iTunes Catch of the Day: John Zorn
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We’ve seen which songs, for whatever reason, I’ve played the most in the last three years, but what actually takes up the most real estate in the sprawling fairgrounds of my iPod?
The winner, the greediest, most space-hungry artist in my library, hands down, is John Zorn, with over 1400 songs on 110 different albums. Zorn is, in fact, a primary reason why I jumped from the 40GB iPod to the 80GB — to include not just my favorites, but to include every god-damned blast, squeak, skronk and squiggle I own from Mr. John Zorn.
Zorn is a true American original — a distinctive sax player, a flamboyantly avant-garde composer, an incredible bandleader and a master of all he surveys. He’s also made himself a legend in the music wars by creating his own label, releasing hundreds of first-class albums in what would ordinarily be a marketing man’s nightmare and insisting upon absolute control of his career. If that were not enough, he’s also acted as mentor and presenter of a whole host of musical outlaws on his Tzadik label.
I came to Zorn through his 1990 album Naked City, which was handed to me by a mentor of my own who had been trying to get me to listen to folks like Sonny Rollins to no avail. It was a good choice for my mentor, who knew that I needed something immediate and demanding to get me interested in a whole new genre of music. Naked City is more than jazz, it’s an encyclopedic engulfing of a century of American music (with some Europeans thrown in for good measure) chewed up in the fevered New York mind of Zorn, played with the intensity of hardcore punk by a crack band of some of the greatest jazz musicians alive. Naked City hit my brain like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst and remains one of my top ten albums of all time. I worked from Naked City (and the seven or so subsequent albums by the same team) to The Big Gundown, his chopping and splicing of the film music of Ennio Morricone, and Spillane, his sprawling, half-hour musical film noir (which he has since expanded into a full-length CD). From there I investigated his game pieces, where large ensembles participate in structured, spirited improvisations, his jittery, menacing, occasionally terrifying classical pieces, his stunning film soundtracks (he is my number one choice for composer when I make my first feature) and his career-in-themselves Masada albums, 17 or so and counting, where, for the first time to my knowledge, a composer has succeeded in wedding jazz to the Jewish musical tradition.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: Death Proof
For Movie Night With
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, a rare treat: a movie in color starring actors who are still alive.
I saw Grindhouse three times in the theater, partly because I liked it and partly because, for the first time in a long time, I walked out of a big-budget American movie and didn’t know quite what to make of it — I didn’t actually understand what it was. It threw me completely off-balance, the structure of the thing seemed so odd and lopsided and peculiar. The first time around I was excited but baffled, the second time around I knew what was coming and loved it, the third time I started to actually put together the complexities that lay beneath the surface. For my money, Grindhouse is still the movie to beat for the American movie of the year.
That said, Death Proof works fine on its own as a stand-alone feature. It’s about 25 minutes longer, which may sound padded, even bloated, to someone who hasn’t seen the “extended cut,” but those 25 minutes actually make the movie breathe in a more natural, interesting way and include a number of suspense beats that weren’t in the theatrical version that help the movie work as a horror thriller.
Did I say horror thriller? That’s too limiting and gets to the heart of Tarantino’s accomplishment here. He starts out promising a horror thriller, a slasher movie precisely, but repeatedly and consistently upends and quashes your expectations until, by the end, you have no idea what might be comingnext.
SPOILER ALERT
In the slasher movie, the dumb teenagers head up to the secluded house by the lake and get picked off by the serial killer one by one. I once sat in a theater and timed one of those movies, and a teenager died, literally, every 11 minutes — about once a reel. You could set your watch by it. Tarantino introduces his comely young things, then tells us he’s making a slasher movie, then has us wait for about 45 minutes until anyone gets killed. Like Stuntman Mike, the audience is kept in a state of frustrated desire, and Tarantino keeps us there so long that when the shocking, unspeakable horror finally happens, you really don’t want it to happen any more. He takes the conventions of the slasher movie, the dumb kids who deserve to get killed, and turns them into human beings whose deaths are ugly, tragic and truly horrifying. You start out liking Stuntman Mike because he’s a movie geek like you (and like Tarantino) and you’re just aching for some action, then he gives you the action and you feel sick to your stomach because you realize that identifying with Stuntman Mike implicates you in the murders, and not in a fun way.
Then, with his movie halfway done, he starts the whole thing over again. Another group of women, all having the exact same conversations as the first group, being stalked by Stuntman Mike again. The difference is, this second group is also a group of movie geeks, which is what makes them more than Stuntman Mike bargained for. In Death Proof, being a movie geek is literally the difference between life and death, between dying and killing.
Then, again, just when you’re getting used to the movie being a horror movie, he goes and pulls the same trick again, and it becomes a chick flick again, except these chicks eventually stop talking about men and start talking about cars and stunts. And the adventure they head off on is so peculiar and singular that, by the time Stuntman Mike shows up again, Tarantino has, somehow, made you forget all about him again, so that his re-appearance is yet another surprise. With the simplest of tools in a movie with very few, very long scenes (some go on for ten minutes or more), Tarantino manages, again, to construct something very deceptive, unique and unexpectedly deep and convincing.
Urbaniak says “Stuntman Mike is a man out of time. His way of life is over (no one knows about the TV shows he was on, and no one makes car-crash movies the way they used to), and he wants to destroy the world.” And that’s one level of Death Proof, but there’s more to it than that. “It’s weird, because on the one hand it feels like a very minor work,” says Urbaniak, “but on the other hand he’s really pushing the envelope, making a movie that is so unreal, so full of devices, so much a movie about making movies, but on the other hand he’s making a real thing about the human condition. It’s almost like a French New Wave movie, a movie made in reaction to and critiquing Hollywood movies, and yet also saying something new and fresh and interesting on its own. There’s something very Godardian about it, how he’s both in love with these conventions and trying to subvert them at the same time. It’s utterly full of artifice and yet completely real.”
For me, my favorite level of Death Proof is the parts about the objectification of women. It was a great joke in the Grindhouse cut when thelap dance was deleted with a “REEL MISSING” message, since the movie spends a great deal of time building up to that lapdance and then chides you for being upset when it goes missing. Well, the lap dance is back in the movie for the DVD and while I miss that joke, the lapdance scene does help build the sexual tension. Stuntman Mike photographs the women he kills, and Tarantino makes explicit the connection between Stuntman Mike’s view of women and Hollywood’s view of women both by constantly fooling with our notions of how the female characters are “supposed” to act, and then for the ending credits, inserting the vintage “color test” frames on the vamps of the insanely catchy closing song “Chick Habit” (chick habit, indeed). Film, Tarantino seems to be saying, exists to objectify women — no color test frame ever included a photo of a handsome man. He teases and cajoles us with his parody/tribute to objectified women of movies gone by, then gives us a group of women who refuse to play by Hollywood rules.
Tarantino is the George Cukor of the 21st century — who knew?
There’s more to say, there generally is about a Tarantino movie, but it’s late. Let me just add that the day after I saw Grindhouse I went to my local video store to rent Vanishing Point, one of the classic car-chase movies cited within Death Proof, but the clerk just scoffed at me — “Dude, you picked the worst day in history to try to rent that movie.” That was five months ago, and Vanishing Point hasn’t come back in yet.