Larry Kart

Roy Fisher's "The Thing About Joe Sullivan": The pianist Joe Sullivan, jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes; in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he’ll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap For all that, he won’t swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the ‘masturbator’s rhythm’ under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence In one chorus -- approach, development, climax, discard -- And sound magnanimous, The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling, just big-handed stuff -- belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go -- And that thing is his mood: A feeling violent and ordinary That runs in standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

I vaguely recall an account from Dan Morgenstern or someone with similar knowledge and stature of Mezz's vast fabrications in "Really the Blues." The conclusion was that the book is essentially a work of fiction.

Triumph looks Irish to me.

About Von sometimes needing to nerve himself, Chuck can weigh in here to correct me (if he wishes), but IIRC Von understandably was rather uptight at the "Have No Fear" recording session (understandably so because he sensed/knew that these were going to be ideal circumstances for him to make his mark on record) and resorted to some vodka (and orange juice?) to settle himself, though clearly not enough to impair him. Renewed thanks BTW to Chuck for letting me be there. History was made.

Watching that terrific Von-Clifford Jordan video, I was reminded of what a magnificent physique Von had. It served him well.

More from the Von-Patrick-Hill band -- dig the way Von flies into his solo:

Well, it's good way to market Krall. You can send one of those Krall dolls up to my room.

I said it was "'smartly' verbal." Putting "smartly" in quotes meant that IMO the gags themselves weren't all that clever/intelligent/sharp but that Allen was more concerned with self-consciously conveying to the audience that he himself was a smart, intelligent fellow. Further, I think that one of the chief reasons for Allen's success is that he does manage to convey just that to a fair-sized portion of his core audience, who are in turn then able to congratulate/reassure themselves that they are among the world's more intelligent/clever/sharp citizens. Funny how one of Allen's chief models, Mort Sahl, had such a shrewd fix on exactly this social game and made it the center of some of his sharpest satire. For example, one of Sahl's bits, pre-dating"Take the Money and Run" by some years, was about a bank robber who comes up against an intellectual teller in a bank in San Francisco. The robber hands the teller a note that says "act normal." The teller writes back, "define your terms."

Valeria -- I didn't "back down." My original remark was '[Allen] not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that).' [Emphasis added] My main point was the first one; my secondary point (clearly a subset of the first, signified by the word "also") was the one you said I backed down from by amplifying my primary point with an example from "Zelig." When I said that I'd need to see the early films again before I could cite chapter and verse about the secondary point, how was that backing down? Or should I say, "Hands up, I've got a gub"? Also, I didn't say that the gags in the early films were all verbal but typically verbal.

Really? I don't think so. That is, I think it's more than "a relative handful of specialists."

Valeria -- About verbal versus visual gags in Allen's early films, let me step back from that particular issue for the moment (because I don't have the time or the impetus to pore over those films right now) and instead choose an example from a later film "Zelig" that exemplifies what my main point was there: Allen's frequent willingness to sacrifice dramatic versimilitude/plausibility for the momentary gag. Now "Zelig" IMO, as a mockumentary, would seem to need to maintain a strong semblance of dramatic versimilitude/plausibility throughout in order to maintain its central comic conceit -- that there is/was a man named Leonard Zelig, a "human chameleon" whose overwhelming desire for conformity gave him the ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happened to be around at the moment and who thus was able to sidle his way into many key scenes in 20th Century history. Signs that an atmosphere of surface plausibility was felt by Allen to be crucial to this conceit are the constants use of "newsreel" footage, the deadpan performances of Mia Farrow as Zelig's psychiatrist, and the frequent and again deadpan in both words and demeanor cameos in which such figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, and Bricktop reminisce about Zelig and speculate about the meaning of his career. All well and good, and then Allen pisses it away for one cheap gag. Zelig has been confined to a mental hospital where one important doctor thinks that his problem is not psychiatric, as Farrow's character thinks it is, but chiropractic. So we see "newsreel" footage of Allen as Zelig lying face up on a gurney and being drastically manipulated by the chiropractor so that his prone legs with feet pointing toward the ceiling are eventually turned into prone legs with feet pointed toward the floor. In a Three Stooges feature or a Tom and Jerry cartoon, sure, but not in a movie that's set up the way "Zelig" is. And then, the reversed feet gone, we're back to the deadpan stuff, over and out. It's as if Miles Davis in his "Kind of Blue" solo had inserted a quote from "Mairzy Doats." Fasstrack -- Just to be clear, I said that I responded positively to "Annie Hall."

So you mean that Kehr writes about films but doesn't make them? Brilliant point. But among those who write about films -- worthless endeavor though that may be -- Dave is highly regarded.

So this guy (and you) don't like Woody Allen - all right we get it! Christ, but that's the most subjective, mean spirited review I've seen in a long time. TPROC is a charming wonderful film, with a dark heart - it swoops and glides, full of unexpected riffs (I particularly like the champagne when she's 'in the film'). As for the line about the gags in the early movies being typically verbal - that is total nonsense. Take The Money And Run, Bananas and Sleeper are crammed to bursting with some of the funniest sight gags ever - IMO of course. Playing cello in the marching band, using the glass cutter to steal from the jewellery shop window. Whoever wrote that review had it in for Woody, and resorted to outright untruth to boot. I have zero respect for someone who misrepresents the case like that. Dave Kehr is no pile of chopped liver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kehr For your dining and dancing pleasure, Kehr on "Purple Rose": "Woody Allen's naive notions of art—he thinks it means a story with a moral—might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly. And the sophomoric illusion-versus-reality games he plays in this 1985 film might be easier to take if he had the directorial skills necessary to establish a meaningful demarcation between the two worlds: as it stands, his “reality” is just as flimsily conceived, and populated by characters every bit as flat and arbitrary, as the romantic illusion the film is meant to criticize. The film's small-town Depression-era setting is picturesquely bleak (under Gordon Willis's brackish cinematography, it makes the London of Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-four look like Club Med) and peppered with poetically wistful Fellini-isms (run-down whores, an abandoned amusement park). And as the put-upon housewife who finds escape and fulfillment at the local Bijou, Mia Farrow is the embodiment of every obnoxious Hollywood cliche of the “little person”—fragile, waiflike, terminally pathetic. When an actor (Jeff Daniels) steps down from the screen and sweeps her off to a land of perfect romance, we're supposed to feel the wonder of fantasy transforming a tragic reality, but it's really just one sentimental convention running off with another." Also, the line about the gags in the early films being typically verbal is mine, not Kehr's. "I know how to use a gub" -- right. Finally, in case anyone complains about violating forum rules, the two capsule reviews of Kehr's I quoted are not IMO copyrighted material. Dave wrote them for the Chicago Reader, on whose website they can be found, but the Reader essentially stole the rights to them from Dave in an ugly manner, and thus I feel free to liberate them. If the powers that be feel otherwise, I will reduce the quoted passages to links.

Because in some of your recent posts you adopt (and I can only hope you're horsing around by doing so) a rather flowery-genteel mode of speech -- e.g. "I honestly feel that advocating a thrashing is not beyond the pale ... an expression of extreme umbrage" -- which is the sort of thing that led W.C. Fields to use that phrase.

That's what I like about the early films, they're just absurdist set-ups for situational humour. Kinda like if a more proactive and animated Chauncey Gardener from Being There pulled a bank heist. Or became an accidental revolutionary. I really disliked the Paris movie as well. It resembled to me the kind of Romantic bed-time story 'Woody Allen' might trot out to a seventeen year old Mariel Hemingway type. And I disliked it more because everyone else seemed to like it so much. About "absurdist setups for situational humor," compare Allen here (I suggest) with W.C. Fields, where the absurd situations either arise from the absurdities of the charters' lives ("It's a Gift" especially) or take place with within acknowledged realms of near-total absurdity (e.g. "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break"). I can't help but feel that those who fall so hard for the gags in Allen's early films have as their basic point of comparison Mad Magazine parodies. Hey -- I laughed at/still laugh at some of those gags in the early Allen films too, but Allen's not a patch on, say Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder or Kurtzman/Wally Wood.

A capsule review by Dave Kehr of "Stardust Memories" that touches upon some of the many reasons I dislike Allen and most of his stuff: "A drab, crowded, ugly film by Woody Allen. Meant to be a confessional in the style of 8 1/2, this 1980 feature is more or less a steady stream of bile: Allen plays a famous film director who hates his movies, hates his audiences, and hates himself. During a seminar at a Jersey shore resort, his life passes before his eyes; the scenes center on his bumbling relationships with what has become the standard Allen complement of three women: the dark (Charlotte Rampling), the fair (Marie-Christine Barrault), and the lesbian (Jessica Harper). Allen is working his camera more, though his visual coups mainly consist of more self-conscious ways of creating the claustrophobia that has always ruled his work. With its blunt, artless angst, the picture leaves you feeling depleted, squashed." I particularly dislike "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and except for a few set pieces don't care much for the early movies (among Allen's chief flaws as a directer IMO is that he not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that). The only Allen film that got to me some was "Annie Hall," and that I think may have been because Dianne Keaton herself momentarily got to Allen -- penetrated his at once smug and fearful isolation -- though I suppose that's more or less the subject of the movie: how does a dick like Woody Allen react when that happens to him. That recent "Paris" movie made me want to thrown things at the screen.

Ah, yes, my little chickadee -- "extreme umbrage." Returning to one of Holloway's points, I could hear quite well what he meant in one of of his points while listening yesterday to the Violin Sonata Op. 134 -- some 35 minutes of "deprived" gloom. That is, to create the feeling of extreme deprivation that DS almost certainly was going for in that piece (written for Oistrakh, it apparently sprang from a then-recent governmental campaign of harassment against Oistrakh that was mounted to set an example for other artists and intellectuals to fearfully take heed of -- this info from liner notes by R. Dubinsky, former leader of the Borodin Quartet, who is the violinist on this disc) DS virtually deprives the music itself of all normal harmonic, melodic, and developmental sustenance, and yet the piece -- virtually in rags and tatters, so to speak, a walking skeleton -- still staggers on. I can see, again, the validity of Holloway's complaint -- it's close to anti-musical to not only place so much weight on a near-static act of "expression" but also to chose to express what one wants to express by almost baldly curtailing the means of music-making. And yet, contra Holloway -- at least for me, at this time (and maybe it will be only a few times for me) -- the piece does work quite powerfully and uniquely. BTW, I think one of the things in the back of Holloway's mind here was that DS might serve (might already have served, in the case of Schnittke, for one) as a dire example -- furthering the idea that the viable future for music was for it to be placed upon a funeral pyre of its own devising, and/or that the continuing semi-suicidal "sacrifice" of much of the means of music-making was what meaningful music-making nowadays absolutely required.

Tricky memory for sure. I was at the Parker Memorial Concerts (in Aug. 1970) and heard Von there, so the South Side party gig I was at must have taken place sometime before then, because I'd certainly never heard Von in person prior to that afternoon. I remember talking over how stunned we both were by what we had heard with Harriet Choice, who was there with me that day. Maybe I transposed the Atlantic album backwards in time because his playing on the album, when I heard it, was not at the level I recalled from that party. Von didn't get onto record at his best until Chuck did the glorious deed.

Will never forget the first time I heard him in person, in the late' 60s or early '70s, not too long (I think) after he came back to town from his time with the Treniers in Las Vegas. He was playing a small social affair (I think it was someone's wedding anniversary, perhaps a friend of his) in a nice room above a South Side restaurant, with Don Patterson, guitarist Sam Thomas, and Wilbur Campbell. I knew Von's Atlantic record, but what I heard that afternoon was almost beyond belief in its power and mastery -- and ease, too. I remember telling Joe Segal about what I'd heard the next time I ran into him, suggesting that he bring Von into the Showcase. I swear Joe said something like "Von Freeman? Never heard of him." Probably he was just putting me on.

Composer Robin Holloway's negative views on Shostakovich: http://books.google.com/books?id=b0KonLPQndcC&pg=PA297&lpg=PA297&dq=robin+holloway+shostakovich&source=bl&ots=Xbb7PC_e1s&sig=fe9VgIXeX7JbV-Szee1S26UWIs4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uB8pUO-JDaqMyAGArIHoBw&ved=0CEcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=robin%20holloway%20shostakovich&f=false

I see that I have Michael Borgstede's set, which I liked enough to get rid of my numerous Kenneth Gilbert Couperin LPs on MHS in order to save space. I suspect that was a mistake, though I do like Borgstede, but it's not a mistake I can take back. Did the same thing at about the same time with all my Fernando Valenti Scarlatti LPs on Westminster. What a maroon, in the words of Bugs Bunny.

Cochard (on Spotify) sounds excellent to me. I love Couperin, have ever since i first encountered him in Sylvia Marlowe's hands.

Yes, that's the one. "At a price" sounds ominous. I think I'll stick with my Kenneth Gilbert LPs and check periodically at Amazon to see if the Rannou shows up there. BTW, I did found her Forqueray set at Berkshire, and it's on its way to me.

No, don't know that one, and 10 discs of François Couperin is a bit much for me. How's this Blandine Verlet François Couperin 2CD-set: Amazon (it's much cheaper in Europe) How Moms can recommend Baumont's Couperin after his endorsement of Rannou's Couperin baffles me. Encounters with Rannou's Couperin on Spotify (that album doesn't seem available on CD right now in the U.S., only for download, but perhaps that's different in Europe) make it clear to me that her Couperin is in a different class altogether. Compared to Baumont, I much prefer my old Kenneth Gilbert LPs.

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish. - Charles Reznikoff