Sondheim Follies of 2007

I'm always surprised when Sondheim's music is referred to as cold and brainy—which is almost every time it's referred to. It's never struck me that way; it's not as if we're talking about dry modernist compositions after all, or if his shows don't concern themselves with matters of the heart. What Sondheim does is mostly avoid cheesy sentiment, and that alone passes for glacial detachment in the overheated world of musical theater.

The cliché about Sondheim was trotted out yet again in the Times' review of the Encores! version of his 1971 masterpiece, Follies: "The brittle shield of ice that was once widely believed to encase anything Stephen Sondheim wrote continues to melt apace…this “Follies” definitively tears off the stigma of cerebral chilliness that was attached to it when it opened 35 years ago." But it's easy to melt an inexistent shield of ice. I mean, who would ever think that the heartbreaking "Losing My Mind," probably the best-known song from Follies, is emotionally distant? And that number is far from being an oddity in the Sondheim catalog.

Anyway, on with the show. It's plain that the Follies a few thousand people were lucky enough to see this weekend was exceptional. Casey Nicholaw did a bang-up job with the staging and choreography, and special props to Ken Billington's extraordinary lighting, which made the ghostly younger cast appropriately monochromatic, even when they happened to step up to center stage to interact with their older selves; the effect was akin to a b&w movie character suddenly being dumped into a color picture.

But what really made the production exceptional were the performers, notably Donna Murphy (betraying hairline cracks in Phyllis's regal composure), Victoria Clark (particularly touching when evoking Sally's wasted life and heartbreak), Christine Baranski (our most naturally gifted comedienne, nailing all of Carlotta's lines and doing an impressive job—save for those tricky last notes—on "I'm Still Here") and JoAnne Worley (a scenery-chomping ringleader in the fabulous "Who's That Woman"?). While the number didn't get the most heated applause at the performance I saw, I loved Clark's version of "Losing My Mind," which I even preferred to Barbara Cook's (this is akin to saying that the earth is flat to hardcore showtune fiends).

Someone on All That Chat theorized that the current crop of female musical-theater stars may be the strongest ever, and I find myself in agreement. Of course there have been tremendous powerhouses in the past, but now the numbers are impressive: We can see the likes of Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, Kristin Chenoweth, Sutton Foster, Bernadette Peters, Christine Ebersole and Tonya Pinkins on a regular basis. (I'm not a huge fan of Audra McDonald but she definitely has her admirers. ) Add a whole bunch of young 'uns working their way up through the ranks, such as Anika Noni Rose, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Laura Bell Bundy and Leslie Kritzer, and we're in really good shape. Now if only we could get exciting new composers to match… but please don't bring up Michael John LaChiusa and Ricky Ian Gordon.

The singles hour

The Village Voice has just published its annual Pazz & Jop Poll. Dylan comes up on top (yawn) with TV on the Radio nipping at his heels (zzzz…), while "Crazy" wins the Golden Toaster for single of the year.

You can look at my own poll here, with the caveat that the results change every week. For the sake of convenience, I'll post MP3s of my top ten singles of 2006 as they appeared in the Voice. Here they are, in alphabetical order.

1. Margaret Berger: "Samantha" Berger was no. 2 on Norwegian Idol, which tells you everything and nothing. A typical Scandi-stomper, "Samantha" is from her second album, the unusually (well, not for a Scandi-pop album, actually) good Pretty Scary Silver Fairy.

2. Bodies Without Organs: "Temple of Love" Yet again BWO entered Melodifestivalen, the Swedish selection process for the Eurovision Song Contest, and yet again they didn't make it through. A shame, for I bet this gloriously old-fashioned explosion of homo energy would have done better in Athens' than Carola's tired entry. And speaking of tough competition, the Ark is entering Melodifestivalen this year, with a peppy Bay City Rollers–style number titled (despite the fact that it suggests anything but) "The Worrying Kind". Go Ark!

3. Cassius: "Jack Rock" Acid lives with this track from Cassius' latest album. Every time I listen to it, I picture an expedition going up Mount Everest: The track climbs up to a plateau and takes a rest at base camp 1; then it climbs some more, and settles down at base camp 2; more climbing, more resting, and so on. The wonky piano and Rolling Stones woo-hoo's take it to the summit. A perennial treadmill tune.

4. Girls Aloud: "Something Kinda Oooh" I included all three of Girls Aloud's studio albums on their respective years' top-ten lists but had to interrupt that impeccable run because their 2006 release was a greatest-hits collection. Fortunately it did feature this new recording. As usual with Xenomania productions, the song has an unpredictable structure: very brief vocal intro, then the chorus, then the verse, and of course a pneumatic bridge to die for. And also as usual, we get the best genius/stupid lyrics a mega-selling girl group has to offer: "Something kinda ooooh/Jumping on my tu-tu/Something inside of me/Wanting part of you/Something kinda ooooh/Makes my heart go boom boom/Something inside of me/Wanting what you do/Something kinda ooooh/Bumpin' in the back room."

5. The Gossip: "Standing in the Way of Control (Soulwax Nite Version)" The Gossip has always shot itself in the foot with the cruddy sound on their recordings. I don't care what people say: It's their refusal to hire a decent producer that's hampered their career, not Beth Ditto's weight and politics. Last year they finally scored a semi-club hit thanks to the Belgian brothers in Soulwax—and an actual bass line.

6. Jamelia: "Beware of the Dog" One of two 2006 hits to cannibalize the synth-pop 1980s. Ruthlessly efficient.

7. The Killers: "When You Were Young" Like the other big drama queen in Vegas—that'd be CSI—the Killers are big, bloated and self-important, with a teeny-tiny ounce of winking self-awareness. This song is U2 for those who loathe U2.

8. Melody Club: "Last Girl on My Mind" A few years ago, Melody Club was slated to play a Swedish showcase at CBGB; they cancelled at the last minute because they got the opening gig on Kylie Minogue's European tour. Still no US release for Sweden's all-male answer to Blondie, but its third release is full of nuggets like this one. The lyrics make the latest Arcade Fire and Decemberists albums sound like the work of fussy librarians: "You're keeping your legs crossed, honey/Like a good girl should/Who's smearing your lipgloss, honey/ Come on take me by the hand." Any guy who mentions lipgloss in a song ranks high with me.

9. Rihanna: "SOS (Rescue Me)" I hesitated listing both this and "Beware of the Dog" because they're so similarly exploitative and so similarly exemplary of a dearth of ideas. Alas, both were lodged in my head in 2006. Rihanna also contributed to the canon of great pop lines with "I'm the question and you're of course the answer/Just hold me close boy 'cause I'm your tiny dancer."

10. Kate Ryan: "Je t'adore" Textbook Europop. The biggest shocker of 2006 for trü-pop fans is that Kate Ryan didn't make it past the semi in the Eurovision Song Contest. "Je t'adore" is so good that in the weeks leading up to the showdowns, us fans were taking bets as to whether she'd win it, place in the top three or in the top five. I was certain that at last Belgium could step to the podium. Oh well… Take it away, Katrien Verbeeck!

A simple plan

I love B movies with a high concept and a low budget, where the director packs 90 minutes—the optimal length for a B movie—with as many variations as possible on the core premise: Cube (strangers must escape from a deadly, always-changing maze); Cellular (kidnapped woman randomly dials and reaches slacker's cell phone; he has to remain on the line while trying to locate her); Phone Booth (the reverse: while in phone booth random man gets call that a sniper is watching him and will shoot if man tries to leave the booth); Descent (women go down cave; mutant creatures hunt them down); Joy Ride (pranksters punk psycho trucker via CB radio; he hunts them down). And that's just recentish ones.

Add Marc Evans' My Little Eye to this canon of satisfying popcorn cheapies. Five people must remain in an isolated, snowbound house for six months—while each of their move is webcast 24/7, à la Big Brother—in order to win $1 million; if one leaves, they all lose. But is there someone outside? Director Evans takes the classic "and then there was none" model (prime example: Alien), wraps it in a reality-TV aesthetic and adds a dash of The Shining for flavor. The barely-above-average acting doesn't help, but the claustrophobic atmosphere is pretty successful on a skimpy budget.

Even more intriguing, Evans' latest film, Snow Cake, has recently come out in Europe and seems to have a tentative release date of April in the US. On paper it looks like a total Hollywood-style weepie with extra-crispy casting: Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman, Alan Rickman as a grieving man and Carrie-Anne Moss as the neighbor who's bound to help Rickman—what? Love again, perhaps? Recover his taste for life? I foresee dignified non-hugging, Evans being British and all.

Turning gold into lead

Yes, that transmutation (granted, not that rare in the arts) is what David Byrne achieved Saturday night at Carnegie Hall: He managed to make a disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos uninteresting.

On paper, Here Lies Love, about the former Muse of Manila and First Lady of the Philippines had it all: the shopping obsession, the trips to New York discotheques, the various official functions, such as Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. That, and the fact that Byrne is a clever guy who kept referring to dance music and Studio 54 in interviews. And yet Here Lies Love was worse than bad: It was a crushingly boring exercise in bland, middle-aged taste. In concert form, it was like watching a beige Crate & Barrel couch for two hours.

Where to begin…Part of the problem may well rest in the very definition of the project: Is it a song cycle or a musical? Using Joan Almedilla and Ganda Suthivarakom to sing the parts of Imelda Marcos and her housekeeper Estrella Campos, respectively, indicated a certain musical-theater ambition of creating distinct characters. Alas, this was not reflected in the lyrics, which are heavily narrative, devoid of any personality and of the wit one has come to associate with Byrne himself. At one point he remarked that the words in a song's first verse were taken directly from Imelda's high-school yearbook—"this is reportage," he dryly added to the crowd's knowing laughter. But reportage, you see, does not automatically make compelling art. Things flowed more naturally when Byrne himself reprised a couple of the songs previously performed by the women: If he just sang all of Here Lies Love himself and called it a song cycle, it might actually work better.

It's symptomatic of the project's timidity that Byrne pointed out at the end of the evening that there hadn't been a single song about shoes, because Imelda's footwear obsession was discovered only after her fall. Right, but if we wanted reportage, we'd read the newspaper. A show requires a certain amount of unhinged vulgarity, which unfortunately is the one word that least describes Byrne's oeuvre. You can bet Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn't worry about reportage when they wrote Evita.

That singular lack of over-the-top glee was reflected in the music itself. For the first 15 numbers, Byrne and the two lead singers fronted a four-piece band. Most numbers were perfunctorily funky. If you're going to mention Studio 54 when talking about your show, you'd better understand that classic late-’70s disco mixed a deeply ecstatic nature with stupefying musical precision; both were missing at Carnegie Hall. (On his website, Byrne describes "Dancing Together" as "Imelda’s philosophy of why she needs to be beautiful for the Filipino people. A song about the exciting world of socialites, celebrities and expensive items." And yet listening to the song, you'd think he'd never heard Chic.)

At last, a string and a horn sections came in for the final five songs—typically, after the big Studio 54 number! Even though their charts were rather primitive and not used particularly well, they did add a welcome luster to the overall sound, as well as more questions: Why add the extra players so late? When two of the numbers were reprised at the end, they did have the strings and horns—so why weren't they used the first time around? The great disco musical still needs to be written.

For a master class in the orchestrated mix of ecstasy and precision, Byrne might want to listen to these two protodisco tracks, remixed to epic lengths by Tom Moulton. Poetry in motion.
MP3 Detroit Emeralds "Feel the Need in Me" from A Tom Moulton Mix (Soul Jazz)
MP3 Eddie Kendricks "Keep on Truckin'" from A Tom Moulton Mix (Soul Jazz)

I guess we can add David Byrne to the ever-growing list of pop/rock musicians struggling to cross over into musical theater. Randy Newman came close with Faust, a show I believe got an unfair shake and needs to be reeavaluated. Significantly, it's Duncan Sheik, the one whose solo career was rather perfunctory, who's made the most convincing transfer with Spring Awakening. Go figure.

High drama and petty jerks

I can't figure out how to do the caron and the macron and many of those pesky diacritics, so I'll just dispense with them and simply say that Leos Janacek's Jenufa kicked major Moravian ass at the Met yesterday. It's hard to beat this tale of tortured love and infanticide in intensity, but when you have Karita Mattila and Anja Silja in the leads, well, the three hours fly by particularly fast. (Not sure about those boulders, but at least the staging wasn't intrusively bad.) Forget the two intermissions: Do it nonstop! Watching and listening in awe, I thought that this was a prime example of human achievement, like sending someone to the moon or inventing a vaccine.

The return to New York reality was so much harder then, and the sight of all the well-heeled Met patrons callously ignoring a freezing homeless woman panhandling by the exit was nauseating.

To all of you rushing to your cabs and limos without pausing to give someone in need a few bucks: Fuck you, assholes!

To all of you who thought she made for a downer end to a wonderful, wonderful evening at the opera and wasn't Karita's upper register tremendous: I'll suspend my disbelief of this grab-bag of superstitions known as religion long enough to tell you to roast in hell.

The genius of Chic

Chic is one of my favorite bands of all times, so thanks to Disco Delivery for posting excerpts from a Radio 2 show about the production of two of their hits, "Good Times" and "Le Freak." Having access to the many tracks that make up the songs, hosts Richard Allinson and Steve Levine go on to isolate and analyze each element. "The overall sound on this single is as close to the perfect pop single as you can get," Allinson says about "Good Times." He could not be more right. Absolutely imperative listening for anybody with more than a passing interest in pop music.

Cat in my lap

It was with a mix of excitment and terror that I was pulled into Meow Meow's self-described "Kamikaze Kabaret" Saturday at Joe's Pub. When the Australian songstress—whose breathless act leaves the audience completely exhausted—started a song in French, she called out for a translator and I was volunteered by my so-called friends. Next thing I knew, Ms. Meow was sitting in my lap. It's not every day someone with the classic figure of a Cyd Charisse showgirl asks me to translate something or other about loins. As if this wasn't distracting enough, I could not figure out which song she was singing two inches from my flustered cheek; while I had easily identified earlier performances of Gainsbourg's "Comic Strip" and Richard Anthony's "Itsy Bitsy Petit Bikini," that one stumped me. Daniel Isengart later revealed it was by Barbara. Ha-HA! My least favorite of the classic French chanteuses.

All this to say that Meow Meow—who had already stolen the show at Weimer New York the previous week—should not be missed next time she's in town, whatever town that is. She is more punk rock than your average emo goon, and drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Prepare for boarding

Quick, you only have until Sunday to see the fantabulous Wickets! The show, part of HERE's Culturemart festival, is labeled a work-in-progress, but it's a lot more polished than many supposedly finished productions—some of them on Broadway—I've had the misfortune to see over the years.

The artistic team of Jenny Rogers and Clove Galilee (both in Trick Saddle) transposed Maria Irene Fornes' 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends, which takes place in a New England house in 1935, to a transatlantic flight in the early 1970s.

All right, this is where it gets totally genius: They reconfigured the theater so it looks like you're inside the plane. The audience sits in three sections and the cast is impeccably dressed and coiffed (note that the hair is now three times the size it was in the photo) like period stewardesses—and these women are most definitely stewardesses, not flight attendants. They greet you at the door with boarding passes doubling as programs, navigate trolleys down the aisles, and offer you warm nuts and vintage copies of Life magazine. They're so in character that when I leaned back from my first-class seat to see what was going on in business, one of the passing stews whispered "Knees and elbows, knees and elbows" without breaking her glide. When the captain turns out to be Peggy Shaw, in a fun little cameo, you're not even surprised anymore.

But Wickets wouldn't amount to more than an elaborate stunt—and a godsend to fans of both Flying High and Angie Dickinson in her prime, like, oh I don't know, me—if the new concept didn't work so well with Fornes' play. The text itself is beautiful and its surrealism gives it flexibility when it comes to the setting, while the ensemble cast superbly rises to the challenge; if you spend way too much time at the theater, as I do, you'll know this is a rare combination indeed. The production also embraces the play's unabashedly feminist themes without Nth-wave irony but with plenty of slinky humor. Also it's often, um, hot.

Have I mentioned that Wickets costs only $15, and you don't have to take off your shoes?

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Latest quickie in Time Out New York: a review of the new Fujiya & Miyagi album. And look! A song from it!
MP3 Fujiya & Miyagi "Ankle Injuries" from Transparent Things (2007)

And now to the fun stuff, meaning the ka-razy Weimar New York show last Friday at Joe's Pub. Curated by Earl Dax (and previewed by my colleague Adam Feldman in TONY), Weimar New York is a diabolically entertaining revue that purports to revive the politically aware and subversively decadent spirit that once infused the cabaret scene during the Weimar Republic. Or did it? It's hard not to suspect that said scene is now largely idealized, but who cares when the new version is so wild?

The inspired organizing principle behing Weimar New York is that it packs a lot of acts into a couple of hours but they only do one number, two at most, so if things hit a lull, you know it won't last. How to describe the atmosphere? For me Penny Arcade nailed it when she exclaimed "I feel like I'm back in 1993!" Perhaps it was the heady sight of half-naked downtowners cavorting around a tiny stage. Perhaps it was a Belgian chantoosie wailing Brrrrrrrel next to a burlesque queen being molested by a severed hand next to a freakazoid (I say this with great admiration) flashing his anal piercing to the crowd. Perhaps it was Justin Bond singing Patti Smith. And perhaps it was that friggin' Penny Arcade was there! I guess that's what comes "from too much pills and liquor."

Next to that, Trisha Brown at the Kasser in Montclair over the weekend was quite sedate, but at the same time it was heady to see Brown herself get onstage at the end of I love my robots. If a 70-year-old woman choreographically engaging with robots (ie remote-controlled cardboard tubes on casters) isn't aggro in our age of youth obsession, I don't know what is.

Two of the three pieces used music by Laurie Anderson, and I was reminded of how well her work suits dance. It actually made me listen to bits from United States again—no matter how good Anderson sounded at the Kasser, there's still no way I could sit through anything she's released in the past ten years.

Li'l writers in li'l countries

Finally got around to reading Milan Kundera's essay "Die Weltliteratur—How We Read One Other" in The New Yorker. I'm no big fan of Kundera's, but he makes some food-for-thought points, particularly in the way he delineates "two kinds of provincialism: that of large nations and that of small ones." This leads to writers and audiences to deal with literature in different ways. "The small nation incalculates in its writer the conviction that he belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the supranational territory of art, is considered pretentious, disdainful of its own people. And, since the small nations are often in situations where their survival is at stake, they can easily present this attitude as morally justified."

Now, replace "small nation" with "minority." What Kundera writes pretty much describes what's at stakes for, say, gay or African-American scribblers in the US, and explains both why some gay or African-American writers refuse to be labeled such, and why others embrace a role closer to adovation.

It also illustrates what to me is a toxic, creativity-stifling attitude from some critics and readers, who expect writers to offer "positive role models" and represent for their peers. Kundera writes: "A nation's possessiveness toward its artists works as a small-context terrorism that reduces the entire meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland" Just read a popular website such as afterellen.com—where every show, movie or album is judged by simplistic criteria such as "But does it make lesbians look good?"—to see that small-context terrorism in action. All right, so deriding a pop-culture website for its critical acumen is easy, but this applies to more highbrow reviewers as well, and it places on writers/artists who are not straight white men (these guys never have to justify anything—just ask people as different as Jay McInerney, Cormac McCarthy or Stephen King) a whole different burden of expectations.

Unrelated: Kundera goes on to remind us that Gombrowicz once wrote a text titled "Against Poets," in which he reacted "to the view of poetry as the untouchable goddess of Western modernism." Yay, someone taking a stand against poetry!

Art for sale

This story started picking up steam early December, and it shows no sign of letting up. Basically, the old-guard French museum establishment is up in arms because the Louvre is the latest in a small group of French museums (including the Pompidou Center opening a branch in Shanghai) to spread out abroad. It has signed an agreement to license its name and loan items from its collection to a new museum in Abu Dhabi. The use of the "Louvre" name itself will cost 400 million euros, according the the contract that was leaked to Le Monde; other museums should eventually strike similar deals, and it all could bring $800–$1 billion to French museums.

Curators and art figures have been signing petitions and raising a ruckus, claiming France is "selling its soul" and art cannot be treated as crassly as wine or those cute little Vuitton
bags Abu Dhabi residents also buy by the truckload.

While one can legitimately question the specific choice of an authoritarian, clanic emirate for a Louvre outpost, it bugs the hell out of me to see those defenders of the artistic patrimoine dump on the exportation of French museum brand names in general.

What crock!

So it's great to endlessly whine about US-led globalization and how it stifles French culture, but when we have a chance to actually take advantage of globalization—and, it seems to me, in a manner that makes cultural and financial sense—everybody's screaming bloody murder. How stuck-up, reactionary and downright foolish can the French art elite get?

In praise of Jean-Claude Vannier

Philippe Garrel's latest movie, Regular Lovers, opens in New York this week. One thing immediately caught my eye in the opening credits: music by Jean-Claude Vannier. Alas, the soundtrack is a very sparse piano one, quite far from Vannier's signature 101 strings. Still, a good pretext to post a few samples by this most brilliant of composers-arrangers.

For many, Vannier is known only as the man who did the luxuriant arrangements (which Beck shamelessly plagia…er, borrowed from on a Sea Change track) on Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Vannier's profile was raised in the US and the UK with last year's CD reissue of his own 1972 album L'enfant assassin des mouches. Vannier and a starry cast of guest singers performed both Melody Nelson and L'enfant live at the Barbican in October ’06. Over the years he's also released solo albums; you can find some MP3s at the excellent Filles Sourires site.

But I love him best when he works with pop singers, and in a few glorious years in the late ’60s–early ’70s, he produced/arranged/cowrote with the best of them. Vannier could do it all, but his forte was decadent strings that suggested vaguely illicit pleasures and veiled menace. My personal favorite is the venomous "Chanson de Slogan," written by Gainsbourg for Pierre Grimblat's 1969 movie Slogan; it's a baroque exploration of decadent aesthetics that epitomizes the incredibly fruitful Vannier/Gainsbourg collaboration.
MP3 Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin "Chanson de Slogan"

It made sense that Vannier would also work on the albums Gainsbourg wrote for Jane Birkin in the 1970s. The trio's collaboration was most effective on her first solo effort, 1973's Di Doo Dah, from which these two tracks are taken.
MP3 Jane Birkin "C'est la vie qui veut ça"
MP3 Jane Birkin "Leur plaisir sans moi"

Another superb Gainsbourg track, this time from the 1967 TV musical Anna; the song was recorded by both Marianne Faithfull and Anna Karina. Just check out that fantastic bass line.
MP3 Anna Karina "Hier ou Demain"
Watch Marianne sing "Hier ou Demain" in Anna

More Gainsbourg with an instrumental from his soundtrack for the 1970 Pierre Granier-Deferre thriller La Horse. Banjo and harpsichord? Sure, why not!
MP3 Serge Gainsbourg "La Horse"

Françoise Hardy, another 1960s icon, didn't work that much with Vannier, which is too bad because her breathy vocals combined well with his arrangements. The strings whirl on "L'amour en privé" reminds me of that on David McWilliams' "The Days of Pearly Spencer" (produced in 1967 by Mike Leander).
MP3 Françoise Hardy "Dame Souris Trotte" from Soleil (1970)
MP3 Françoise Hardy "L'amour en privé" from Message Personnel (1973, written by Gainsbourg for the movie Projection Privée)

Vannier cowrote and produced the first song on Brigitte Fontaine's most pop album as well.
MP3 Brigitte Fontaine "Il pleut" from Brigitte Fontaine est… (1968)

Vannier also collaborated with one of the great French singer/songwriter/pop stars—and certified eccentrics—of the 1960s and 1970s, Michel Polnareff. This song has one of the greatest chorus buildups in the history of pop music.
MP3 Michel Polnareff "Dans la maison vide" a single from—when else?—1969

Robert Bresson, ascetic genius, sublimizing horndog

Very interesting interview with actress/author Anne Wiazemsky on the France Inter radio show "La Bande à Bonnaud," on the occasion of her new book, Jeune Fille. Wiazemsky's name will be familiar to cinephiles—she was in Godard's La Chinoise and Weekend, as well as in Pasolini's Teorema and Porcile. She's been writing novels for a while now, with some success, and her latest is a largely autobiographical one about the making of her first movie, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar—yes, the allegory with the donkey—in 1966. Quite a way to start off a film career.

The interview is priceless about Bresson's working methods. Wiazemsky (who has a wonderful radio presence) speaks about working with him when she was 17-18. When they first met, she was totally into commercial cinema, reading about stars in pop magazines, and she wasn't familiar with his work. For her audition, Bresson made Wiazemsky read lines from his own first movie, the 1943 nun flick Les Anges du peché. Her grandfather, Catholic writer and Nobel Prize–winner François Mauriac, authorized her to work with Bresson, with the warning that the director was on the odd side.

The first thing Bresson did on the shoot was to order Wiazemsky to live in the same house—she had to go through his bedroom to reach hers, and they shared a bathroom. She could talk only to him, had to have all her meals with him; she was completely separated from the rest of the crew (which nicknamed her "the little captive"). But Wiazemsky also recalls that the captive was complicit, and that she enjoyed submitting to the older man's authority and knowledge. She is really insightful about the love Bresson had for his actresses, including her, a love he sublimated in his movies. Funnier are anecdotes about Bresson going nuts about the donkey, which he apparently tried to direct exactly like the human actors. Walter Green, Wiazemsky's costar, was so shaken by the experience that he gave up acting and became a dentist; he also went on to marry 1970s star Marlène Jobert and sire…Eva Green.

The year after the movie came out, Wiazemsky married Godard. (How's that for a transition?) When Bresson learned about it, he called her and told he she was nuts to marry Godard, who was too old for her; Godard got furious that a director he admired so much would meddle in his private life. The show then played a clip of Godard calling Bresson both a great inquisitor and a humanist, adding that people who go to the movies once a year should make that movie one by Bresson, since a Bresson movie is the world.

Non-Viennese froth

In the NY Times, Anne Midgette writes about an upcoming operetta series in New York. Since it takes places at the Austrian Cultural Forum, it obviously focuses on the Viennese strain, which, as Midgette makes clear in her intro, somehow has become one of only two styles of operetta for many Americans (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan): "The term [operetta] mostly conjures up visions of ostrich feathers and rhinestones; Central European duchies with ornate military uniforms; pretty melodies crooned by bright-eyed ingénues." Jeez, and you wonder why people think it's irremediably corny.

But wait a minute! Operetta's not all Viennoiseries. Not only did France contribute a little Alsatian dude called Offenbach, but operetta remained a viable artistic and commercial form there way into the 1950s. (Francophones can check out this thorough, instructive site on French musical theater.) On a trip to Paris last year, for instance, I caught a charming revival of Toi C'est Moi, composed by the Cuban exile Moïse Simons in 1934, with loony lyrics by (mostly) Albert Willemetz. The show was a frothy mix of Parisian humor and the Latin rhythms Simons incorporated into his score, and I think it could seduce Broadway fans here. The yummy Susan Graham actually covered Toi C'est Moi's "C'est ça la vie, c'est ça l'amour" and "Vagabonde" on her 2002 CD dedicated to French operetta, but here's the show's comic highlight in a 1933 recording by Pauline Carton and the mononamed Koval. Now forgotten, Carton once was one of the most popular character actresses of French stage and film (think Marjorie Main).

MP3 Pauline Carton "Sous les palétuviers"

The style is tricky to bring back to life though: For every brilliant staging of Offenbach by Laurent Pelly, you get a failure like Alain Resnais' stultifying 2003 film adaptation of Maurice Yvain's 1925 Pas sur la bouche. (I'd love to have seen last year's Châtelet revival of Francis Lopez's catchy Le chanteur de Mexico—which upped the kitsch factor by starring Rossy de Palma and boasting a flamboyant poster by Pierre et Gilles.)

Our most outspoken advocates in town are Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeil, artistic directors of L'Opéra Français de New York; they know how good French operetta can be—their enlightening six-part TV doc about it in 2002 is required viewing for anybody with an interest in the popular music of the 19th and 20th centuries—and last November put together a program titled "Les folies de l'opérette" that included Yvain next to Offenbach. (The company's music director, Yves Abel, is no operetta slouch either, since he worked on Graham's CD, among other accomplishments.) Let's hope these guys help raise the consciousness level so we can start seeing more French operetta in New York—including some Offenbach other than Tales of Hoffman, please. I'm totally convinced that Offenbach shows such as La Belle Hélène, Orphée aux Enfers and La Périchole could draw New Yorkers, and possibly start off a classical fashion similar to baroque.

It's…different

Or so said a man sitting behind me during intermission at the Met yesterday evening. But Tan Dun's The First Emperor isn't that different from the Met's usual fare: It may be green tea–ginger to the usual strawberry-vanilla twist, but it's still ice cream. It sprinkles Western opera with some Chinese fairy dust, but the core of the piece is in a familiar form, down to the outlandish plot points of a crippled woman regaining the use of her legs after sex and a man biting out his own tongue. (Not to say that these types of development are typically Western, but that they'll be familiar to a Western audience.)

My esteemed colleague Steve Smith has praised The First Emperor's instrumental interludes and I completely agree with him. Most of the arias are uncommonly dull (notable exception: the seduction scene between Elizabeth Futral and Paul Groves), while the music leading in and out of them is often fantastic, especially the rolling clouds of ominousness. In other words: Tan Dun writes great soundtrack cues. No wonder much of the music reminded me of Japanese soundtracks of the 1950s and 1960s.

Zhang Yimou's grandiose staging would also be familiar to Met goers accustomed to mammoth scales, and I found it visually pleasing but also rather static. Of course a 140-strong choir will look good on stage; it's the universal rule of mass attraction: more is more. But if you just plop people down there, chances are the audience's eyes—and mind—will wander. Compare and contrast with Anthony Minghella's take on Madama Butterfly, which was aesthetically somptuous and had a real sense of dynamic movement.

Speaking of mass: I threw a real hissyfit when Fox cut both school-band routines during the Ohio State-Florida halftime on Wednesday. I had endured the stupidest sport of all for way too long just to see those bands and then Fox went to commercial! In America the opera and marching bands are the main refuges for those of us in love with the use of bodies on a large scale. Gigantic human tapestries…now that's something the old communist countries knew how to do.

Bollywood sur Seine

Just as the Met is finally starting to catch up, a Euro house moves up the ante: Apparently Bollywood director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has signed on to direct a French opera at the Châtelet in Paris. We'll probably crash back down to earth when reality comes knocking (no news as to what the opera will be, or even if it's already written—scary considering the piece is scheduled for 2008) but on paper this strikes me as a stroke of genius. Bollywood and opera share a taste for extravagant situations and hyper-heightened sentiments, so the jump isn't as drastic as it looks. And Bollywood directors tend to know how to move crowds—which is good, since Bhansali has said that the show will involve a huge cast. Exciting times we live in.

Hate in a cold climate

Let's take a break from the wild cabaret stylings of Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches (which I saw for a third time on Saturday night) in order to focus on a particularly unholy week: The old-school black metallers in Dark Funeral and the fierce proggy Vikings of Enslaved land at BB King's for a Scandi double whammy on Wednesday 10, while Northsix shows that America can throw a mighty punch as well by hosting a seriously scary evening of domestic brutality that includes Southern Lord signees Lair of the Minotaur and cultish BM band Krieg on Saturday, January 13.

To get in the mood, here's a selection of MP3s by some favorite underground extremists, harvested from various European fields. Think of it as Travel + Leisure for the maleficent set.

I find extreme metal makes for invigorating listening, which some may find odd considering it's a genre dedicated to nihilism and eeeevil. But the sheer intensity and ultra-dense texture of these sonic tapestries is unparalleled; the listening experience is very tactile. And I realize I may torpedo whatever cred I have left by writing this, but this stuff also works great at the gym. The crazy-fast BPMs would get anybody going on the treadmill, and the looks from people next to you hearing the primitive shrieks bleeding through the earphones? Priceless.

England's Anaal Nathrakh pretty much laid down the rules for the necro subgenre on its debut, The Codex Necro. The duo plays some of the most stomach-churningly violent music I've ever heard, and its latest, Eschaton, shows no sign of slack. I reviewed it for TONY a few weeks ago, and here's a taste:
MP3 Anaal Nathrakh "The Necrogeddon" from Eschaton (2006)

France, where metal and hard rock had always faltered, has recently emerged as a rather fertile ground for mysterious—even by BM's standards—combos that take black metal in unpredictable, often experimental directions, making the Scandis sound like the nerd squad in a John Hughes comedy. Hailing from the darken lands of Normandy and Burgundy, as well as the hellhole known as Paris, I give you Malcuidant, Arkhon Infaustus and Blut aus Nord.
MP3 Malcuidant "…et la complainte se tut…" from L'Hymne de la Ghilde (2005)
MP3 Arkhon Infaustus "Epsilon: Saturn Motion Theology" from Perdition Insanabilis (2004)
MP3 Blut aus Nord "The Howling of God" from The Work Which Transforms God (2003)

The aforementioned Enslaved is only the top of the Viking metal iceberg (so to speak). Good thing that the field's crowded, too, because frankly you can never have enough albums hatched in forges by burly men claiming to be inspired by valkyries and ice-covered paganism. Speaking of ice, deaths in extreme metal are known to be pretty dramatic: Musicians die of exposure, or they fall from a bridge and break their neck on a frozen river—which at least isn't as bad as allegedly eating your dead bandmate's brain.

Tyr comes from the Feroe Islands and offers a melodic, almost dreamy, folk-inspired version of the Viking genre; the production values are relatively high as well, which seems to be a folk-metal trademark (think of Estonia's Metsatöll or the grandiose Finntroll). On the other hand, take Graveland, hailing from the well-known Viking province of, er Poland, with a big grain of salt. The band aims for the majestic with no small success but it's a really good thing we can't understand what they sing about—in interviews leader Darken espouses the kind of stupefyingly dumb theories sadly common in a certain black-metal fringe, eg Burzum et al., and among such Neofolk and industrial outfits as Death in June and Der Blutharsch. The power of the music is hard to deny; the politics stink to high heaven.
MP3 Tyr "Olavur Riddararos" from Eric the Red (2003)
MP3 Graveland "Prayer for My Ancestors" from Fire Chariot of Destruction (2005)

Similar ethical issues emerge with the Ukraine's Drudkh, though its take on Slavic pride is a lot more literate—the lyrics to The Swan Road are influenced by the work of 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.
MP3 Drudkh "Eternal Sun" from Lebedynyy Shlyakh: The Swan Road (2005)

Finally, a short trip across the Mediterranean to Israel and Tangorodrim—hey, if Israel can compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, I can include it in a post about European extreme metal. The band's latest is on Southern Lord, ensuring easy access in the US at least.
MP3 Tangorodrim "Bestial Scent" from Unholy and Unlimited (2006)

And speaking of the US, Americans aren't well known for BM (or Viking metal for that matter) but there are exceptions, and they tend to be one-man bands like Xasthur, Leviathan and my favorite of all, rehtaF ruO. Hailing, I believe, from Florida, [edit: as it turns out, San Antonio, TX] rehtaF ruO has made a demo CD and one proper album, Boiled in Goat Blood, a monument of paradigmatic bedroom metal. The entire thing is terrifying, a mess of lo-fi hisses, buzzes and inhuman screams, but this track has got to be the worst of all.
MP3 rehtaF ruO "Child Sacrifice" from Boiled in Goat Blood (2000)

Enjoy!

Crap on toast

For some unfathomable reason, there seems to be some kind of buzz around Marcus Sakey and his debut novel, The Blade Itself. First a positive blurb and an interview in PW, now a fairly encouraging review from Janet Maslin in the Times. I know, I know—Maslin's taste is incomprehensible. But how could even she get hoodwinked by such a pathetic thriller? Actually, the word "thriller" should come in quotation marks whenever used in conjunction with The Blade Itself, a book in which each plot turn is so clumsily phoned in that any reader with half a brain will be able to skip a few pages and not miss a thing.

As for style, every other sentence drips with the kind of affected toughness that contaminates the worst noirs. Sakey has obviously read his elders and betters, but he hasn't absorbed what it is that makes them good—moral ambiguity—and only regurgitates chunks of ultra-pasteurized clichés; it boggles the mind that he could be mentioned in the same breath as James Ellroy or even the overrated Dennis Lehane (has anybody praising him actually read his preposterous Shutter Island, from 2003?).

But perhaps it's Sakey's reading of his peers that's the problem. As he says on his website, "Mostly I read crime and lit-fic, but every now and then you gotta branch out" (this in regard to Philip Pullman's wonderful The Golden Compass). Well duh! No wonder Sakey's novel feels so limited: It draws not from life or fiction in general, but from a narrow sliver of fiction. As Gordon Ramsay would put it: Oh for fuck sake!

Wild horses couldn't keep me away

Went back for a second helping of Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches yesterday. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how this is one of the most exciting shows of the year. That assessment was confirmed yesterday: Kritzer is it. January 6 is your last chance to catch her before she leaves for the out-of-town tryout of Legally Blonde. Go, go, go!

The saddest thing is that the Sheila and I were among only a handful of women at Joe's Pub yesterday. I can't even remember the last time I was in such an overwhelmingly male environment. Being surrounded by men isn't the sad thing, of course; no, what's sad is that women just don't seem to get into this kind of shows, even though it's hard to think of a more "empowering" (ahem) spectacle that Leslie Kritzer bringing down the house through pipes of steel and sheer star wattage. Ages ago I wrote a piece for The Village Voice about the lone condition of the show tune–loving lesbian. Things have not changed one bit, and I'll just say once again how much it pains me that lesbians still flock to the worst guitar-strummed, clichéd modes of female expression while ignoring the deliciously subversive wonders of the musical-theater world.

Upcoming Marvel

Just got an announcement that Elizabeth Marvel will participate in Classic Stage Company's reading series, the First Look Festival. This year it's dedicated to Chekhov, and Marvel will be one of the actors reading Three Sisters on February 12. Engrave this on your calendar, as any appearances by this most charismatic of performers must not be missed. Her Hedda Gabler (pictured) and her Blanche Dubois, both under the direction of Ivo Van Hove at New York Theater Workshop, are among the greatest performances of the past decade, and she manages to wring haunting moments from the most undercooked plays, like Terrorism or Dark Matters. I actually make it a point to see everything she does, and so should you.

Oh yeah, the rest of the First Look lineup ain't too shabby either: Kathleen Chalfant in The Cherry Orchard (January 22); Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney and Michael Stuhlbarg in The Seagull (January 29); Peter Dinklage in Uncle Vanya (February 5). This is why we live in New York, folks.

Weekend update

What's with that trend of bands playing one of their albums live from top to bottom? My thoughts on the phenomenon in today's New York Times.

The Christmas break has just flown by and thanks to a nasty case of flu I didn't accomplish a single of my goals—go to MoMA, see movies at noon, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to Chinatown, play Halo while eating delicious Indian sweets from Jackson Heights.

When I was five or six, I got my tonsils taken out in Paris. As soon as I was out of the operating room, my mother, never one to miss an opportunity to see some art, took me to the ballet at the Paris Opera (I'm pretty sure it was Coppelia). Alas, I got sick at intermission and we had to leave; on the way out, I left a trail of crimson-red (I'd been fed strawberry sorbet to soothe my throat) vomit all over the marble staircase. It took me 35 years to be so sick that I'd have to leave a show, which is what happened at yesterday's Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo matinee. Right in the middle of Pas de Quatre, I was overwhelmed by a coughing fit worthy of Marguerite Gautier, aka Camille, aka Violetta Valéry; the only option was to leave. So ended my one and only outing in this lost week. What a waste of free time.

Speaking of free time, and perhaps too much of it, Sufjan Stevens has released a box set collecting his Christmas songs over the years. I find Stevens interesting mostly in the context of his relationship with Daniel Smith, the brain behind Danielson; it's touched upon in JL Aronson's new doc on Danielson (which I reviewed for TONY). If Aronson had had more guts, he'd have centered the entire film on the All About Eve connection between Stevens and Smith, and used it to show how the more banal talent gets less recognition than the pricklier one.

20/20 hindsight

Yep, there was quite a bit of good theater in New York this year, and here's what I liked, listed in chronological order:

1. Red Light Winter, by and directed by Adam Rapp, at the Barrow Street Theater. Rapp is moving beyond shock tactics and into craft.

2. BLACKland, devised by Krétakör and directed by Árpád Schilling, at Montclair U's Kasser Theater. A political revue created and interpreted by a super-physical Hungarian troupe. The Kasser is quickly becoming one of the area's most daring venues. But the one thing that depresses me every time I go there is the dearth of students in the audience, especially considering they get free tickets. I guess those cretins would rather be at some sports event.

3. The Wooster Group's revival of its take on O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte at St. Ann's Warehouse. Fucking A! This is theater!

4. Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm and directed by Peter DuBois at the Public Theater. The year's smartest, warmest, most generous comedy. And the most unfairly neglected.

5. The History Boys, by Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Broadhurst Theater. Enough has been said about the merits of Alan Bennett's play. But why American directors can't put together anything as kinetic as what Hytner does here is a mystery to me.

6. The Drowsy Chaperone. Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison's score is delicious pastiche of the old Gershwin/Wodehouse musicals of the 1920s. The show is an oddly intimate experience at the cavernous Marquis Theater.

7. Spring Awakening. I missed the Broadway version but on the Atlantic's small stage Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's ode to burgeoning teen sexuality was pretty darn cool. And it showed the horrible, embarrassing High Fidelity that rock & roll is a state of mind, not a few hasty references and a couple of dudes in band T-shirts.

8. Eraritjaritjaka. Heiner Goebbels hardly ever disappoints and this year's entry, part of the Lincoln Center Festival, was gripping, using technology in a thrilling way. The Met should get him to direct an opera.

9. Mother Courage and Her Children. Edge-of-your-seat spectacle from the two merrymakers known as…Bertolt Brecht and Tony Kushner?

10. Mary Poppins. Some say it's too long or clumsy or overblown—I don't care. I'm sure the ungainly sight of my jaw hanging fairly low in amazed delight was a turn-off for my neighbors at the New Amsterdam but yeah, I loved it. This is exactly what an all-ages show should be.

But the best thing about going to the theater may well be watching actors at work. Here are my all-stars:

• Julie White in The Little Dog Laughed—but the Off Broadway version, which I found less shrill.

• Kate Valk in The Emperor Jones. The best actor in New York. Only Elizabeth Marvel comes close.

• Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens. Yeah yeah yeah…but she really is that good.

• Michael Stuhlbarg and Euan Morton in Measure for Pleasure. Stuhlbarg is acknowledged as a great by now, but Morton is turning into a real asset to the New York stage. He was rather cool in Brundibar as well.

• Sherie Rene Scott in Landscape of the Body. She can sing, she can act, she can slink. Old-school sass and an underrated performer.

• Nellie McKay in Threepenny Opera. Watching that show, I could not figure out what the hell McKay was doing. Then I realized she was doing the part filtered through an old Hollywood idea of an ingenue done by someone who can't act. Not sure it worked at the moment, but several months later it sticks in my mind and remains the only thing worth saving from that wretched production.

• Ian McDiarmid in Faith Healer. The play was a snooze (and Cherry Jones was uncharacteristically awful) until McDiarmid came in at the beginning of the second act, with his ratty orange hair and fantastic timing.

• Judy Greer in Show People. Watching the quirky Greer was taking a master class in reactive acting: Even when she wasn't speaking, Greer was in the scene—without mugging to draw attention to herself. It's a fine line, and one she walked beautifully.

• Felicia Finley in The Wedding Singer. A couple of quick in-and-out numbers were enough for Finley to bring down the house. It was fun to watch someone chew the scenery with such gleeful vulgarity.

• Nina Hellman and Jeremy Shamos in Trouble in Paradise. Subtle comedic chemistry from these undersung stalwarts of the Downtown stage.

• Sherry Vine in Carrie. Whaaaaa…???

The year's visuals belonged to the opera, though: Joyce DiDonato going mad in Hercules at BAM; Viviva Genaux and Elizabeth Futral in super-sexy Handelian closeness in Semele at City Center; Madama Butterfly's gorgeous death at the Met. (Note to potential employers of Julie Taymor, however: Stick a fork in her, she's done.)

Post-apocalypto

I've always been fascinated by novels and films taking place in a post-apocalyptic world. Give me a small group of survivors trying to make it in a dramatically altered landscape, and I'm happy. I'm not talking about movies depicting the catastrophe itself (ie Deep Impact or The Day After Tomorrow) but about the ones specifically dealing with the aftermath—the nuclear winter of our discontent.

Entries in the well-stocked post-apocalyptic genre include novels like Stephen King's The Stand, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, even Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and quite a few films: Ray Milland's Panic in Year Zero!, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later…, Michael Anderson's Logan's Run, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man, Lynne Littman's still-striking Testament (which shows just how much of an emotional punch you can pack with a budget of approximately $12).

On two completely different planes from each other, we can add Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the CBS drama Jericho to the shelf. Neither is hot-off-the-press new, but I'm just getting to them so fine, I'm late.

I'd never been able to finish a Cormac McCarthy book until The Road. His prose felt too affected for my taste—goth for boys—but The Road's stark minimalism actually allows the flights of poetry to support the book rather than choke it. The plot is simple: A man and his son travel through a blighted, ash-covered landscape where nothing grows anymore. They encounter some of the post-apocalyptic staples, like cannibalism and a hidden stash of food, but mostly McCarthy zeroes in on primal emotions and describes incredibly well the abyss the characters face on a daily basis.

Like The Day After, Jericho takes place in Kansas—shorthand, obviously, for all-American. I've only seen the pilot so far but the show looks decent, even though there's a surfeit of hugging. (Hugging has got to be the single most overused—and irritating—gesture in American movies and TV shows. It's a skin-deep show of support that signifies a lot and means nothing.) Jericho follows the Lost formula pretty closely in terms of the group of people it throws in together, down to a hunky-but-broodily-sensitive male lead. What the show lacks so far is that sense of existential dread that permeates the best post-apocalyptic fiction (I'd even include Bergman's Shame in that bunch), as illustrated by the fact that the creators couldn't even bring themselves to let the little girl die on the crashed school bus. Oh well, I'll take Jericho, even if it turns out to be more like Dawson's Irradiated Creek.

Next: Arctic expeditions run amok!

Will it snow in July?

Will it rain toads? Is this a sign of the impending Apocalypse? In the middle of the latest issue of Vice there's quite a 1-2-3 punch: an excerpt from a text (unpublished novel titled Velvet? unclear) by Andrea Dworkin sandwiched between short stories by Chuck Palahniuk and Neil LaBute. Ka-POW! I mean, I never thought I'd see these names in such close proximity, and in Vice, of all places. And the Dworkin story, nominally about hitting a dog, is the most surprising of the bunch (I did enjoy the other two as well, but their authors deliver exactly what you'd expect from them).

Actually when I first noticed that there was a piece by Dworkin in the fiction issue of Vice, my first thought was that one of the mag's smart asses had written a parody. But the story, "I'm Half Dead" isn't what anybody would consider a "typical" Dworkin screed so it had to be real.

More depressing is the LaBute piece, "Slave to the Office," which somehow aims to make you feel faint pangs of pity for an office bully halfway between asshole and pathetic. Boy has LaBute painted himself into a corner at this point. He has such ease as a stylist, but for what? Cheap effects in the service of devious targets. Still, I keep going back to his stories and plays. It must be nostalgie de la boue.

Palahniuk, at least, achieves a certain 21st-century Freaks-ishness in "Mister Elegant." The take on ideas of normalcy and physical appearance may be only Twilight Zone–deep, but I found the piece's black humor rather effective. It somehow reminded me a bit of what I like in Judy Budnitz's stories. Her work is less anchored in a certain type of hyper-reality, but she also captures the grotesqueries of life.

So there you go: Vice's fiction issue. It's free, pick it up.

Squeeeeal like a pig!

Coming out of a rock show half-deaf, I'm familiar with; but emerging half-blind as well, that was new. Not only did Clockcleaner play loud at Cake Shop on Friday night, but they also turned off the stage lights and turned on a couple of blue strobes. My ears! My eyes! It was sensory-
overload agony, and I was in ecstasy. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't all because of some nostalgia trip either: Sure, the Philly trio sounds like it's listened to the entire AmRep catalogue back to front, but it's already developed a live power that's all its own. And bassist Karen has a sturdy, no-nonsense presence that reminds me of the glory days of Kim Deal (not a coincidence I guess, since I hear Clockcleaner did a Breeders cover at its WFMU appearance earlier this month.)

The band has recentish MP3s on its website, so here's a couple of older tracks, from its 2004 debut EP The Hassler: "Walking With My Lady Friend" and "Shingles/Black Baby."

What the jury heard

Updates have been woefully rare since the end of November, as that period has been uncharacteristically busy. At least I can now reveal the main reason the Dilettante got so little attention: I was a member of the advisory review panel for the New York State Music Fund, which has just announced a new batch of grants. You can see discover where they went there.

In short, the NYSMF was redistributing money from fines paid by the major record labels, which had been sued by State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for payola. Being a panelist for the Fund was extraordinarily demanding but also extraordinarily exciting. I can safely say I learned more about music-related institutions in New York State in the past couple of months than in the past couple of years. And soon, we'll all get to hear what that windfall help produce.

Help raise the freak flag

A group of New York theater gals led by playwright Kate Moira Ryan, director Leigh Silverman and writer/actor (and New York Theater Workshop associate artistic director) Linda Chapman has teamed up with the equally excellent Hourglass Group, whose past productions include a wonderful stage adaptation of Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (starring the always fine Nina Hellman).

And to what end, you may wonder, already bedazzled by this introductory list of names, slathered with praise like jam on toast ? Well, they want to stage Ann Bannon's pulpy book The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, and they're now doing some fund-raising. The novel is a classic of overheated 1950s paperback lit, as examplified by its front-cover blurb: "Lost, lonely, boyishly appealing—this is Beebo Brinker—who never really knew what she wanted—until she came to Greenwich Village and found the love that smoulders in the shadows of the twilight world." Come on, what would you rather see on stage, this or the latest hairball coughed up by Richard Greenberg?

So giddyup and fork out some $$$. After all, it's the time of the year when we're meant to be generous. You can donate through their new website, or check in with the Hourglass Group.

It's astounding, time is fleeting…

…madness takes its toll. And boy, did it!

Based on a glowing recommendation from my colleague Adam Feldman, I dropped by Joe's Pub Friday evening to check out Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches, an unwieldy title that turned out to hide a dynamite show, as Ed Sullivan would put it.

The basic concept is that Kritzer reproduces Patti LuPone's last set at Les Mouches, a Chelsea boîte where Patti held a Saturday residency for 30 weeks in 1980—performing right after appearing in Evita on Broadway. Oddly, this is the second show I've seen in the past couple of months where a performer has turned a nominal homage into a memorable, completely original evening. And Kritzer had set herself a challenge even bigger than the one Terese Genecco faced in her tribute to Frances Faye, because Genecco dealt with Faye in general, telling the audience about her subject's life for instance; Kritzer, however, is reproducing a particular set's song list and banter, making it trickier to both avoid simply mimicking her model and put her own stamp on the material. That she delivers the most high-octane performance I've seen in ages must be credited to her powerhouse voice, interpretative chops and deadly comic timing—and those are her own and nobody else's.

Making her grand entrance with "She's a Latin from Manhattan," Kritzer hilariously emphasized LuPone's tendency to slur lyrics into complete unintelligibility, but she dropped the strict emulation quickly and somehow managed to appropriate songs indelibly associated with Her Royal Pattiness, like "Meadowlark" and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina."

A side result of listening to this recreation is that I was once again struck by the porous barriers between genres in 1980. Patti was doing "Love for Sale" but also "Superman" and "Because the Night," rock songs that were newish at the time—compare this to contemporary cabaret artists who pat themselves on the back for dipping into the back catalogs of Randy Newman, Laura Nyro or Joni Mitchell. And let's not forget the time-warp experience of "Heaven Is a Disco," a 1977 song by Paul Jabara—author of the immortal "Last Dance" and "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)"—that suddenly turned Joe's into Studio 54.

After looking her up, I realized that I had actually seen Kritzer before—in a 2000 revival of Godspell at the Theater at St Peter's that also starred then-unknowns Barrett Foa and Capathia Jenkins. I can't honestly say I had singled out Kritzer at the time, essentially because the entire cast of that zippy production was surprisingly good.

And while we're on the subject of Patti LuPone, I may have to check out Jet Blue's fares: She and Audra McDonald are starring in Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at Los Angeles Opera in February/March; even better, the production is directed by John Doyle, who excellently staged Sweeney Todd on Broadway last year (and, granted, is less successful in the current revival of Company).

The Rural Juror

The "rural juror" joke alone would be enough to make me eat crow, but there's been plenty more of that ilk on 30 Rock, the sitcom I once described as a turkey. A hasty judgment, obviously, since against all odds (1. Tina Fey as an actress, 2. Tracy Morgan, 3. Tina Fey as an actress) the show has been steadily improving and now qualifies as a weekly delight. Okay, so I was wrong—at least give me some brownie points for admitting the error of my ways.

And while we're in the realm of "things I never thought I'd say": The Met Opera is exciting! The recent announcement that it's going to present Philip Glass's 1982 Satyagraha in 2008 may have raised my pulse by a couple of ticks on its own, but what really makes me count the weeks is the news that it'll be staged by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, of Britain's Improbable company. McDermott and Crouch co-directed Shockheaded Peter, a wonderful, innovative piece of musical theater which, under the pretense of being a kids' show (its first NYC production was at the New Victory), brilliantly exposed the stuff that nightmares are made of. Their Hanging Man at BAM in 2003 wasn't too shabby either.

Now if we somehow could get Tina Fey and Peter Gelb to meet…

Charity, Scandi style

Just because they're giving it away doesn't mean it's bad!

The Swedish label Sudd, operating out of Goteborg, has had the brilliant idea of doing an MP3 advent calendar: They're offering a new track every day of December until Christmas eve. Today, for instance, is Sophie Rimheden and Sofia Talvik's lovely techno-pop number "Xmas on the Dance Floor" (which made it to my top ten of last year, despite usually having very little patience for holiday songs).

Elsewhere in Sweden, Stockholm duo Small Feral Token (pictured) has put up 17 of its songs for free download.

December is the best time of the year to enjoy Swedish deliciousness!!!

Heavy rotation

Cobra Killer is the Carl Stalling of gonzo tech-punk. Few bands so habitually confound expectations and so cleverly weave strands of disparate musics into consistent albums.

As I wrote in this week's Time Out (link not up yet for some reason), Cobra Killer is scheduled to hit Tonic tomorrow evening. Gina V. D'Orio and Annika Line Trost are off the charts (to quote Dina Martina) live, not to mention among the nuttiest interviews I've ever done, even if it was by email. And since they cancelled their past two NYC shows at the last minute, all digits are crossed for this one.

While Cobra Killer's often been compared to Peaches because they all are women who at one point relied on basic electronics, the comparison treads water, especially now that Peaches' radical rep solely rests on her lyrics, as she's considerably streamlined and beefed up her sound, and the days of triggering her sampler on stage have given way to touring with a full band (more later on last week's show at Irving Plaza, if I can find some time). Cobra Killer, on the other hand, confounds pretty much all the expectations you could have from people making music, down to their relationship with their instruments (they basically shun them live). What they play is deceptively simple but on stage they take it so far as to be in a league of their own.

For now, here are a few tunes to enjoy while counting down the minutes to the show.

"H-Man-A Psychocat" and "Loaders in Octobers" are pulled from CK's sophomore album, 2002's The Third Armpit. Released on the Australian label Valve and relatively hard to find, it marked the band's transition from saturated digital-hardcore ADD to cleaner swinging Berlin.

Plus! Special extra-super-duper geek-out bonuses with…side projects! Because Trost and D'Orio just can't stop the music, and I can't stop hunting it down. D'Orio has released the solo CD Sailor Songs on Australia's excellent label Dual Plover; minimalist half-booty musicalizations of American high-school dramas with Patric "ec8or" Catani under the name A*Class; and Bass Girl, a collaboration with Like a Tim, from which "I Only Have Eyes for You" is pulled. Meanwhile, Trost has released two solo CDs; "I Was Wrong" is on the latest one, Trust Me (2006).

Cobra Killer: "H-Man-A Psychocat"
Cobra Killer: "Loaders in Octobers"
Like a Tim and Gina V. D'Orio: "I Only Have Eyes for You"
A*Class: "I Don't Like the Prom"
Annika Line Trost: "I Was Wrong"

Oh hell…

Double bummer reading the Times yesterday: Betty Comden and Anita O'Day died on Thursday.

Comden and her writing partner Adolph Green were my favorites in the world of stage and film musicals. Their lyrics could put high-brow references in a decidedly low-brow context, or turn the banality of everyday life into elegant melancholy—qualities that are exactly reflected in their scripts for On the Town and The Band Wagon. Comden and Green were open to the world around them, and connected to it with an uncommon relish that gave their work a unique verve and humor.

Below you can download their own versions of a pair of songs from one of their lesser-known efforts, Two on the Aisle, a 1951 stage vehicle for Dolores Gray and Bert Lahr.

As for Anita O'Day, she was my favorite jazz singer—and among my top five favorite singers, period—though I discovered her not through jazz but through show tunes. More specifically, her rendition of "Who Cares?," from the 1931 Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing. O'Day's voice had a smoky texture not unlike Dusty Springfield's (another entry in the all-time list). There are many things to praise about her but my favorite aspect of her performing style was the way she could sing very, very fast with no loss in clarity or interpretative subtlety whatsoever. Her 1959 album Anita O'Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May, of which "Just One of Those Things" is the opening track, is packed with breakneck takes on Porter classics. As for the details of her life, the title of her autobiography, High Times Hard Times, pretty much says it all.

Comden & Green: "If"
Comden & Green: "Catch Our Act at the Met"
Anita O'Day: "Who Cares?"
Anita O'Day: "Just One of Those Things"