Black and white dragon fly in woods near Rochester, New York
We’ve been gorging ourselves on the first three seasons of Breaking Bad, all available as “Instant Play” on Netflix, in preparation for the launch of season four on Netflix dvds. Season five drops on June 14th but we don’t have cable tv so this is how we do it. The reruns still have plenty of meat on them.
We’re crazy about the show but also worry that the writers may not be able keep this brilliant run up. When we mention the show people are always trying to us into other shows like Mad Men, Six feet Under, Weeds or The Wire and we’ve given them all a try but come on. Breaking Bad is the bomb.
Loading docks on Mushroom Boulevard in Rochester, New York
The Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, defines filmmaking as sculpting In time. “The Sacrifice” is a magnificent sculpture. We spent three nights with the movie, watching it and the extras a few times. Tarkovsky says an artist doesn’t look for a subject, “the subject grows within the artist.” This film is so beautiful that it hardly matters that the story is about Armageddon.
Still of Maria Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc
They really were better actors in the silent days. If you don’t believe me check out 1928 movie “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, “one of the greatest movies of all time” according to the Netflix envelope. The expressions on the actors faces are so over the top I kept wanting to pause the dvd and take a photo. Cindy Sherman could have shaped her whole career with this movie. No movie has ever effected me this way. I couldn’t wait to watch it again in the morning before the sun light steams into the room and wrecks the mood.
Joan is a heroine in France and a saint but in the fifteenth century her claims of divine guidance were met by the church hierarchy with a drawn out trial and death by burning at the stake. This movie portrays the leering old men of the cloth in devastating fashion as they challenge Joan on her manly dress and push for details on her vision of Saint Michael at one point asking “Was he naked?” They wish. And they couldn’t wait to pile into the torture room to exact a toll on nineteen year old Joan.
The poor church did not like the way they were portrayed and the movie was denounced, cut, and burned just like Joan was. So little has changed this movie could have been made today! Perfect fare for a Good Friday evening. I hesitate to mention that the entire movie is available on YouTube because you really should see the higher res Criterion Collection dvd.
Fifties Chevy BelAir station wagon on Brooklyn street
When our Netflix queue ran dry we put out the word and loaded it up with recommendations from friends. We lost track of who recommended what but I’m pretty sure our friends A & R pointed us toward “Momma’s Man“.
We watched the movie a couple nights ago and were transfixed by it. A low budget movie with the director’s parents ((avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs, shown third and second from the right in this photo) playing versions of themselves in the fourth floor Manhattan walkup he grew up in. The director, in the form of Mickie, comes home and wallows in his adolescence. We saved the extras for the next night and the movie only got better. Instead of the director talking over the movie he dispensed with a rerun of the visuals and recorded a conversation with his parents about the movie, a minimal masterpiece, that deepens the movie’s impact.
Remember PIL’s performance on American Bandstand? It was one of those transcendent moments of rock n’ roll bliss. We watched it live and hadn’t seen it until we followed this link on the Mojo site. I had a scare last week when SMR almost reached the one week mark without a new post. Turns out it was just a temporary lapse and it’s come roaring back with posts on Kraftwerk and early Swamp Dogg.
Rochester’s favorite realtor, Rome Celli, had his yearly bash last night treating his past and present clientele to popcorn and a movie at the Little Theater. We chose the Descendants, which featured a realtor, and then squeezed in to the café where Annie Wells was playing with a big band. Her ethereal, upper register voice was lost in the din but we did get to hear a bit of a Dave Ripton song on the way out.
I picked up a City Newspaper and was thrilled to find Frank DeBlase back in the saddle after his hospital tweak. Frank’s writing doesn’t get sidetracked with the back story crap. He goes right for the gut and conveys music’s potential for transcendent moments.
Regal Cinema sign at Culver Ridge Plaza in Rochester, New York
Back in college I let my roommate, Steve Hoy, write a paper for me. It was an English class of some sort and a creative writing exercise so the topic was wide open. Steve wrote a Sci-Fi like paper about time as the “Fourth Dimension.” It received an “A” with a little note that read “Very nice Mr. Dodd.” It was the best mark I ever got in that class.
Craig, who used to be in our painting class but is now across the hall in a figure drawing class, said “The Artist was a good movie but Hugo is a great movie.” Peggi and I loved The Artist so Hugo became a must see.
It is amazing that both movies cover such similar territory in similar time periods, France, dogs and movie making but there were some striking differences. The Little Theater was packed for the Monday night showing of The Artist. Regal Cinema in Culver Ridge Plaza was almost empty. There were three other people in the theater with us with the 3D glasses on. The Artist was whacky and fun while Hugo was steady and sure footed. It felt too long about three quarters in and I started thinking about how much money the movie must have cost. I vote for The Artist.
Five of the movies playing at Regal Cinema were in 3D. I’m waiting for 4D.
Dr. Carl Atkins playing Bye-Ya at the Baobab Cultural Center in Rochester, New York
I had the best tofu I have ever had at Edibles on University Ave. It was marinated in a ginger sauce and grilled in some fashion that left it moist and soft on the inside but slightly charred on the outside with a caramelized sauce. We had dinner with our neighbors before heading down the street to the Baobab Cultural Center where noted Jazz authority, saxophonist, and RIT Professor, Dr. Carl Atkins and his group, “Culture Clash” gave a lecture lecture-performance. He was Co-Director, along with bassist Ron Carter, of the Thelonious Monk Institute. He led a very cool group of bass, drums and vibes and w would up with, “Epistrophy” and “Ruby, My Dear” and “Well, You Needn’t” swimming around in our heads. That led us to YouTube this morning where watched and listened to main ingredient. And then we dug up dvd copy of “Straight, No Chaser” that Jeff Munson gave us. That’s now number one in our queue.
White flower weeds lining the path in Spring Valley
As a long time one movie at a time Netflix customer I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about when they jacked up their rates to cover the Instant Play movies that weren’t part of the package when I signed on but the announcement of the two separate companies seems plain crazy. At least they didn’t bring Meg Whitman on board.
On Tuesday we watched the Alice Neel movie from our Instant Queue. She is one my favorite painters so all they had to do was fill the screen with her paintings and I was happy. The movie was made by her grandson and he tried to come to terms with how Alice put her painting in front of family as if it follows that great artists should also have stellar parenting skills. Alice put her all into her work and her paintings testify to this. She was mostly ignored by the art world until well into her seventies. The story of how her sensational paintings could ever have been overlooked would have made a better movie.
The same art world embraced Mark Kostabi, the subject of Wednesday night’s movie, “Con Artist.” This one came in the mail in a red envelope. Kostabi did some really cute little line drawings early on and then decided to stop getting his hands dirty. He out flanked Warhol and hired a staff to not only churn out the work but come up with the concepts, mostly ugly, noisy paintings. They were snapped up as fast as he could sign them. Kostabi reminded us of Bob Ament, the muckraking candidate for our town supervisor. He rubbed his fakeness in the faces of the art establishment and demand continued to soar. So this really is the movie about how the art world ignored Alice Neel and it really isn’t all that good a movie.
We stopped by Clover Pools on East Ridge Road to pick up a new solar cover for our street pool. We found some paperwork that says we bought one back in 2007 so I guess these things only last five years or so out in the sun soaking in chorine. Clover Pools sells hot tubs and patio furniture too so we looked around a bit.
We had recently told Rich and Andrea that our NetFlix queue was getting dangerously low and they emailed back their picks. Hot Tub Time Machine was on both of their lists so we just watched it last night. I fell asleep and that’s a thumbs up from me. I couldn’t get over this set of patio furniture that they wanted $2,325 for. The circular table had what looked like Philip Guston cigar butts in an inset fake fire pit.
We walked to the library in last weekend’s snow and picked out a double sided dvd (Does anyone get books at the library anymore?)” We curled up last for the double feature.
I certainly admire people who do things.” Bruno said this to Guy as he sat down next to him on the train in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 movie, “Stranger On A Train.” Bruno, a mama’s boy, who was wealthy enough to not work hated his father and had hatched a plan to get rid of him. Guy was supposed to be the good guy but in the Hitchcock’s hands Bruno was more likable. Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley) wrote the novel and she makes a cameo in a record store. Hitchcock’s cameo has him hopping on a train with a stand up bass that is as big as he is. And Hitchcock’s daughter gives an sizzling performance. We watched both the Britsh and the American version last night. The British one supposedly had homosexual overtones that escaped the American style censorship but we didn’t spot the extra footage. Both were amazing.
Andy Warhol and DannyWilliams from “A Walk Into The Sea” at the Little Theater in Rochester New York
You can stream “A Walk Into The Sea” from Netflix but it was so much more fun to see it last night with a crowd in the Little Theater’s big venue “Theater 1.” Rochester Contemporary sponsored the event, an unusually arty documentary about Andy Warhol’s lover, Danny Williams, a film maker who disappeared and the following discussion. The beautiful black and white footage in the movie is all Danny’s except for a bit of “Chelsea Girls” and it was all edited in camera. Some great raw footage of the Velvet Underground and the Factory crowd all wrapped in a “who was using who?” who done it.
The George Eastman House has a world famous collection of films in their vaults and they screened a rare print of Joe Boyd’s 1973 film “Jimi Hendrix” last night. Made just three years after Hendrix’s death there wasn’t time for revisionist history and the interviews with Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton still show signs of jealousy. Lou Reed pretty much gives it up for Jimi, about as much as he can. And in the film Jimi gives it up for Bob Dylan with an incredible performance of of “Like A Rollin Stone.”
I left Woodstock before Hendrix performed because Dave thought we were going to starve and I’ll never let him forget that decision even though he is dead. I did get to see Hendrix in Indianapolis in 1969 with Dave’s ex, Kim. I sort of remember losing my brown shoes in a cemetery before the show. And what I mostly remember from the show is Hendrix flipping the bird to the fat cops who stood with their arms crossed in front of the stage.
There is some jaw dropping performances in the film like 1967’s black and white performance of “Purple Haze” at London’s Marque Club and Jimi in a TV studio playing 12 string against a white seamless backdrop. You can see why there hasn’t been another Hendrix movie since. They could never outdo the real thing and this is as close as it gets. I was transfixed by Jimi’s longtime girlfriend, Fayne Pridgon. She has a major role in this film and she was so engaging I came home and googled her but didn’t come up with much. Guess I’ll have to rent the dvd for more.
Peggi’s almost done with Keith Richards’ book and then I’ll set down my Guston book to dive in. There is only one more film left in the Eastman’s “Rock n’ Roll” series, next Wednesday’s showing of the “The Last Waltz.”
Frozen wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
The Eastman House put up a mint copy of the 1974 political thriller “The Parallax View” with Warren Beatty last night. And it was free for members. Peggi and I both thought we had seen it back in the day but we hadn’t. We would have remembered the spectacular shots. Same cinematographer as the Godfather movies and it really looked good on the big screen, so good I was laughing at inappropriate times. The plot was delicious too. Just like the Warren Commission got to the bottom of the JFK assassination and George W.’s plan to hire Henry Kissinger to get to the bottom of the World Trade Center bombings we never really know who’s calling the shots but there is probably a multinational corporation behind it.
Graham Nash curated the Rock n’ Roll photography exhibit at the Eastman House and we’ve been trying to get there for a month or so. I’m hoping Anton Corbijn’s Beefheart portrait is in the show.
Don Van Vilet was a rock n’ roller and real painter. He told The Associated Press in 1991. “I don’t like getting out when I could be painting. And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.”
Local film director, Robin Lehman has two Oscars under his belt or above his fireplace or stashed away somewhere in his Rochester home. The Eastman House honored Lehman last night by showing three of his documentaries and then grilling him in a post movie Q and A session. I liked the first short the best. Beautiful, liquid shots from inside an African volcano that were orchestrated to a Bach organ fugue. The second short, close-ups of underwater creatures, was unbelievably beautiful but the soundtrack was cornball and the third, main feature, “Forever Young”, about aging well, was just what you would expect. Get into something and get into it good, advice that could just as easily be offered to people of any age. My neighbor, Leo, in his nineties, is a perfect case. Whenever I say “Take it easy,” as a parting salutation he shoots back, “I don’t want to take it easy.”
And then (we were following Rick and Monica around tonight) off to L&M Lanes on Merchants Road in the old hood for a few games of bowling and some pints of Victory Hop Devil. The juke box hits the spot as well with Neil Young, Parliament and Zeppelin. This place feels like ground zero Rochester.
John Gilmore insisted we put this cable tv show called “Breaking Bad” in our Netflix queue. In fact he asked for our password and he added the movie himself. We spotted it in there and bumped it down a few times (I didn’t like the name of it) but it eventually worked its way to the top when we weren’t looking and then showed up in our mailbox.
We really love it. It’s over the top and believable at the same time without getting into reality tv territory. We watched the first three episodes in a flash and while we were waiting for the next disc to arrive our neighbors brought over a movie called “Leaves of Grass” with Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfuss. It was a similar topic. We watched the movie together and I was obnoxious throughout because I couldn’t believe how pale this thing was stacked up to “Breaking Bad.”
We don’t have cable tv so we have a lot of catching up to do and there is nothing but “Breaking Bad” in our Netflix queue now.
Our car is over at Jeromes’s getting the once over. It was time for an oil change but it’s also time for new brakes, new tires and a new pump for the window washer fluid. Those guys are the best so I know it’s in good hands but it is a strange sensation handing over the keys to a car with an Obama sticker on it to a garage where Glen Beck’s fire and brimstone rants are blasting. Bipartisanship in action. We just watched Network the other night and were surprised how relevant the thirty four year old move is.
We borrowed our neighbor’s car so Peggi could get to emergency because she had a bloody nose that wouldn’t stop. They packed it with liquid cocaine solution. her lips went numb and the bleeding stopped. And then we borrowed our other neighbor’s car so I could get to my painting class. I didn’t mind asking him because I had just helped him take down a diseased tree. You can see his time tested method in the photo above. You basically create a hinge that runs across the center of the tree by cutting the wedge perpendicular to and facing the direction you want the tree to fall in and a cut straight in on the other side about four inches above the wedge cut. The tree teeters on the uncut “hinge, you can almost tip it with a wedge and it drops. Can’t think of a better way to spend an afternoon.
Even though Guy Davis (referenced in my last post) played mostly songs from the giants of blues catalog I found him to be more folk than blues. But what do I know? I am not a folkie. He told some great stories between songs.
I woke up thinking I was tending to the cabbage in our garden. We don’t have any cabbage. I was still thinking about the German movie we watched a few nights ago called “The White Ribbon.” It was full of “who done its” without any concrete resolution and it had us speculating all day long. Not that it even mattered, it was a way of getting back into the movie. It was beautifully shot in austere black and white and set in pre WW1 Austria and was as unsettling as “Children of the Damned.” The sub titles were small so we sat cross-legged, up close to the tv. This intensified our involvement and it took a while it shake it. May have to try that again.
Clarence, the man who built our house in the late forties, stopped by with his daughter like he does every summer. Our neighbor, Jared, who was here when Clarence lived in our house, stopped n to reconnect and he asked Clarence what he attributed his longevity too. At 98 and a half Clarence is sharp as a tack. He said something about the Lord and Jared, the lovable atheist that he is, asked, “Why does the Lord decide to let you live to a ripe old age and then take a young person down”? Clarence said he has lived long enough to gain wisdom which is better than intelligence”.
We put “The White Ribbon” in the mail and cued up the Netflix “Instant Play” version of “The Horror of Dracula” on our iPad. Jack Garner recommended it in our local paper. We propped the iPad up between a Philip Guston book and one on Mattise and ran the audio out to our stereo. The application locked up at one point and I grabbed this still.
Peggi’s mom was using her fingers to name her five aunts. She was having trouble coming up with the sixth name and said, “I’m afraid the hereafter is going to be very confusing, trying to reconnect with everybody.” Her sole known cousin had called and it was his mom’s name that we trying to think of. I was thinking how I have about fifty first cousins and I could never name them all.
Sparky stopped by to check up on us. We keep talking about doing a repeat performance of Polish sausage lunch we did a few yeas back. The woman who made these magical sausages died and Sparky hasn’t found a substitute. It gives us something to talk about, sausage and Pete. We gave him a cassette of Pete LaBonnes’s music years ago and he always asks about him.
When Jeanne Perri was in town this summer (she moved to Nashville in the music boom days) we sat around calling out our favorite Pete songs and then playing them on our laptop. One that stuck with me is “Punk Rock Dressing Room” with the refrain, “We’re living in a punk rock dressing room”. I was thinking of that song last night when we got home from Peggi’s mom’s place. There was an unlabeled cd in a white envelope taped to our door with “4 U” written on it. I popped it in to my desktop computer and 19 untitled audio tracks popped up so I gave it a spin. It was a live Ramones’ recording from San Francisco from the “Road To Ruin” tour. We saw them many times and this brought it all back. They rescued rock and roll and were true performance artists. Rick Simpson stopped by this morning and asked if we got the cd. I never would have guessed it was from him.
Our NetFlix movie selection of the night was The Runaways movie. Even the extras were good except there was only still photos of Joan Jett and no current video of her.
Private Property No Fishing at Newport House in Rochester, New York
Roman Polanski made some of my favorite movies (Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Chinatown) and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (The Fearless Vampire Killers). We had “Repulsion” here for a days and it looked and sounded great. Chico Hamilton did the soundtrack and it’s a big part of the sixties action. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my cds I might try to track that soundtrack down. The dvd (from Netflix) would not play through part of the movie. It froze and then jumped ahead and we couldn’t reverse it. We tried sneaking up on the bad spot and watched the early scenes about five times in the process. They were so good we didn’t complain to Netflix or anything.
This situation came up tonight where I threw a ringer and the shoe landed under a leaner that Rick had. We weren’t sure how to score it so we gave Rick two and me three. I have to look up whether one cancels out the other. Last one thrown scores? I’ll report back.
Paul Dodd being arrested at an anti war demonstration in Bloomington Indiana
We stopped in Abilene on Monday night to hear Jenna sing with her new old band, Krypton 88. Reconnected with left handed drummer, Dana Gregory, from my high school days and asked Jim Via if he was nervous before going on. He laughed and said he wasn’t.
Jenna and the band sounded great but we had to leave before their set was over in order to catch the PBS show on the My Lai. That doesn’t sound like much, fun does it? I had read an intriguing review of the show in the morning paper. US soldiers under Lt. Caley’s command were interviewed and Vietnamese survivors told their side of the story.
I was so out of it in high school that I chose “Hawk” when asked to write a short essay on whether we were a Hawk or a Dove. It was my junior year and the war was raging. That summer Doug, who had already graduated and gone off to war, showed us a belt of gook’s ears that he proudly wore on the plane on the way home. End of tour senior year Rex’s dad wanted his son to go in the army before college. My mom wrote me at school that Rex had been killed, shot in the back by friendly fire. Tom, who lived down the street from my family, came back on leave and I asked him what he did over there. He said he sat in a helicopter and kicked napalm canisters out without even looking at what or who was was below.
I think Kim took this photo at a demonstration in IU’s Assembly Hall. I got arrested at another anti war demonstration (above), eventually dropped out and was reclassified 1A. I was considering my options when they decided to institute the lottery draft system. I watched them pick my ping pong ball in Kenny Macher and Dave Jolly’s apartment. I think Rich was there too. My number was in the two hundreds.
Later I worked with a guy named Paul who wept when Viet Nam came up and I’ll never forget him describing how they were so scared they shot at anything that moved and one time it turned out to be a bunch of kids. And then John the postman, who used to come see Personal Effects, got his Viet Nam photos out and shot himself in the head.
The PBS show was very well done, as good as Hurtlocker which we watched last night, better in fact because it didn’t try to wrap things up with a hokey scene with a soldier talking to his infant son.
