Found Sounds and Such...

My review of Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass. is in today’s Berkshire Eagle. This was a particularly good show and I did a few fun things in the review as well. The above link takes you to the story and photos from the show.

“In those days the band was inspired by a cockeyed desire to leap into musical chaos, but limited by the patience-trying experiments of founding bassist Reed Mathis, who wandered through indulgent, upper-register voyages on an electric Fender bass he had pinched in the family jewels with a pitch-shifting device…

…Raymer was a consistent delight, offering a hybrid of rock and jazz drumming styles that shone on “Imam,” on which he locked into some ferocious interplay with Haas on piano, as the latter crouched over his keys with Buddy Holly glasses sitting low on the nose, occasionally jerking his head back and sending with it a barely regulated mound of curls.”

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I had no idea Joan Rivers was funny.

I don’t know her as a comedian. Or as an actress. Just as a personality. And it’s a personality that rubs me the wrong way whenever I catch it in short bursts during, for instance, her signature red carpet reports.

But when she savagely desconstructs that gig in the opening minutes of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the excellent documentary that opened the 5^th annual Berkshire International Film Festival last night—seen in a dingy club gig, Rivers holds a microphone forward and rants, “You think I want to be on the red carpet? ‘Who are you wearing? Who the fuck are you!?!?’”—I suddenly realized how much I was missing. 

As seen in this unflinching doc, Rivers is foul-mouthed, painfully self-aware, at times painfully un-aware, simultaneously desperate for fame and profoundly unsatisfied by it, and, more often than not, flat-out hilarious.

Co-directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg seemingly had full access to Rivers and her staff over the course of a year, and capture many unguarded moments—though, even at her most discouraged, disappointed, and desperate (perhaps especially then), Rivers seems fully aware of the entertainment value she’s providing.

Though the film aptly opens with extreme closeups of makeup being applied to that famously worked-on face, the opening montage concludes with a glamor shot of the finished product. This reflects the line the filmmakers walk throughout. They keep an even-handed perspective, freely depicting the loneliness of the subject while seemingly keeping on good terms throughout. And so, it sometimes seems to cut close to the bone but not quite close enough.

Rivers is seen openly grubbing for any gig she can find (“I’ll wear a fucking diaper, I don’t care” she says at one point), but rather than probe too deeply the essential sadness of these sequences, the filmmakers briskly punctuate them with flatteringly hilarious stand-up footage, or well-curated “legacy clips” (from The Tonight Show and elsewhere) that place Rivers as a comedy icon in the mold of outlaws like George Carlin.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes when Rivers scans the script of a potential TV vehicle.

“I can’t find me anywhere,” she says.

The painful conclusion implied (though never hammered home) is that there in fact is no there there. Rivers craves fame for the sake of fame, but feels perpetually discounted and defeated. Maybe some of it is shtick. But when she consents to a Comedy Central roast because of the “extraordinary money” it pays, even though she knows she’ll be humiliated by the process, it’s a bit difficult to empathize because her eyes are wide open throughout.

Because of her frankness, we enthusiastically root for her to win a big payday, at whatever means. We share in the victory when she graduates from a dingy New York club to a 4,000-seat theatre. In the most painful sequence for the audience, Rivers’ autobiographical stage show is panned by West End critics (after apparently receiving a strong reception at the Edinburgh Festival). The limited excerpts shown in the film do not disprove this take. But Rivers is clearly thrown by the reception, and she declines to take the show to New York so as to save herself the humiliation of yet more negative reviews.

“My acting career is the thing that’s most sacred to me,” she says. “My career is the career of an actress. I play a comedian.”

Hrmm. For someone intensely aware of her persona, who leaps at the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice despite her misgivings simply because it’s “face time” on network tv, she seems here to be at the greatest disconnect with her own abilities and legacy.

Is it endearing? Not necessarily. Yet the yuks are not squeamish, because she continually gives us permission to laugh. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad.

The Berkshire International Film Festival continues through Sunday evening. My plans for tonight? The Taqwacores, about the Muslim punk scene in Buffalo, NY (yeah, I know, the topic is played out and everything…) and Soul Kitchen, which looks to be a charming German film about a restaurateur. I’m skipping the tribute event for actress Patricia Clarkson (The Station Agent, The Untouchables) and a screening of her upcoming film Cairo Time.

See my advance piece on the festival in Metroland.

The LA Times on Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.

I’m pleased to have the lead album review in this week’s issue of Metroland, Albany’s alternative newsweekly. The David Byrne & Fatboy Slim album is an interesting project; give a read if you like.

“The music here may not be visionary, but much of it is still delicious. Fatboy Slim’s hand weighs heavily on the addictive electro-stomper ‘Eleven Days.’ With its needling, township guitar riff, high-strung Byrne vocals and references to 50 Cent and reality television, the great ‘American Troglodyte’ sounds the most like what you might expect from ‘the new David Byrne album.

The snaking tropical rhythms of ‘Every Drop of Rain’ and ‘How Are You’ are totally danceable, but sound like genre experiments that Fatboy Slim, author of era-defining Big Beat ear candy like ‘The Rockafeller Skank’ and ‘Praise You,’ could program in his sleep.”

Both from the Berkshire Eagle on April 20 (click photo for the review):

Check out my review of the new Disco Biscuits album, Planet Anthem, in this week’s Metroland.

“And though cues are taken from the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Zero 7, most of this low-aiming but essentially successful after-party soundtrack could have been released in the waning days of the Clinton administration…

Dancepop flavored by a heavy, delightfully corny guitar riff, ‘You And I’ has more to do with Lady Gaga than, say, Jerry Garcia. ”

BTW, the above link is to the Metroland site, but if you have comments on this review please leave below!