961, or Vera Lynn's "Auf Wiedersehen" in 1952. By January 10, 1964, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold its first million in the United States, just in time for The Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. 

The albums created and collected in The U.S. Albums were to chart that intensity as America reeled from the cultural invasion from England in the coming years. But these bastardized records, with banal titles like Something New (really?), Beatles '65 and Beatles VI, demonstrated (despite all their musical excitement) that their record company used greed and negligence to cover up its lack of foresight. They exploited the cultural storm for maximum impact and profit. But issuing this new box set, in such a cavalier manner, by airbrushing some of their past sins, Capitol Records continues that dishonoured tradition of paying tribute to one of their most successful acts by taking full advantage of those who made them so.

- originally published on January 23, 2014 in Critics at Large.

- Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Revisiting Rubber Soul

It's been over half a century since The Beatles recorded and released what many consider to be their masterpiece. Kevin Courrier, in Critics at Large, not only examined what made the album their best, but the progeny that came in its wake.

A Masterpiece and its Spiritual Cousins: Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds and Aftermath

Over 45 years ago,The Beatles released Rubber Soul which is arguably their best album.While taking over 113 hours to record, compared to the one-day they took putting together their debut Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul was startlingly innovative taking the R&B genre beyond its purist roots. Unlike many other white pop artists, especially the ones who merely paid reverence to the style and attitude of black blues and R&B, or channelled the essence of the form (as did Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac), The Beatles sublimated rhythm and blues into their continually expanding musical fabric. And the record would irrevocably change the direction and sound of pop music.

With a densely intelligent collection of love songs, Rubber Soul confronted a variety of issues: the cost of romantic desire (“I’m Looking Through You”), the power of love to heal (“The Word”), as well as to hurt (“Girl”); contemplation (“In My Life”); and the deep regrets of loss (“Nowhere Man”). On the record, The Beatles broadened their musical identity, too, by introducing an original interpretation of classic R&B (specifically the Memphis Stax soul sound) while refusing to become defined by black music (as many other British blues bands had). The Beatles instead defined their own interpretation of American black music.

Political Mirrors

At last night's Academy Awards, Ben Affleck's Argo took away the top prize. it was a prize many early on thought would go to Zero Dark Thirty. In this recent post in Critics at Large, Kevin Courrier suggests why Argo lingers longer in the memory.

The Hindsight of Time: Ben Affleck’s Argo

Ben Affleck's Argo

There are a number of good reasons why many of the post-9/11 movies (In the Valley of Elah, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me) have failed to come to terms with the aftermath of that tragic moment and the subsequent wars that followed. Besides depicting those events through conventional melodrama employed only to stir audience empathy, these films actually leave little to the imagination.While trying to make sense of a time that is still being played out, each movie leaves scant room for reflection. This might be why Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the mission to kill bin Laden, fails to resonate with the power the subject warrants. Despite all the heated debate about the picture’s point of view on torture, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) actually backs away from the dramatic core of that subject.

Mothers and Sons

South Korea has a national cinema that is now laying claim internationally. One of those directors, Bong Joon-Ho, furthered that claim in 2010 with Mother, which is reviewed below by Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large.

The Ties That Bind: Bong Joon-Ho's Mother

Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother is devastatingly good. It begins as a story about a middle-aged single mother in a small South Korean town with a mentally-challenged son who gets incarcerated for the murder of a young woman. But it ultimately goes far beyond the basic mechanics of melodrama. For Bong, the director of Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2007), genre is merely the starting point for a more searing examination of the family ties that bind.

The umbilical chord that holds a mother to her son is also the link between a country divided and a society not far removed from the rituals of authoritarianism. Like Germany in the post-war and Berlin Wall years, Korea is also a severed nation. But unlike the post-war German directors, like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who used genre pictures as a means to express their guilt and hopelessness, Bong Joon-Ho uses conventional narrative to uncork the violence and pain of being estranged. Given that authoritarianism imposes ritual, Bong is naturally drawn to genres that have rules – but rules he feels compelled to break. The Host, for example, begins as a humorous, wily tribute to '50s monster movies like Creature of the Black Lagoon and Godzilla, but it quickly becomes a surprisingly stirring drama about family honor and loyalties. When a slimy reptilian monster (a product of chemical pollution) kidnaps the daughter of a rather dim-witted father, he goes on a torturous mission to get her back. The Host evolved into that rare horror film, one that became inconsolably poignant. Mother shares many of The Host’s virtues, as well as some aspects from his first film, Memories of Murder, a procedural about a Korean serial-killer.

The Facebook Journal (Part Two)

When Kevin Courrier first signed up on Facebook last summer, he had no idea just what he was going to do with it. In time (that is, in short time), he created a salon with a number of 'friends' whereby many things minor and major were discussed and posted. Here is a sample from Part II:

The Facebook Salon, Part II

Earlier in the month, I included a sampling from my Facebook page which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with friends about social and cultural matters. Some have described it as a salon. Here is more of the same. As before, it also includes borrowings of songs and photos that others have posted and that I've commented on:

Joni Mitchell draws on the intimacy of Nina Simone's version of Rodgers and Hart's "Little Girl Blue" (which also begins on piano with a Christmas tune) to tell a tale of independence that doesn't so much have a destination in mind, but rather a sense of place that's only uncovered in the journey. While her feet would indeed learn to fly, the ground was never certain beneath her. Don Quixote had his windmills while Mitchell had the road in which to tilt forward. Those fascinating elliptical tales of romantic entanglement and creative struggles that followed Blue (1971) might just have started right here on that "River."

The Facebook Journal (Part One)

When Kevin Courrier first signed up on Facebook last summer, he had no idea just what he was going to do with it. In time (that is, in short time), he created a salon with a number of 'friends' whereby many things minor and major were discussed and posted. Here is but a sample.

The Facebook Salon

I was rather late joining the Facebook revolution (which seems to have now been passed on to Twitter). There was nothing personal in my decision to resist. I welcome innovative technological changes providing we use our powers of discrimination in using them so that we become accountable rather than blind consumers. For me, however, I discovered that what worked best was creating a virtual salon, an ongoing soiree where all my 'friends' could be part of a never-ending discussion on a variety of subjects. Sometimes these items were created by me. At other times, I shared items posted by others. On occassion, it's a quick review of a movie, a song, or a book. It can also be a cartoon, a painting, or a photo with a short comment. Here is a sampling:

...or Barfly for Brats.

Having just seen Spielberg's Lincoln earlier today, I can see why some of my colleagues and friends have found it dull. But I think there's a strong emotional undercurrent in this picture below its formal theatrical structure. And it held me to the very end. In a sense,Lincoln holds up a mirror to the ideals of the current Obama-era by imagining the country Obama inherited but can't yet claim for himself. The picture carries the weariness of unfulfilled prophesy; of the tiredness we also registered on Obama's face during his first debate with Romney.

Lincoln looks back at how the stain of slavery was abolished, but it also connects with us in the present with Obama (who is the true inheritor of the vision Lincoln has for his country). Only Obama can't act on that inheritance with the shrewd political skills of a Lincoln because he is cornered by the lingering racism that Lincoln's amendment couldn't abolish. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner shrewdly submerge the drama of Lincoln's life into a more contemplative examination of the troubled paths taken by Lincoln, his allies, and his adversaries, to keep those promises; promises that would continue to resonate unresolved in the years to follow the Civil War.

Character Director

There are some movie directors who make unassuming films that aren't formula entertainment. One of those artists, Irvin Kershner, when he died in 2010, almost went unnoticed himself. Kevin Courrier, in Critics at Large, delves into why.

The Invisible Artist: Irvin Kershner 1923-2010

When George Lucas tapped director Irvin Kershner, who died last Saturday at 87 after a three-year battle with lung cancer, to direct The Empire Strikes Back (the sequel to Star Wars), Kershner asked him, "Of all the younger guys around, all the hot-shots, why me?" Lucas replied, "Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you're not Hollywood." Lucas wasn't kidding. Nor was he simply pandering to the veteran director. Although Irvin Kershner had been making movies in Hollywood since the late fifties, he certainly wasn't typical Hollywood. He didn't make the most obvious commercial entertainments, but rather he examined with thoughtful consideration what constitutes commercial entertainment. Which is one reason why The Empire Strikes Back was a significant improvement over its predecessor.

Bold as Love

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, he left a body of work that's still compelling today. But it's where his work was heading towards the end that captivated Kevin Courrier in this piece in Critics at Large.

Jimi Hendrix Drifting

When Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, over forty years ago this month, I was in high school. It was a time when a number of key pop figures – all in their twenties – never got to see thirty. A year earlier, it was Brian Jones of The Stones, and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison would soon follow Hendrix to the grave. Besides providing you with a keen sensitivity regarding death (right at that moment when you saw nothing but life straight ahead), you also realized that a person's genius, their gifts, even their youth, could do nothing to protect them.

Hendrix's death hit me harder than the others because I came to truly love the paradoxical nature of his music. (In a song that fundamentally came out of the blues like "Burning of the Midnight Lamp," he combined a harpsichord with a wah-wah electric guitar and a chorale section to create a powerfully intense emotional soundscape.) Although Jimi Hendrix was always fully recognized as a virtuoso and theatrical guitar stylist, he was rarely discussed in any great depth in terms of his gifts as a poet, singer and music innovator. (For those insights, it's best to read David Henderson's 1978 biography 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky which still hasn't been equalled.) But John Morthland, writing in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, captured key aspects of those many gifts that Henderson elaborates on. "As a guitarist, Hendrix quite simply redefined the instrument, in the same way that Cecil Taylor redefined the piano or John Coltrane the tenor sax," he wrote. "As a songwriter, Hendrix was capable of startling, mystical imagery as well as the down-to-earth sexual allusions of the bluesman." Those sexual allusions though also led to a particular kind of theatricality that the artist himself was growing tired of indulging. Joni Mitchell, who met Hendrix in Ottawa towards the end of his life, recognized immediately his frustration about the public and critical perception of him based on those sexual allusions. "He made his reputation by setting his guitar on fire, but that eventually became repugnant to him," Mitchell told The Guardian in 1970. "'I can't stand to do that anymore,' he said, 'but they've come to expect it. I'd like to just stand still'."

Paying Tribute

When a number of artists, both veteran and contemporary, paid tribute to Bob Dylan last year in a four-disc omnibus for Amnesty International, Kevin Courrier wrote in Critics at Large about the daunting task of paying tribute to the artist's voice while not losing your own.

The Author's Voice: Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International

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Film critic André Bazin

The French film critic André Bazin once offered that the reason we get so few great movies from great books is that film directors are intimidated by the author's voice. He speculated that the film adapter, who obviously loves the work of fiction, feels in danger of falling short of the book's greatness. Therefore, Bazin thought, it was much easier for filmmakers to make great movies out of ordinary books, bad books, or even pulp fiction. It's an interesting theory. He's right, for example, that there are few great films made out of classic writers such as Dostoyevsky (remember William Shatner in Richard Brooks' woebegotten The Brothers Karamazov?), Virginia Woolf (let's just give a huge pass to Michael Cunningham's nod to Woolf in The Hours), or Tolstoy (War and Peace with Rod Steiger, anyone?). But Jim Thompson (The Grifters), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) have provided some pretty terrific pictures. Coppola's The Godfather may be the best example of a great film coming out of a mostly lousy book. The only exception to Bazin's rule perhaps is Charles Dickens, celebrating his 200th birthday this year somewhere in the great beyond, who has had more good movies made from his books than any other great writer. But that's likely due to Dickens writing in a popular dramatic style; that is, constructing his stories in a manner that anticipated the model for film narrative which D.W. Griffith would build upon in his first silent pictures. (Outside of Dickens, Henry James and James Joyce might be two other exceptions.)

Road Maps

We all know that history is more than a collection of facts. History, as demonstrated in Kevin Courrier's review of The Dustbin of History in Critics at Large, can also provide road maps to events still in the process of being defined.

Rummaging Through the Dustbin: Greil Marcus's The Dustbin of History (1996)

For all the value we assign to history, both as a field of study in school and for understanding the ways of the world, it's also dead meat. Our best friend's marriage ends and we say it's history. Sports commentators, eager to create an air of finality, always remark: "With that goal in overtime, the playoff series becomes history." One goal and everything that came before it is now superfluous. The winning team moves on; the losing team is history. History might even be worse than dead meat because (to paraphrase Johnny Rotten) it's got nooooo future. It's history.

In high school, we often treated the subject as a function of correcting mistakes. The teacher told us that if we studied what took place back then, then maybe we could prevent it from happening again. Know it and you can control it. History was something you could beat by simply having all the right facts.With certain truths on your side, you could freeze an epoch in order to properly dissect it. But why should history's dustbin become such a convenient dumping ground for facts left behind like last week's garbage? This is the central question in Greil Marcus's uneven, yet fascinating book The Dustbin of History (Harvard University Press, 1996), which sets out to provide a road map to find some answers.

Hitchcock & Chaplin

Making sense of an artist's body of work, and its history, is complicated by time. When you live through the artist's life the experience of their work is much different than if you didn't live through their time. Kevin Courrier examined that aspect of understanding art when he reviewed two films by two of cinema's earliest practitioners in Critics at Large.

Pioneers Making History: Criterion's Release of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps & Chaplin's The Gold Rush

A few years ago, when I was working on my book Artificial Paradise, about the dark side of The Beatles' utopian dream, I was speaking to a friend who was a clerk in a Toronto music store. In the midst of our conversation about my work, he described to me his own experience hearing The Beatles' music. "The first album I really discovered was Revolver," he told me. "Then I went back to With The Beatles and later found Rubber Soul." What was jarring, of course, was that he began his quest with one of their later 1966 albums, arguably their best, before jumping back to their second record in 1963, a fiercely eclectic songbook primer of hard rock, balladry and R&B, before landing in 1965 on the band's most radical reinterpretation of American rhythm and blues and folk. What startled me most was his seemingly arbitrary dance through history. And it left me wondering how he could ever begin to make sense of it.

Sean Penn Redux

With Sean Penn currently starring as Mickey Cohen in the new Gangster Squad, it seemed timely to revisit a 1996 interview with the star by Kevin Courrier about acting and directing which was posted in Critics at Large last fall.

The Pennultimate Challenge: Five Reasons Why Sean Penn Wanted to Give Up Acting and Become a Director (1996)

Sean Penn

Back in June, Mark Clamen wrote about a new Sean Penn film, This Must Be the Place, which had opened all over Europe, but had yet to have a theatrical release in North America. "This Must Be the Place turns out to be either the strangest road movie ever made or the single quirkiest Holocaust-themed movie since Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds(although I should stress that Nazis notwithstanding the two films have absolutely nothing else in common)," Mark wrote. "The only reason I'd hesitate to call This Must Be the Place a Neglected Gem is that I’m hoping there's still time it will find the wider audience it deserves." Mark finally gets his wish when this Italian/French co-production opens next month in North America. Of Penn's performance, Mark wrote that "Penn plays the character with a low-burning intensity...[his] performance ultimately reveals an eminently likable man, but it takes much of the movie to get to know him." That "low-burning intensity" of Sean Penn became the subject of a profile written by Kevin Courrier in 1996 when he spoke with him at a Toronto Film Festival round-table when the actor, promoting his second film as a director, The Crossing Guard, was considering abandoning acting for the director's chair. In the piece, Courrier takes five of Penn's reasons for the career shift and examines their merit.

The Politics of Experience

If there was a film last year that didn't get the audience it deserved, it was Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. Kevin Courrier, in Critics at Large, wrote about it in the context of movie violence.

True Blood: Margaret & The Experience of Violence

"I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in them – murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the propagation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident. It is a story for the films. You couldn't write it in fiction or for the stage. But on the screen it would be good. Listen – it may turn out to be a powerful thing!"

– "A Conversation on Film With Leo Tolstoy" quoted in the appendix of film historian Jay Leyda's Kino: A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film (Princeton University Press,1960); and later reprinted in Roger Ebert's Book of Film (W.W. Norton, 1997).

In September 2001, it was my twentieth year as a film critic covering the Toronto International Film Festival. It was also the year of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Before the carnage took place, I'd already been seeing a number of pictures that dealt with the subject of violence. But my response to the violence was as varied as the films themselves. South Korean director Kim Ki-duk's drama Address Unknown, for instance, attempted to tackle the cultural stigma of Korean women who had had children out of wedlock with American USO soldiers stationed in Seoul. But the director quickly lost sight of the more ambiguous ramifications of the story. Kim's unbridled rage instead got the better of him. There were so many florid scenes of mutilation and brutality that it overshadowed any compassion we might have had for the characters.