beautiful, funny, sad & true

The other night I was supposed to get together with J, but she had a change of plans, so I scrounged around a bit to see what was happening in town. I called RockShowGirl to tell her about the movie Man on Wire, and how amazing it looked.  She was too exhausted to go out, having spent the last few hours running around town and then cleaning her apartment, so I went from being double-booked to being zero-booked.  The time was 7:22, and the movie started at 7:30.  ‘I can still make it to the movie,’ I thought.  ‘I don’t care if anybody else is free, I’m going.’  I grabbed my sweatshirt and my phone, jumped into the car that I’d borrowed from my neighbor for the evening, and raced over to the movie theater.  I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am that I did.

The movie was amazing, and I recommend it to all of you.  It’s a documentary about the French guy who walked across a tightrope that he hung (secretly and illegally, I might add) between the towers of the World Trade Center.  There have been many pictures taken of that famous act, but this documentary was based on Phillipe Petit’s book.  The story and the individual characters were all fascinating and intriguing.  It’s really one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, and I watch a lot of them.  Here’s a trailer:

Incidentally, another of my recent favorite documentaries is Helvetica.  Yes, it’s about the font.  No, it’s not the least bit boring.  It’s about art and design and culture and the ways that they are perceived over time.  Go rent it.  I promise you’ll enjoy it.  But don’t take my word for it; Helvetica is sexy.

And since we’re on the subject of documentaries, I just rented and received Theremin; an Electronic Odyssey.  A friend of mine wrote a play about Leon Theremin, and it inspired me to find out more about the supremely interesting inventor.  His most famous invention is the instrument which bears his name:

You play the theremin by holding each of your hands nearer or farther from each of the corresponding wires to control the volume with your left hand and the pitch with your right.  When you touch the lower loop, the volume drops out completely, and when you bring your hand closer to the vertical wire, the higher the pitch rises.  It looks odd, and it’s very tricky to play.  You’d recognize the sound from about a million science fiction movies and quite a few staggeringly popular songs, including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the theme from the original series of “Star Trek.”  The most famous person associated with playing the theremin is Clara Rockmore, who was a student and protegé of Leon Theremin himself.  She was the first to play ‘serious’ music on a theremin, with astounding results.  Here she is playing her most widely-acclaimed piece, “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns.

She’s so brilliant.  I could watch that all day.

Well, you now have your homework, and you know what to do, and now I have a favor to ask of you in return.  What are some of your favorite documentaries that you’d like to recommend to me?  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Wednesday night I was invited to see Ray LaMontagne with my friend Jeannie, who had an extra ticket.  I’m not super familiar with Ray’s music, but I do have one of his CD’s, and I enjoy it, and I’m certainly not going to pass up a chance to see him live.

We started the night by going to dinner.  We had a few choices for happy hour places, one of which was Kenny & Zuke’s.  We started there, and a quick perusal of the menu revealed that it was a total meat-a-thon.  We asked the waitress what their vegetarian choices were, and she checked over the menu and replied, “Well, there’s. . .an egg-salad sandwich. . .and, uhhh. . .tuna fish. . .?”  We thanked her and decided to go elsewhere.  We walked around the corner to Saucebox, which neither of us had been to before, but we both now agree that for happy hour it’s one of the best deals in town.  We’ll definitely be going back.

The show was awesome.  Leona Naess was the opening act, and she and her band were multi-talented and excellent.  She still seems fairly new to the game, but it’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here, and how she progresses.

Ray and his band took the stage and absolutely owned the audience the entire time, despite hardly saying a word until about three-quarters of the way through the show, when he talked about the sense of relief he felt after the election, and how he felt like partying and celebrating instead of singing his quiet, introspective, sad songs.  It was very endearing and funny.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with his band, though.  They were each good players individually, but it seemed to me that they just sort of plodded through every song, without many dynamic changes.  I would have liked to hear much more from the piano player especially, and the two or three times he finally got to take a solo, the audience really appreciated him.  The guitarist was unexciting (as are the overwhelming majority of rock guitarists), but he was absolutely stellar when he sat down to play the pedal steel.  Don’t know what a pedal steel is?  You’ll recognize the sound, for sure.  Here’s a video.  (No, this isn’t the guy from the show.  I couldn’t find a video of him.)  See if you can figure out what song he’s playing:

I will say, to be fair to Ray’s band, that they are phenomenal at playing quietly and keeping the energy level high while ‘holding back’, if you see what I mean.  A standout song for me was “Shelter”, which I was able to find a video of from his show in NYC a month ago.  Notice the awesome pedal steel solo, too.

So Ray and the band finished up their set and left the stage.  After a couple of minutes, he and the bass player came back out to do a heartbreaking version of the song “Jolene”, which an audience member had been loudly and drunkenly requesting before almost every other song of the night.  Incidentally, he didn’t even yell ‘THANK YOU’ after Ray finally played it, by which I think we were all a bit surprised and disappointed.

After he finished that song, the audience gave him a standing ovation, and then stayed on their feet to put their coats on and leave.  Probably a third of the audience started streaming out of the theater.  I told Jeannie, “That can’t be it.  The house lights aren’t even on yet.”   After a wait of almost ten minutes, the lights came back up and the band walked back out onstage.  The remaining crowd roared, and Jeannie and I took the opportunity to run down to the front.  We sat down in the aisle as he and the piano player started the introductory chords to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”  It was breathtaking, and those were the best two encore songs I’ve ever seen.

Great show, and just another great night in an incredibly full week.  More to come.

OneYearAgo

I won’t spend too much time dwelling on this here, because this not normally a political blog in any way, but suffice it to say that Tuesday’s election made me feel, quite possibly for the first time in my life, proud to call myself an American citizen.

A small group of us (Allanah, Lucy, Mike, Scotty and I) went to a huge radio show/election event at Grand Central Bowl over in southeast Portland, and had the time of our lives.  Every time a new state went Democratic, everyone in the place clapped and cheered.  John McCain’s speech was eloquent and gracious, and everyone was impressed.  That speech, incidentally, was the first time in which I felt I was again watching the John McCain who I actually used to like and respect, who I even considered voting for in previous elections.  It seems to me that he lost his personal focus this time, and he spent the last few months trying to pass himself off as a conservative, which he’s not.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Barack Obama appeared on the screen to wild applause.  Every one of his pauses was punctuated by our cheers and hands raised into the air.  We were surprised to see Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey in the crowd, as spectators.  I think everyone felt a huge sense of relief.  It took me until the next day at work to realize how anxious I’d been lately, because I was able to juxtapose my relaxed feeling with the tension of the previous day.

At the end of the night, our little group of friends did a collective high-five to commemorate the historic moment in our own small way.

Yay.  Here’s to a new country, and to a new world.

OneYearAgo

My Halloween was fun, but not exactly in the way I expected it would be.  My Plan was that I would dress up as a grown-up Harry Potter, with a lightning-shaped forehead scar and a wand, but just dress the way I normally do, with no wig or anything.  I thought that would’ve been very clever and hilarious, but I wasn’t able to find a makeup kit for the scar here locally, so that was the end of that.

At work, there were a whole bunch of people who dressed up, some of whom were very clever.  One of my friends dressed up as the dead girl from the movie The Ring.  I wanted to take a little video of her, and she asked if I wanted her to walk in a creepy way, and I said, “No way, it’s much creepier if you just walk normally.”

Five years ago today, Elliott Smith died.

It was officially considered a suicide, but the possibility of ‘foul play’ was never really ruled out.  I’m here today to pay a small tribute to someone whose music has moved me more than almost any other.

Although he had been living in L.A. for many years, those of us from Portland will always consider him one of our own, because Portland plays a large part in his songs, and there are a multitude of locations and references to the time he spent living here.  He wrote very dark and honest songs, in a way that very few other people are brave enough to do.  He’s most famous, probably, for his music being featured prominently in the movie Goodwill Hunting, and that early-to-middle period of his songwriting is my favorite.

The album “XO” was the first one that I bought.  I heard the song Waltz #2 (XO) on the radio, but didn’t catch the name of the artist.  The next time I heard it was about a month later, in Seattle.  I was in the back seat of a car, riding around with two of my friends, and the song came on.  I said, “I love this song. . .turn it up; I need to know who this is.”  That afternoon, I drove straight to a record store in the University District and picked it up.  I will always remember driving around Seattle in my little green Toyota truck, with the windows down, listening to that CD.

Elliott recorded many of his early songs and albums at Jackpot! Studios here in Portland, and his piano was at the studio for years after he had moved away, but it has since been donated to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.  At the time he died, the band I was in (listen to the songs “Please Let Me”, “Shadow” and “Windows Down”) was in the process of recording our album at Jackpot, and all of the piano tracks were recorded on that piano.  It was a haunting and surreal honor to be playing it, even moreso in retrospect.

Here’s one of Elliott’s earliest songs, “The Biggest Lie”, the video for which was filmed the day after he died.  The location is the Solutions Wall in a neighborhood of L.A., which was the backdrop for Elliott’s album “Figure 8.”

Miss you, Elliott.  This planet isn’t quite the same without you on it.

OneYearAgo