I have raved elsewhere about Dear Lemon Lima, a dreamy, indie film that doesn't shoehorn its characters into the Disney/junior executive mold that has polluted an entire subgenre of American films -- those for and about adolescents.
British viewers hadn't been able to find either the film or the soundtrack, but I have good news: both are available at Amazon and iTunes.
If, however, you'd like to hear the full soundtrack, the composer, Sasha Gordon, has made it available on her YouTube channel. It took some digging to locate, so bookmark the link, or this post, if you're interested. Once you have navigated to Ms. Gordon's channel, simply click the "Videos" link, and look for videos bearing the image you see at the top of this post.
I was at that in-between stage: old enough to go to the movies on my own, but not able to afford it. So, the first place I heard this song was on the Academy Awards telecast. Jennifer Warnes, who performed it on the soundtrack, was not invited to sing it for the telecast. That honor went to some C-list Vegas hack -- the way they did in those days.
These days, the songs are so bad they can't even find five of them to nominate.
I sound old, but not vintage, unlike this song. Composer Randy Newman has an uncanny knack for making songs sound as though they were written at the end of the 19th Century when, in fact, they were written one hundred years later.
This is Jennifer Warnes with "One More Hour" from the 1981 film, Ragtime.
I have been to Lake Elsinore only once. I was about nine years old, and the occasion was a picnic with my parents' oldest friends, and some friends of theirs. If I had known what was lurking there, I would have begged off with some sudden, mysterious ailment.
Luckily, I never encountered Elsinore's fabled tarantulas -- or their equally-storied natural predators, tarantula hawks -- except in gossip shared by horrified acquaintances, just a few years ago.
When I put it all together, I knew that, if Shakespeare's Hamlet had found himself parked at the Elsinore in Riverside County, he'd have known exactly what to do.
And by the way, you sulky brat, Check out the 3-inch-long, parasitic wasp winging your way
Here's the cast of the brilliant, Canadian TV series, Slings and Arrows, with another suggestion: "Cheer Up, Hamlet".
On Twitter the other day, I remarked that I'd probably spend the next four years with this soundtrack on repeat. Indeed, I might.
I don't remember what happened to this CD during the course of my nomadic existence. I only know that, all of a sudden, I missed it terribly, and was compelled to replace it immediately.
Yes, children, there are some CDs you simply must own, and this is one.
There seem to be as many interpretations of the Coen Brothers' dark, unsettling film, Inside Llewyn Davis,
as there are people who've seen it. I think the key is in this song --
the first song you hear in the film.
I think Llewyn spends the entire
film -- and a significant amount of time before the events in the film
take place (i.e. his relationship with Jean) -- looking for the
perfection of this one recording, and the one relationship that made it
possible.
He never finds it, and that's too bad. Although he exhibits
some stunningly-narcissistic behavior, he's not always wrong about other
people's blindness. The tragedy of the film is that the blind are leading the
blind right back onto the hamster wheel of hell -- and they don't even
know what they're looking for.
This is Oscar Isaac and Marcus Mumford with "Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)".
The very first thing I remember about Marni Nixon, who died on July 24, was this: She was the voice of Mary Poppins on the Disneyland Records compilation of songs from the film.
I was awfully young -- I must have been about six years old when the record was released. I don't know what possessed me to read the record labels (I had more than one of the singles), except that I read everything I could get my hands on. All I know is, those record labels formed an impression of Marni Nixon that would last for years.
The next thing I remember about Marni Nixon is that she had come to my college to give a master class. Please! I was digging The Who and The Buffalo Springfield, plus whatever indie/punk/jazz fusion stuff my far-edgier friends could throw at me. Why would I want to spend two stultifying hours listening to the no-doubt saccharine singing advice of Mary Poppins?
Probably because every other voice major was planning to. In any case, I went.
I only remember two things about that class. The first was that sweet, Julie Andrews lookalike casually eviscerating the student accompanist's "cocktail piano". The second was her seen-it-all approach to the "Black Swan" aria from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, whose first lines are:
The sun has fallen and it lies in blood.
The moon is weaving bandages of gold.
O black swan, where, oh, where is my lover gone?
It didn't seem to matter that the vocal department's reigning diva was trying not to quake in her boots. The aria was wrong, and Marni Nixon was ready to take it apart.
I was just another wide-eyed voice major in the auditorium, glad for once not to be sitting in the front row, but Marni Nixon taught me a lot that day.
She taught me that you could look and sound fragile without breaking. She taught me that you could look and sing like an ingenue and still call others to task for faking it, ingenue roles be damned. She taught me that you could explore ugly, painful subject matter, even as people continued to underestimate you and your unimpressive baby face.
I did not realize at the time how much Marni Nixon had taught me, or that she had taught me anything at all. But, I look back now, and see that those hard lessons came from her and her alone. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Rest in peace, Ms. Nixon. Wherever you are, they've finally stopped underestimating you.
These days, niche marketing is all the rage. Social media makes all other media -- newspapers, radio, television -- endlessly customizable.
I like having those options. Even though I'm a baby boomer, I tended to like isolated tracks rather than complete albums long before iTunes happened. If iTunes had existed back then, I would have been in heaven and saved a lot of money on music besides. How that impacts artists is another story entirely, but I digress.
The 1980s were about the last time that everyone was on the same page in terms of what we watched, read, and listened to. Platinum albums were more common than they are today, but the far bigger loss is the sense of community. We all have less in common now, because niche marketing encourages us toward individual, rather than collective, expression.
As much as I love being able to buy one song from the CD, one episode from the TV show; as much as I love being able to read the news and editorials I want rather than those that the profit-obsessed editors of my local newspapers want me to read, I miss the communal experience we all had watching videos like this. Somehow, knowing the same songs, the same shows, made us seem more connected, and that's the worst, most dangerous thing about both niche marketing and the Internet -- the utter lack of real human connection. It is almost impossible to genuinely connect with someone these days. That makes me sad.
So, here I am doing something I almost never do -- pining for the old days. Funny, Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin are doing the same, all the while lamenting "Separate Lives".
Maybe it’s because Broken Circle Breakdown – the Belgian Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Film a couple of years back – isn’t a feel-good film in the tradition of O, Brother, Where Art Thou. Maybe it’s because BCB had its moment a couple of years ago, and people have since moved on.
Whatever it is, I don’t understand why my fellow bluegrass fans aren’t sharing videos from the film’s soundtrack on a regular basis.
It can’t be because all y'all haven’t seen the movie, can it?
Can it?
Do yourself a favor and take a look – whether for the first time, or all over again. BCB
has bluegrass themes, tunes, and culture deep in its bones. The passion
and skill with which these European actors interpret American bluegrass
and country music is tremendously satisfying.
In this clip, the film’s two lead characters offer a heart-rending version of Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You”.
Saturday, May 7, 2016
“The General Jumped At Dawn”, performed by The Golden Gate Quartet in the 1944 movie Hollywood Canteen.
These lyrics! Utopian togetherness in wartime.
Sadly, we couldn’t even manage it then.
Spike Jones was the Weird Al Yankovic of his day, but with musical training. He and his band, The City Slickers, could play anything – and did.
Been here, doing what Fred sings about in this video — figuratively speaking – for those who fancy themselves above the dreary necessity of having to pay for their mistakes. Here's what Joan Didion had to say about it in her 1961 essay on self-respect: "In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once calledcharacter,a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
"Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt."
If you've started it, for God's sake, finish it, or have the decency to say, face-to-face, why you cannot. From Follow the Fleet (1936), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”.
