0 Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (2003)

I've spent most of my life indifferent to Joan Baez, but I like "Diamonds and Rust" (the song, not the album) so much I never entirely count her out, and this album, for one, has finally justified my persistence, such as it is. I caught up to it a year or two after release; it was the Steve Earle song, "Christmas in Washington," that drew me in—though it is about 1996 (and though it name-checks Woody Guthrie) I heard it through the filter of 2004, and its deep melancholy felt like respite, a connection sorely needed, however misinterpreted. I also liked the title of the album, which further underlined the appeal of the song, so I took a chance. It's a pretty good album overall. On close inspection, the basic idea appears to be casting a net and covering songs of a later generation and certain musical sympathies. So there's at least one songwriting credit apiece for Earle, Ryan Adams, Greg Brown, Natalie Merchant, and Gillian Welch, among others. The production by Mark Spector layers on a thick, buffed-up sheen that occasionally feels a little suffocating, but if it's undeniably pristine it comes up well short of sterile. It works fine with Baez's clarion singing, as true as ever at 62, her age when she recorded this album. And the implications of the title are not shirked on either. The Natalie Merchant cover, "Motherland," for example, with its carefully positioned post-grunge squalls, is well within the explicit promise of dark chords and big guitars—I admit it surprised me Baez could pull that off, but I'm happy for the schooling. On the other hand, the sensibilities of Baez and the songwriters are mostly aligned, but occasionally jarring, as in "Elvis Presley Blues" (by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings), another brick in the myth of the cultural shit-house that is the day Elvis Presley died (compare Elvis: What Happened?, or the Odds, "Wendy Under the Stars"). I can believe it's someone else's experience—and see no reason to think it's not Welch's and/or Rawlings's—but it does make me wonder what Joan Baez was actually doing and thinking and feeling that day. The cultural figure she seems most genuinely involved with on this album, judging by what I hear as her commitment in singing the song, is not Elvis but rather the beat poet Kenneth Rexroth, who appears ghost fashion in Greg Brown's "Rexroth's Daughter." In my mind, that's as it should be. It grounds the album well within her sensibility, and enables her to reach beyond it credibly and with admirable force. So, finally, a Joan Baez album I can count as a real pleasure. I think I'd have to say it was worth the wait.

Detail: Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (2003)

0 Camera Obscura, "Teenager" (2003)

(listen)

I'm pointing to the "official" video but it looks more like one of those homemade jobs not least because I can't make out what camping has fuck-all to do with this song, which seems to me more at play in the glittery upscale sandboxes of Nico, Young Marble Giants, or Saint Etienne. Wispy girl vocals, understated playing, an achingly beautiful twangy guitar. It's almost lounge, in a way, but closer to saccharine early '60s highschool pop, reminiscent of the Paris Sisters or Fleetwoods. But the note of ironic detachment is pervasive for that or lounge. Dare I say, twee? As Scots out of the '90s perhaps they come by it honestly. I don't know. Part of the appeal here is the mystery. It comes from the wonderfully titled Underachievers Please Try Harder, which is itself preoccupied in gentle ways with matters of adolescence ("Suspended From Class" is the first song). Or, well, to be more accurate, with the grappling of adolescence by fully grown adults in their 20s and 30s. "Teenager," that is, as in "you're not [one], so don't act like one." To be fair, the tone of the music and of the words are somewhat at odds with one another. I like it most precisely because it does sound so teenager and highschool. It's easy to miss the quietly stinging rebuke when surrounded by so much else so lush and simple and sweet. In many ways it is the most emblematic song on the album, perhaps of their career. Released as a single, however, it barely cracked the nether regions of the UK top 200 chart. Never caught on. Perhaps they are just too '90s and this came too late. The irony.

Detail: Camera Obscura, "Teenager" (2003)

0 Weakerthans, "One Great City!" (2003)

(listen)

Just because I made a big deal out of the song "Nightime" by Big Star, and just because I'm about to do something like that for this great song by the Weakerthans (from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), that doesn't automatically mean I love songs because they use the word "hate" with such conviction. But it certainly doesn't hurt. And it doesn't hurt that I think I know something of where chief songwriter, singer, and guitarist John K. Samson might be coming from. For at least the three minutes this lasts the focus of his loathing, and a very pure version of it too, is the city of Winnipeg. Some places are cold—they're cold even when they are warm for others, and some places feel like they are always cold. Samson runs down some good details in the verses—mostly he puts the sentiment in the mouths of others, a clerk at a Dollar Store counting Loonies, a commuter stuck in traffic. But in the end it seems to be coming more or less from Samson: "... our Golden Business Boy will watch the North End die, and sing 'I love this town,' then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim, 'I hate Winnipeg'"—taking dead aim at a great Manitoban symbol with naked scorn and derision. On the other hand, it's 10 years later and Samson is still living in Winnipeg and by all indications reasonably happy—married, solo career, etc. So we all grow up, I guess that's the lesson here, and a good thing. But we pass through times, through moods, through sour days or hours, when we feel like this song too. It's almost exhilarating to hear it expressed so purely.

Detail: Weakerthans, "One Great City!" (2003)

0 21 Grams (2003)

USA, 124 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writer: Guillermo Arriaga
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Clea DuVall, Danny Huston, Paul Calderon

One more prestige production of the past with the prestige season of the present still (barely) upon us. 21 Grams is the kind of edgy upscale downbeat over-the-top melodrama/acting showcase that seems to put in an appearance most years one way or another, often indeed with Sean Penn in the cast—one thinks of Dead Man Walking or Mystic River, for example. Perhaps Silver Linings Playbook occupied the niche this year, though that did not seem to me generally quite as glum as many of these others, which often go to such formal narrative extremes to wring the ducts (Monster's Ball, Things We Lost in the Fire, you know what I'm talking about).

Certainly one sees similarities in terms of how 21 Grams has been put together. First and most obviously there is the big-name mainstream commercial acting talent, self-evidently "stretching": Sean Penn (who can make even running in place look like stretching), Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro—the latter two arguably at their peaks of popularity. Then there is the promising young director element, in this case Alejandro González Iñárritu, which is how I came to be gulled in. I thought his feature debut from 2000, Amores Perros, was shaggy and barely held together, but dazzled with ambition and creative energy. It seemed promising even to me to throw him in with Del Toro, Penn, and Watts, for a complicated story about lost souls in the modern world, miracles of medical science, the ways we insist on living, alienation, drugs and sex, redemption by fertility, cruel auto accidents, tortured Christianity, etc. Trauma and grief, in other words, we got 'em. Also spoilers, on the other side of the jump, big time (though here's the biggest spoiler of all: none of the narrative surprises are particularly surprising).


21 Grams is edited to be confusing, cross-cutting across time streams and various narrative threads, offering little help, in the manner of a Nicolas Roeg picture say, but the story once pieced together seems hardly worth the effort. The complications are all those of activity and event and nothing about the characters, who are more types, with by-the-numbers despair inflated by convenient events, any one of which would naturally produce despair in anyone. Sean Penn, for example, plays Paul Rivers, a man in his 30s or early 40s suffering from heart disease, ultimately the recipient along the way of a heart transplant. His response is to continue smoking and to become obsessed about whose heart it was. He's not very likeable or sympathetic, nor interesting as a freak show—the problem with the picture as a whole.

Then there is Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro), a lifelong lowlife criminal now gone hardcore Christian. He's tryin' hard, Ringo. But when he accidentally runs over a family in his Jesus truck he lapses into an emotional coma while his wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) attempts first to cover it up and then to minimize his time in jail. This raises questions of greater duty—to God and community, or to family—that are not interesting or insightful. Meanwhile, Paul's estranged wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg—hey, two Mary wives plus a Cristina, is that Catholic enough for you?) secretly had an abortion and damaged her fallopian tubes. Now she enters into fertility psychosis, in her desperation for a child by Paul before he dies. Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts) is the widow created by Jack's hit and run. Her dead husband provided Paul's new heart. So naturally Paul now wants to fuck Cristina, which explains how they become involved and also why they decide they have to kill Jack (who got a suspended sentence or some such).

Busy busy. But also irredeemably unbelievable, from premise to resolution. Because a gun appears and is fired, this movie additionally has the chutzpah to pass itself off as a crime drama. Crimes against who, that's the question. Me, I feel a little violated by the interminable parade of human trauma event, even as I recognize how expertly the cast plays it—why, it's almost like sitting in on a workshop! 21 Grams keeps trying to raise the stakes so high (loss of entire family, loss of one's physical heart, loss of all meaning in life, etc.) because on some level they are not grounded in anything. This is the dramatic narrative equivalent of CGI. It's obviously phony, even as it keeps heaping incident on the disaster pyre to attempt to sputter it into life.

I do appreciate that 21 Grams mostly appears to proceed on the basis of intuition, with everybody involved feeling their way to what we end up with here—narrative structure, performances, photography, staging and blocking. Everything was open to experiment. There's a lot of good energy put into this. Unfortunately so few of these brave experiments even cohere, indeed tend rather to jostle over and across one another seeking attention desperately. All we're left with is pieces to pick through. It feels like things were thrashed and thrashed through as this was mounted. Everyone obviously worked very hard, at every step. It just kept eluding them. Then they released it. And brought home two Oscar nominations: Best Supporting Actor for Benicio Del Toro and Best Actress for Naomi Watts. Yippee!

Detail: 21 Grams (2003)