Author: chimesfreedom

Editor-in-chief, New York.

Super 8 (Short Review)

super 8 How much you like Super 8 (2011) will be dictated by your expectations. If you know it is directed and written by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg and you compare it to movies like E.T. and Stand By Me, you will be disappointed and disgruntled. But if you are looking for a decent summer action movie that is a fun ride, and you do not care that you might forget about it the next day, then you will enjoy Super 8.

The film follows a group of kids in a small town in Ohio in 1979 who are making a movie about zombies on a super 8 home movie camera. While they are shooting one scene, they see a train crash that creates a dark mystery. As the story progresses, the town is thrown into chaos, and the adventurous kids try to put together the pieces of the puzzle. The young actors, including Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney in his first feature, are excellent. Courtney’s performance has to work for the film to work, and it does.

I will not ruin the story, but the film features themes of parent-child relationships, issues about losing a loved one, an apparent supernatural mystery, and a bad guy military officer. One might argue that the movie tries to do so much that it does not do any one thing exceptionally well, but the sum of the parts make for a fun light-hearted ride.

If you do go see the movie, make sure to hang around after the credits start to see the film the kids were making throughout Super 8.

What did you think of Super 8? Leave a comment.

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    American Tune

    American Flag

    Happy Fourth of July weekend for our readers in the U.S. In a recent post, we considered Willie Nelson’s recording of “Graceland” on his album, Across the Borderline (1993). That CD also featured another classic song written by Paul Simon, “American Tune.” The beautiful music in the song, though, was not original to Simon.

    The music we know from “American Tune” appears in the chorale from “St. Matthew Passion,” BWV 244, written by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) about the crucifixion of Christ. You may hear “American Tune” in that composition in No. 21 (Chorale – “Acknowledge Me My Keeper”), No. 23 (Chorale – “Near Thee I Would Be Staying,” and No. 53 (Chorale – “Wha’ever may vex or grieve thee”). But Bach did not create the theme.

    Bach’s composition reworked “Mein Gmüth ist mir verwirret,” composed by Hans Hassler (1564-1612), a German composer who wrote the tune around a century before Bach was born. Hassler’s song was a secular love song known in English as “My Heart is Distracted by a Gentle Maid.” Hymnist Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) also borrowed Hassler’s tune in one of his compositions. We might call Hassler the “Father of Recycling.” Through Gerhardt and Bach, Hassler’s love song became a religious hymn (“O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,/ Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown.”). Here’s the Bach version:

    Paul Simon took the beautiful music and transformed it with new meaning in “American Tune,” which appeared on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973), released as Simon’s second album after his breakup with Art Garfunkel and as America was tangled in Viet Nam and Watergate. As columnist Anne Hill explained, the song “captures perfectly all the complexity of an idealism that died but still lives; the bitter disappointment and deeper hope which are intertwined in the soul of this country.” The lyrics are vague enough to allow for various interpretations, but the music conveys the melancholy of the song while still maintaining the beauty.

    But it’s all right, it’s all right;
    You can’t be forever blessed.
    Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day;
    And I’m trying to get some rest;
    That’s all I’m trying to get some rest.

    Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performed Simon’s song, “American Tune,” at their famous free concert in Central Park on September 19, 1981. The performance appears on the CD, Concert in Central Park. Here is Simon solo.

    Here is Willie Nelson and Simon performing “American Tune” from Nelson’s CD, Across the Borderline. On the album version, Paul Simon produced the recording and backed up Nelson. Check it out below (YouTube also has a live version of the song performed by Nelson and Simon.)

    Eva Cassidy does a beautiful version of the song too. Among others, Peter, Paul and Mary recorded a folk song, “Because All Men Are Brothers,” which was written by Tom Glazer and is based upon the same Bach music. The song’s lyrics include: “My brother’s fears are my fears, yellow, white, or brown; / My brother’s tears are my tears, the whole wide world around.”

    Thus, Hassler’s tune written in 1601 has functioned as a song of brotherhood, a love song, a hymn of faith, and an American tune about dreams surviving a time of lost innocence. That’s a pretty good record, and a nice theme for Independence Day.

    Photo of flag and barn via woodleywonderworks.

    What do you think “American Tune” means? Which version of the music do you prefer? Leave a comment.

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    Tom Waits’s “San Diego Serenade”

    I recently purchased a copy of Dion’s Yo Frankie CD.  The album featured an excellent cover of Tom Waits’s “San Diego Serenade,” although Dion renamed the song “Serenade.” I love the Tom Waits version, which is hard to top, but Dion does a great job.

    Tom Waits Heart of Saturday Night “San Diego Serenade” originally appeared on The Heart Of Saturday Night (1974), which was the second album by Tom Waits. Waits is one of the great songwriters of his generation. I am not sure why more artists do not cover his songs, but it might be because Waits’s vocal style is so distinctive and memorable.

    In addition to Dion, Nancy Griffith also covered “San Diego Serenade” on Late Night Grande Hotel (1991).  But there are not as many covers of the beautiful song as one might expect. Nothing matches the original recording by Waits of this song about regret and about recognizing what you have lost only when it is too late.

    I never saw the morning ’til I stayed up all night;
    I never saw the sunshine ’til you turned out the light;
    I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long;
    I never heard the melody, until I needed a song.

    The Voice of Tom Waits

    In later live versions, you hear a change in Waits’s voice, as later albums embraced a raspy gravely vocal sound. There are various theories arguing that the change was a choice, that it was due to a change or damage to his vocal cords, or that it was caused by cigarettes, alcohol and/or drugs.

    Waits briefly discussed his voice in this interview on NPR (starting around the 7:45 mark), but he does not clearly answer the question. The live version below was recorded in December 1975, which is less than two years from the release of the original above.  But you can already hear a big difference in his voice. Still, the interpretation is beautiful.

    A Nice Cover Version

    I looked through a number of other covers and amateur recordings. One usually finds interesting amateur recordings of songs on YouTube.  But there may be something about the emotion and voice needed for this song.  It is difficult to find any worthwhile versions of “San Diego Serenade.”

    A band called The Sensitives created one of the best covers of the song.  I had never heard of the band, and from their MySpace page, they are from Australia. Or were. They have not updated their MySpace page in more than two years.

    No label apparently singed The Sensitives, and there are some rough signs in this video — like the use of a music stand.  So, I suspect they are no longer performing together (though at least the lead guitarist Henrik “Pilen” Pilquist still seems to be in a band called the Marino Valle Band).

    Here, though, whoever he is, the lead singer of The Sensitives has an excellent voice.  He is one of the rare singers who capture the meaning of the song in his performance. Whoever you are, dude, I hope you are still singing somewhere, just as I hope Tom Waits keeps writing and singing these beautiful songs.



    What do you think of “San Diego Serenade”? What do you think of the cover by The Sensitives? Leave a comment.

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    Anniversary of Publication of Gone With the Wind

    Gone With the Wind Museum
    Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind was published on June 30, 1936. Mitchell spent about ten years writing the book, using her own imagination, her research, and her childhood memories of family gatherings where relatives “refought the Civil War.” Her work over such a long time period paid off. More than 30 million copies of the book are in print around the world, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 movie version of the novel is considered the biggest earning film of all time if you adjust for inflation.

    Gone With the Wind Dress

    Like movies such as Star Wars and The Big Lebowski, the book and film Gone With the Wind has rabid fans, calling themselves “Windies.” There is a museum devoted to the book and movie in Marietta, Georgia, which I recently visited. The movie, which deviates from the novel in some ways, has detractors who note the movie’s glorification of the South’s cause and that the film ignores slavery’s inhumanity. On the other hand, some note that the movie and the book have a strong feminist theme, with an unusually strong portrayal of a female lead role for 1939. Is it okay to love and hate a movie at the same time?

    Gone With the Wind leaves us with a similar problem presented by Birth of a Nation and other movies.  One must ponder how to deal with a work of art that is tainted by ignorant beliefs and stereotypes from a prior time period. A lot of movies have confused messages about important topics. Like anything, the solution is education as opposed to censorship. We might still learn from films, even if what we learn is not the producer’s intended lesson. But it is also possible that the mixed messages may ruin the entertainment value.

    Leslie Howard CigarettesGone With the Wind is a great artistic achievement, but its legacy might be something more if it is used as a starting point for discussion and education about the Civil War and our country’s legacy of slavery. Everything about America and race is complicated, and so is the movie’s legacy. Gone With the Wind features stereotypical African-American characters like Mammy, but then the wonderful Hattie McDaniel broke through a barrier and became the first African-American to win an Academy Award (as Best Supporting Actress) because of her portrayal of the character.

    One thing about Margarett Mitchell’s book, though, is certain. There are few twentieth-century novels that have been as popular, or had such an impact around the world, or which still may provoke such controversy, as her 1936 novel about Katie Scarlett O’Hara.


    Above is an interesting clip of screen tests for the movie, leaving one to wonder how different the film might have been without the performances we know by Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, and others.

    Photos by Chimesfreedom.

    What do you think about Gone With the Wind? Leave a comment.

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    A Coen Brothers Movie About Dave Van Ronk?

    Dave Von Ronk Mayor of MacDougal Street
    Reports are going around, including from the Los Angeles Times, that the Coen Brothers plan to make a movie loosely based on 1950s-1960s folk-singer Dave Van Ronk and the New York folk scene. It will be great to see the Coens creating another movie based around great music like O Brother Where Art Thou?

    If you watched Martin Sorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, you might recall that one of the most interesting interviewees in the movie was Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk was a folk singer in Greenwich Village during the 1960s, and he was a friend and supporter to many of the singers who would go on to more fame than he achieved, such as Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Van Ronk passed away in 2002 while he was working on a memoir, which was then completed by his collaborator Elijah Wald. The book, which will be used by the Coens, is titled after one of Van Ronk’s nicknames, The Mayor Of MacDougal Street.

    One of Van Ronk’s classic recordings is of the song ‘Green Rocky Road.”

    When I go by Baltimore,
    Ain’t no carpet on the floor.
    Come along and follow me;
    Must go down to Galilee,
    Singin’ green, green rocky road,
    Promenade in’ green;
    Tell me who ya love,
    Tell me who ya love.

    [UPDATE:  The movie became Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).]

    What do you think about the plans of the Coen Brothers? Who should play the Van Ronk character in the movie? Leave a comment.

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