 | Evergreen A film by Enid Zentelis, shot on location in Everett, Washington. |
SIFF: WEEK ONE (SHORT RECAP); WEEK TWO - WHAT'S AHEAD SIFF 2004 is now one-week old. It's been a busy but entertaining week, with its share of highs and lows. Not entirely unexpected, Opening Night last Thursday kicked off the fest with a slight disappointment. Nick Cassavetes' "The Notebook," a good-old-fashioned story of love, is hardly a "Dr. Zhivago." Set at a lakeside nursing home, two seniors (James Garner and Gena Rowlands) share a senior moment of nostalgic reverie from a more innocent but difficult time, as Garner's character reads from a faded notebook about young love on the cusp of World War II, and spans through the years following the war. As the Pope was allegedly quoted as saying about Mel Gibson's nail-biter, "it is as it was."
On screen this weekend, look for the following the films. Links below go to official sites or to summaries about the film from SIFF's web site:
Final note: The Director's Cut of "Donnie Darko" has been sold out, but there might rush tickets. There has a been a lot of buzz surrounding this one. Also, not for the faint of heart, but Bruce La Bruce fans (you know who you are) should get in line to see "Raspberry Reich" at midnight Friday 28 May at the Egyptian. It's a new one from Canadian bad boy director of "Hustler White." Happy fest!
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 | Eartha Kitt Torch chanteuse has fresh energy at Jazz Alley. |
SASSY EARTHA KITT BRINGS HER LEGENDARY CABARET TO SEATTLE Last Saturday night I saw Eartha Kitt perform an hour-and-a-half set at the Jazz Alley. While my expectations were high to begin with, I did not anticipate an evening of music and comedy that would rank among the very best I have ever seen. The sassy seventy-seven year-old singer — looking great in a tight-fitting gold dress — was the very definition of stage presence. Kitt’s powerful voice moved within a broad spectrum of modes, both musical and emotional, and her comic timing was perfect. Her more sexually suggestive numbers were broken-up with sly, provocative comments frequently directed at embarrassed and bemused men in the audience. While these skills are no doubt the result of decades touring around the globe, what was most remarkable about Kitt’s performance was a freshness and high level of energy she brought to the stage. Kitt’s musical medium is not traditional jazz but the old cosmopolitan language of cabaret that was once the domain of Marlene Dietrich. While it may be regarded today by many as hopelessly retro and a genre suitable only for the more convincing drag performer, I believe that it presents all kinds of potential challenges young contemporary jazz vocalists instinctively shy away from. Perhaps this is because most of them would simply be unable to master such extroverted forms of self-expression.
I must confess that I find Norah Jones and Diana Krall dull and uninspiring. Their emotional range is limited, their sentiments conventional. Yet in many ways they seem perfectly representative of their respective generations. As my friend Ljiljana might say — quoting from the Roman poet Catullus — “There’s no salt in the bowl!”
So where is our Eartha Kitt? Are there no young vocalists who “Want to Be Evil” anymore? Kitt makes it look like so much fun. | |
 | The Graffiti Artist featuring Pepper Fajans in James Bolton's film shot on location in Portland and Seattle. |
SIFF BEGINS The Seattle International Film Festival begins tomorrow. Yes, SIFF is here already, and like a vacation into the realm of light and shadow, spectacle and boredom, and armchair time travel, three weeks of film and video will keep anyone interested in something new, something old, something borrowed, something blue. At least that's what Secret Film Festival passholders are told each weekend during the festival run.
The Secret Film Fest, by the way, is a club of filmgoers who take an oath and swear they will keep secret the films they see. For legal and other reasons, SIFF cannot publicly advertise what films they screen. It wouldn't be secret, would it? And press cannot attend (or at least report on what they see).
But, for those who will miss out on this event at SIFF — which usually sells out when tickets go on sale, there are plenty of other opportunities to catch a film over the next 25 days through June 13.
Here's a short line-up of arts-related films SIFF will be screening. Links below go to official sites or sites about the film:
For more information, visit SIFF's web site. Tickets are presently on sale online, and on the third floor at Pacific Place (downtown Seattle) and at the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill. Films will be screened at the Broadway Performance Hall, the Cinerama, the Egyptian Theater, the Harvard Exit, and at Pacific Place. The festival runs from May 20 through June 13, daily. | |
 | Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California. Photo: Daniel E. Glenn. |
MANZANAR INTERPRETATIVE CENTER OPENS IN CALIFORNIA On April 24th, the US National Park Service opened an interpretive center at the site of the Manzanar Relocation Camp in the middle of the Owens Valley — a largely unpopulated area of eastern California that lies between the snow-capped Sierra Nevada range and the more arid Inyo Mountains to the east. The Owens Valley is known primarily as the area from which the Los Angeles Aqueduct flows. The river that once drained into the now-dry Owens Lake was diverted nearly a century ago to a irrigate orchards in the San Fernando Valley, and later, to fill the swimming pools of subsequent housing developments. Anyone who has read Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert or seen the PBS documentary of the same name will be familiar with the story.
Midway between Los Angeles and Mammoth and at an elevation of some 4,000 feet, Manzanar is one of the loneliest, most isolated places in California. I traveled there some years ago on a June day when temperatures reached 100 degrees. What surprised me was how little remained of this forgotten place, where interned Japanese-Americans struggled against both psychological despair and an inhospitable natural environment to recreate what they had left behind in the West Coast communities were most were born.
At the Eastern California Historical Museum in nearby Independence — among displays of artifacts from miners and other early settlers, yellowed newspaper clippings that report on the clandestine diversion of water to LA, and movie stills from Gunga Din and other old Hollywood pictures filmed at the Alabama Hills a few miles south — were a multitude of photographs and ephemera that gave some sense of the daily lives of the Japanese-Americans who lived there.
Looking at these Manzanar displays, you got the sense of a people determined to continue leading their lives just as they had done back home. Printed programs and black-and-white photos from dances and other social events looked like any which might have come from a local church or high school during those years. Photographs also showed how these interned citizens turned parched, dusty plots of land into lush, communal agricultural areas.
At Manzanar, however, all that remained were the foundations of demolished buildings and the recently restored camp gate. At some point the government had decided to tear down the camp, at least in part to eradicate the memory of one of the uglier chapters in United States history. The sole monument to the lives of those interned at Manzanar was the large white obelisk that stood in the empty graveyard against a bright blue sky.
I hope to return to Manzanar someday to visit the interpretive center, which I suspect will house the artifacts I saw at the museum in Independence and much more. It is important for our government to remind us of what can happen during a time of nationalist hysteria and to honor the lives of those citizens who strove to maintain their dignity and well-being when it suddenly turned against them. | |
 | Confessions of a Burning Man Photo: Brett Colvin |
FILM: CONFESSIONS OF A BURNING MAN Directed by Un Su Lee and Paul Barnett (2003) On Wednesday last week, The Big Picture screened Confessions of a Burning Man in its final run at Belltown's cine-salon. Directed by Un Su Lee and Paul Barnett, Confessions follows four individuals who participated in 2002's Burning Man event, held each year coinciding with Labor Day Weekend, at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The four participants from California include Samantha Weaver, an actress from San Francisco, Anna Getty, heiress to the Getty family fortune, Kevin Epps, a resident from a low-income San Francisco community, and Michael Winaker, a New York native and San Franscisco resident who worked as taxi driver in the Bay Area during its dot-com boom. Each one attended Burning Man for the first time, and, willingly or not, became transformed by their individual experience of Burning Man.
Disappointingly, Burning Man organizers have barred filmmakers from documenting the event until recently. Beyond Black Rock, directed by Damon Brown, is the first documentary to receive official blessing to chronicle the event's history and offer a glimpse at the 2002 annual. Confessions, however, is not an exposé of the end-of-summer event but a portrait of the four participants' sojourn to Burning Man. The result, fueled with the downtempo soundtrack by Darkhorse, is combination road movie, travel adventure, and camping video journal as the film's interviews and off-camera narratives orbited around the central idol at Black Rock City's La Playa in Nevada.
Some background first: Burning Man emerged from a private event that happened at the close of summer in San Francisco back in 1986. Artists Larry Harvey and Jerry James, Burning Man's founders, wanted to mark the occasion by burning a wood sculpture at Baker's Beach. Each year afterwards, curious onlookers came to see the burning ritual, until a change of venue was in order. By 1990, the number of attendees swelled in ranks, and the Burning Man event relocated to an arid stretch of lake bed at Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
Through the Nineties, Burning Man has blossomed to amazing proportions with participants coming from all over the world and contributing to the art colony's short-lived temporality under the blazing sun. While Burning Man is an experience unique to its adherents and participants, it is kind of a free-wheeling city bustling with a Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome energy, and uplifted with a Carnival-like atmosphere that's been cross-mutated with strains of New Age spirituality and creativity.
Confessions captures a sense of all this with irreverant footage of burners playing chess with dildos for chessmen, practicing bikram yoga in the sun, and dancing in outlandish costumes at all-night rave parties that would be at home in the Star Wars Cantina bar.
The film penetrates this atmosphere through the eyes of its four participants, or "burners," as each of them ponder what Burning Man means in their lives and how the occasion will change them. Relationships, past and present are considered, as well as the personal transformations they expect to make. Imagine if a documentary was made about the contestants on "Survivor" and how their lives have been shaped by the experience.
Away from the central energy of the Burning Man spectacle and week-long event itself, the four express their transformations by week's close. Michael Winaker, who drove a makeshift taxi at Black Rock City that week, inveighs against the predominantly white educated burners that comprise the event's predominant demographic, but ultimately embraces the experience. When the burning man idol is engulfed in flames culminating in the event's close, participants toss items in the pyre as symbolic breaks with the past. Winaker, a nervous chainsmoker, stops short of tossing his cigarettes into the flames claiming he's too much of a coward.
Comparatively, Samantha Weaver throws her appointment book with reminders of her sexual past with an ex-boyfriend who engaged her to participate in the dark side of sex. This release, for her, liberates her from that memory. In these final scenes, the event unfolds with climactic ritual, one that sprinkles ash into the desert and vanishes like a sand mandala. | |
 | © Kraftwerk Monday 26 April 2004 The Paramount, Seattle, WA |
Kraftwerk: Press Play Hey, where did the time go? Before you check your Smart Watch to get the latest news in headlines, stock ticker and weather forecasts, do you remember 1975? Remember what life was like before SARS, Y2K, and email? Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall? Before dot-coms, raves, grunge, and Chernobyl? The 1970s is, perhaps — culturally — the most influential decade from the 20th Century. And the year 1975 pretty much saw the end of the Sixties and a changing era with the American pullout from the Vietnam War. It was also the year the Baader-Meinhof trials began in West Germany, and, despite Cold War differences, Soviet and U.S. scientists collaborated on the joint effort for the Apollo Soyuz Space Mission which launched that summer.
In the world of pop music, Pink Floyd followed up their 1973 concept piece Dark Side of the Moon with Wish You Were Here. The Who released the film version of their delirious rock opera Tommy, and David Bowie minted the soulful Young Americans featuring the radio hit "Fame." In Seattle, that was also the year that local lipstick-n-lace rockers Heart recorded "Crazy on You."
That's how long it has been since Kraftwerk has been to Seattle on a tour promoting Radio-Aktivitat (Radio-Activity), the former West German band's first English-translated record and fifth release.
Kraftwerk has all but disappeared into obscurity since the early 1980s, and generated a mystique surrounding the band and recording output limited to their mostly-influential Seventies releases. Pop music today — and ever since — owes its debt to Kraftwerk's pulsing rhythmic long players like Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express which practically spawned the advent of techno and contemporary dance music. Computer Welt (Computer World) was their last full-length studio album which was pressed in 1981. Their 22-year absence from the recording studio however, has caught up with them, and the current tour seems to recapitulate their desire to make up for lost time.
At the Paramount Theater, time and space seemed fluid, expansive. Kraftwerk's concert last week in Seattle was one of three whistle stops during their short U.S. tour, which included play dates in San Francisco and Indio, California, for the Coachella Valley Music Festival.
It seems fitting, though, that Kraftwerk appeared in Seattle — for a second time, but possibly their last given their age and the rigors of touring. (Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the band's original members, are nearly 60). Seattle has come of age since the 1950s and 60s: once, Seattle bustled as the Jet City, vibrant in the Boeing-fueled economy and as a major West Coast port. Its emergent utopian skyline suggested the buoyant optimism of the city's young energy, and crowned with the Space Needle from the 1962 World's Fair.
By 1975, when Kraftwerk first appeared in Seattle on tour, the Kingdome was a year from completion and the economy lagging. Last week's Kraftwerk performance in town is a curious choice for its brief American tour; there were no play dates in New York, Los Angeles, or Detroit! Perhaps, Seattle, more than other American cities, is more aligned with the Kraftwerk aesthetic. In a town that has become one of the software industry's major business and cultural hubs — with Adobe and Getty Images in Fremont, and Microsoft in neighboring Redmond, echoes of Kraftwerk's "Home Computer" are mere mouse-clicks away. I program my home computer / Beam myself into the future.
Although their performance spanned a retrospective of their earlier work, Kraftwerk's two-hour production suggested time travel through the circuit board of computer-generated sound. Their show opened with a simple gesture: shadowy silhouettes projected against a scrim featured the four band members poised with their keyboards and laptops, red light flooded the stage behind them. The scrim gave way to the Düsseldorf Fab 4 dressed in charcoal black suits, red dress shirts and black ties. Opening with their anthem "Die Mensch-Maschine" ("Man-Machine") computer animation loomed behind them was evocative of early Soviet graphics spelling out the song's title in block white letters against a black background. The song's hypnotic cantata twisted and turned.
During the set, Kraftwerk later had changed into tight-fitting body suits adorned with a grid of electric green light. Kraftwerk, appearing iconic as the man-machine, morphed into their spectacle of techno. After performing newer material, including "Elektro Kardiogramm" and "Aéro Dynamik" from last year's Tour de France Soundtracks, the band left the stage looking like cyborg computer engineers from TRON.
Their performance suggested time travel with music accompanying split-screen visuals, computer graphics, film footage, and text — all of which project Kraftwerk's distinct perspective of a bright future coupled with failed utopian dreams. "Autobahn" bounced and perked with the whir and zip of a country drive on Germany's expansive highway system. Nostalgic imagery of roadside picnics and weekenders flickered in mid-century news reels behind the band. Today, traffic congests most major motorways throughout the world, as their split-screen film illustrates.
Their music, which distills the polite grace of Viennese waltzes and court dances to minimalist effect, pulsed with linear repetitiveness and propulsion. In concert, their songs "Autobahn," "Tour de France," and "Trans-Europe Express" best exemplify the band's passions towards sport (specifically, cycling) and travel. Apart from the chilly "Vitamin" which featured animated capsules raining half-speed with numbing slowness and "Radio-Aktivitat" — a hymn originally about the power of radio broadcasts but reworked to suggest radiation fallout (Harrisburg, Tschernobyl, Hiroshima), Kraftwerk kept their rhythmic set upbeat and steady.
Towards the end of their set, the band left the stage for an encore. Their absence produced audience excitement for what was to come: the robots. All through the Paramount, fans held out cellphones, waving their small blue square displays like lighters at arena shows in times past. After some delay, the stage scrim opened to reveal not the band, but their likeness as mechanized mannequins while music from their signature number "We Are the Robots" hummed with repetitive drones. It was a fitting spectacle, redolent of one of Fritz Lang's themes in Metropolis: one day in the future, robots will replace the work of people. And, likewise, rock and roll will become irrelevant. Pivot, turn, and press play. | |
