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From Funkylb: I never read children's books as a child. I would always plow through the very adult offerings from one of my aunt's book club and whatever my youngest aunt was reading for her high school literature classes. So, of late, I've been trying to catch up on everything I missed, and also pay close attention to the thousands of titles geared toward children of color. Black and Latino publishing appear to be booming in this niche market. There will be fiction and non-fiction adult titles reviewed here in the future. In the meantime, check out my book of the month suggestions for grown folk here. The book of the month entries from me, though, are more descriptive than critical. They merely serve as just a literary heads-up, really.
Abiyoyo
by Peete Seeger
Illustrations by Michael Hays
NY: Macmillan, ©1963
(Picture Book for Older Children)
Review by Funkylb
This
book recreates a South African folktale about a young ukulele player, who, along
with his magician father, is banished from an interestingly multicultural town
(inhabitants include Asians, peoples of African descent, Native Indians,
Continental Indians, peoples of European descent, Jewish peoples) accused of
making too much noise.
The boy’s father’s crime is making too many things disappear.
A mythic creature called an Abiyoyo, though, soon besieges the town.
The Abiyoyo, it is believed, eats humans.
Everyone in the town is afraid of the creature except for the banished
boy and his father.
The boy takes up his ukulele and plays for the creature making a song
about of its name.
The Abiyoyo, it seems, is quite narcissistic and is overcome with the
desire to dance to the sound of its own name.
Soon tired, the creature falls to the ground and the father makes him
disappear with his magic.
The town celebrates the bravery of the two newly minted heroes.
The style of illustration in this book is impressionistic oil paintings on linen. The linen surface gives the pictures an earthiness, depth and texture that enriches the story’s pastoral backdrop. Every picture is a double page spread with no white space in the gutters. This decision is a misstep because it disrupts the continuity of the paintings on a few occasions. The artist alternates between the use of heavy lines in the paintings to very thin lines. The heaviest lines are utilized in the service of evoking menace and heightened action, especially in the scenes with the Abiyoyo. Too, it is a wonderful artistic decision on the part of the illustrator to deviate from the more representational style of drawing utilized for the human figures when the depicting the creature. The Abiyoyo is very loosely drawn, rather amorphous in shape and detail. This preserves the mythical nature of the creature, while at the same time leaving much room for young minds to graft onto the creature any imaginative, nightmarish qualities for a beast that they may have. That is a wonderful device for such a tale.
My Man Blue
New York: Dial, ©1999.
(Poetry for Children)
Review by Funkylb
This
is a collection of narrative poems thematically linked around the central story
of a boy’s coming to terms with his mother’s new boyfriend, the titular,
Blue. Each poem in the series
illuminates some new facet to young Damon's deepening relationship with Blue.
Blue helps Damon overcome his fear of heights, helps him to put his
affliction with asthma into perspective
and teaches him how to live with the taunts from other boy’s his age
about being a mama’s boy and boy who does not fight girls.
Some of the poems rhyme and others do not.
The overarching style is a conversational narrative tone wherein every
word is purposefully placed. Grimes
manages to say a great deal with just a few lines.
The poems are in Damon’s voice and sound very much like a child’s
perspective on suspicions about the new man in his mother’s life, encounters
with the class bully and dealing with neighborhood violence.
The language is not ornately poetic, but is characterized by highly
distilled and realistic everyday speech. The
real poetry is in how lines are organized, what words are omitted and how
adjacent words function together, both in terms of sound and imagery. Grimes
successfully assembles poetry that is accessible and relevant here.
The
real joy in this work, however, is to be found in Lagarrigue’s acrylic
paintings on paper. The illustrator
visually posits an urban cityscape that is vibrant and warm. Even the abandoned
cars and buildings seem not to be examples of blight, but objects that
positively contribute to the neighborhood’s overall tableau.
Both Damon and Blue are representationally drawn, but the Canson paper
that Lagarrigue uses gives his human figures an über-dimensionality that
surpasses even the triptych dimensions of real life. Lagarrigue’s city neighborhood is dominated by oranges,
pale greens, reds, and aquamarine, that all bring a nostalgic quality to the
story. It is as if the young boy,
now grown up, is looking back on a pivotal time in his life.
Black Books Galore: Guide to Great African American Children's Books. Donna Rand, Toni Trent Parker & Sheila Foster (eds). New York: Wiley, ©1998.
Black Books Galore: Guide to More Great African American Children's Books. Donna Rand, Toni Trent Parker & Sheila Foster (eds). New York: Wiley, ©2001.
Black Books Galore: Guide to Great African American Children's Books About Girls. Donna Rand, Toni Trent Parker & Sheila Foster (eds). New York: Wiley, ©2001.
Black Books Galore: Guide to Great African American Children's Books About Boys. Donna Rand, Toni Trent Parker & Sheila Foster (eds). New York: Wiley, ©2001.
This is a suite of reference tools, geared principally toward parents, but valuable for educators as well. The editors provide largely descriptive annotations for hundreds of "positive" books (both fiction and non-fiction) for Black youth from preschool through grade 8. The overarching organizational principle of the bibliographies is age group. The titles in each age range are then listed alphabetically. Short spotlight pieces introducing authors and illustrators, the majority of whom are Black, are included. As are cover art and story excerpts from select books. Usefully, a list of Coretta Scott King, Caldecott and Newberry award winners is also provided. The only shortcoming I find with these texts is the lack of critical evaluation. Each text covers at least two hundred books and it would be helpful to know which are poorly written or, in the case of the non-fiction, badly researched.
Ernestine
and Amanda: Summer Camp Ready or Not!
By
Sandra Belton
Aladdin Paperbacks, 1997
0689808453
Ages 8 to 12
Review by Funkylb
Ernestine and Amanda are two eleven-year-old African American girls negotiating puberty and profound family transitions in 1950’s West Virginia. In this book, the second in a series that consists of four books to date, the girls tackle summer camp. Ernestine heads off to an all Black camp, and Amanda, to an integrated camp in which girls who look like her are still underrepresented. Belton utilizes an alternating first person narrative strategy that allows the girls to recount two very different camp experiences in a progressive plot strategy. Belton deftly and sensitively explores issues of body image, divorce, a segregated South and nascent friendship between two girls who are first suspicious of one another and later only grudgingly cordial. Belton does a splendid job at drawing the two main characters so that, although they are the same age and hail from similar kinds of families, each has a voice that is uniquely distinct from the other. Both Ernestine and Amanda are bright, clever young women whose verbal sparring with one another is laugh out loud funny. Also to Belton’s credit, the relationship between Ernestine and Amanda progresses very slowly and lends itself to a story with more verisimilitude. Too, the languor with which the relationship between the two girls develops creates, in the reader, an interest in reading other books in the series to learn how these two contentious characters become friends.
Belton’s
writing is sharp and very well crafted. She
is particularly adept at writing convincing dialogue between young people.
Belton’s prose assumes the natural intelligence of her 8-12 year old
audience; it never speaks down to that audience.
Belton’s writing style forces this age group to stretch, making good
use of vocabulary that inspires the latter.
Peppering the text with words like oblique and disenfranchised
sets a standard and a tone that persists throughout the text.
Nothing about this text seems forced or contrived underscoring the
author’s note that she grew up at a time, in a town and in a family much like
the title characters. Ernestine and
Amanda are wonderful portraits of female pubescence.
Norah Jones: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 at The TLA (Philadelphia)
Opening Act: The Gabe Dixon Band
Review by Funkylb
Daughter of noted composer, sitarist and all around hero of the 60's and 70's hippie musician crowd, Ravi Shankar, Norah Jones seems to have come out of nowhere and within a very short time landed in the top 10 of the Billboard charts. What is noteworthy about her ascent is that she's a young (only 22 years old) phenom who effortlessly and intelligently mines the country, folk, jazz, pop, and R&B milieus and comes up with style that is all her own. She sounds like no one but Norah, but it is obvious to the listener that she has paid close attention to Billie, Ella, Sarah, Nina, Aretha and Patsy. Forget the new school so called divas, Norah has learned from the originators and imbibed those lessons fully and well. Also noteworthy is the fact that her debut album, Come Away With Me, is doing brisk business for the heretofore serious jazz (read: relatively low selling, recognized and appreciated by only the in-nest of the jazz cognoscenti) BlueNote label. Marry all of the above to the fact that Norah and her band of similarly young and talented NYC based musicians write the majority of their material and excel at their chosen instruments, and what you have is a present day pop musical anomaly. Norah, unlike most "artists" inhabiting the top of the charts is no vacuous confection. She sings and plays piano and Wurlitzer with an organic sense of time, timbre, attention to lyric, and innate soulfulness that seems to be from an era long gone.
http://www.thegabedixonband.com
So, it was with great delight and heightened anticipation that I made my way down to the TLA one rainy Wednesday evening to catch Norah and the other members of her quartet: Lee Alexander (bass), Adam Levy (guitars) and Andrew Borger (drums). It was a sign of good fortune to have as an opening act The Gabe Dixon Band, another piano led quartet out of the University of Miami School of Music that recently scored a major label deal. Gabe Dixon usually handles lead vocals and piano, organ & keyboards of one type or another himself, and is also the band's putative lyricist. Gabe is really the thinking man's Ben Folds. His lyrics, though, are less cutesy-mercurial and his chord vocabulary is pretty expansive in a jazz-inflected way. Some might call him a funkier, blusier Billy Joel or Elton John (for real!), but Billy and Elton haven't integrated P-Funk, Billy Preston, Stevie Wonder and Jimmy Smith-isms into their musical output in the way that Gabe has. Let me be clear about that fact that Gabe is no mere regurgitator, he has filtered and stripped his myriad musical influences of their surfaces and re-shaped the raw materials, the innards to his liking.
Gabe played piano, Rhodes, the Hammond B-3 this evening and was more than adept at all three. He has serious chops. Sir Paul McCartney apparently thinks so too, as he tapped Gabe to play keyboards for him in NYC last year. Gabe is also a truly soulful and funky vocalists with a beautiful falsetto!!! He was ably assisted on this night by Winston Harrison on bass (electric and upright), Jano Rix on drums, and Chandler Harrison on alto sax. The tunes the band played were loose, funk-jazz-pop pieces accompanied by good lyrical storytelling. Stand out tunes were: Everything's Okay, More than It Would Seem, and Corner Cafe and Last Fool. Their set was regrettably too short. I wanted to hear more. Fortunately, the Band was selling copies of their full length album for Reprise Records, On a Rolling Ball, for a mere $10.00. $10.00???!!! I would have gladly paid twice that amount for this audio distillation of gleeful funk. The disc is not yet available in stores. Lucky me.
The lady of the hour, Norah Jones , and her band took the stage without much fanfare after about a 45 minute set from The Gabe Dixon Band. Norah played to a sold out audience that seemed to know all of the songs from the album, Come Away With Me and the now out of print EP, First Session. Norah had been selling the latter EP at earlier 2001 and 2002 shows. They were also available through her website, but no more. Rabid fans like myself presciently snatched them up months ago.
The show commenced with a loose reading of Cold, Cold Heart that swung like nobody's business. Norah and the guys are such the antithesis of serious and stuffy jazz musicians, a descriptor that they all can credibly claim. The dress was denim casual for all of them and the mood was playful and open. Norah shared with audience some of the very bad jokes that help them break up the monotony on the tour bus. Norah also playfully put the spotlight on Lee Alexander's new-old jeans that he had purchased earlier that day, and admitted that she gets great pleasure out of embarrassing the laid back upright bass player. Norah seemed relaxed and did a good job of connecting with the audience even though, as a result of the positioning of the piano and Wurlitzer on stage, the bulk of the audience only saw her profile all night. That was not a hindrance because people were there for the music primarily. I will say that I was pleased to have had a fantastic view of Norah's hands as she played piano all night. That kind of perspective on a live musician is invaluable and instructive.
The musicianship on display this evening was of the highest caliber, with Norah mostly engaging in some light and subtle comping as guitarist Adam Levy took a front seat on the majority of the tunes. Levy is virtuosic on both acoustic and electric guitars bringing a Bill Frisell-esque whimsy to most of his solos. Lee Alexander and Andrew Borger were a well-matched rhythm section with Alexander's bass walking patterns resting comfortably if animatedly on top of Borger's percussive combinations. Alexander's impeccable sense of time was best displayed during the band's reading of Hank Williams' tune, Cold, Cold Heart. The Band turned this tune inside out eschewing its maudlin quality and replacing it with saucy, sexy seduction. It is my favorite song from the album, and it, along with Tennessee Waltz was my favorite tune this evening.
But the most sublime and otherworldly element in evidence this evening was Norah's voice. To say that she is a singer is a misnomer: singers marry words to music. Ms. Jones is a vocal storyteller; she adds depth, nuance, color and shading to each word of each song. Norah is well aware of the melodic and harmonic range of her voice, and intelligently coaxes the maximum pathos and emotion out of it, seemingly without great effort. All of this even as she supports the music with tasty, but sparse chordal accompaniment on piano or Wurlitzer. What a sophisticated and graceful interpreter of lyric and composition this 22 year old is! Norah Jones and her band are a discriminating music lover's delight. Catch them in your city, if you can.
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Also, see my MULTI-Part Queer Stuff on DVD/VHS mini-Reviews |
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SEE BRIEF COMMENTS & RATINGS OF A CROSS-SECTION OF NEW FILMS FOR 2003 |
| my top ten list of films for 2002 |
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FILMS REVIEWED: |
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QUICK
PICK
Starring:
Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Mia Maestro, Valeria Golino, Edward
Norton, Antonio Banderas, Ashley Judd
Directed by: Julie Taymor
Screenplay by: Clancy Sigal, Edward Norton, Gregory Nava (among others)
Review by Funkylb
Mention
the name Frida Kahlo these days, and chances are the person you are addressing
will know to whom you refer. Recognition
and appreciation of Kahlo, though, is a relatively recent (last 25 years or so)
phenomenon here in the US. Her
ascent in esteem can be attributed, in large part, to the positive revisionist
efforts of the women’s movement. In particular, Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biomythographical
(to borrow a wonderfully rich literary neologism coined by Audre Lorde)
book-length treatment of Frida’s life went very far in introducing the world
to a woman who is arguably Mexico’s greatest painter.
Madonna and J.LO’s mad rush to be the first to bring Kahlo’s life to
the big-screen also fomented interest and visibility for Mexico’s gran
artista feminina. Given that
human beings tend to be guilessly (mostly, I think) reductive, Kahlo’s
personage and heady artistic contributions have been boiled down to “uni-brow,
mustache, and bloody self-portraits.” Clearly,
Frida was so much more. Iconography can be such an unforgiving and
restricting beast! Thankfully,
actor Salma Hayek’s decade long filmic labor of love reveals layers upon
layers of this most complicated and truly modern woman. This film will
certainly bolster Kahlo's icon status, but, to its credit, it does try to tell a
more complete story.
Frida,
as a biopic, follows the familiar storytelling trajectory for that kind of
picture. That is to say, it adheres to a kind of temporal diachronicity
and linearity. There are, however, a number of whimsical and highly
imaginative divergences that upend the roteness of the genre. More on that
a bit later...
In the opening of the film we meet a young Frida circa 1915 who is impish, strong-willed and clearly charmed by life. That little girl morphs into the university art student who is still making mischief, but who now exudes a kind of earthy sensuality, fearlessness and restless intelligence. This Frida is outspoken, attenuates boundaries through sartorial gender play and is uncowered by the perceived headiness of the theoretical writings of the likes of Shoeppenhauer and Hegel. In the midst of a heated debate with her then boyfriend about the influence of Marx on these and other critical thinker, the bus transporting the two crashes into a building. As a result of this collision, Frida suffers a crushed pelvis and left foot and a twisted spine. Her injuries leave her bed-ridden for months and necessitate dozens of painful operations over the course of her life. Frida would never fully recover from the accident, living with chronic unbearable pain, walking with a limp for the rest of her life and then pretty much being confined to either a wheel chair or her bed in her the last years. Some of Frida's most anguished and poignant paintings convey the physical and mental devastation she suffers as a result of her post-accident body.
It
is during her post-accident convalescence that a bedridden Frida’s passion for
painting as self-expression becomes palpable for the audience. Frida, in interviews and the like, often commented that she
would simply “paint her reality.” Confined
to a full torso cast and relegated to being mostly horizontal, Frida uses
whatever is in her purview as artistic subject, even her own feet.
As her body heals, she is able to use a mirror to paint her own visage
and then graduates to portraits of her family members. Needing to make money to
help support her family, Frida begins to see art as commerce as well.
She seeks out Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, for his opinion of both her
creative and of her commercial viability as an artist.
Rivera is impressed with her gift and tells her so.
Frida wants to be mentored by Diego, but makes it clear from the start
that they are to be compadres only.
It is not long, however, before Frida begins to see her twin soul in the
unkept, lumbering, unsuccessfully posturing and rapaciously sexual muralist.
And so one of the great romances in modern times begins.
The
lion’s share of the film chronicles the tempestuous open marriage between
Diego and Frida. Both had many
lovers during their marriage. Frida,
though, did a better job of being discreet about her liaisons with both men and
women. (To the film’s credit, Frida’s bisexuality is frankly related in this
film. Kudos to Hayek for being
fearless about this aspect of the artist’s life. One of Frida's more
famous female lovers, Chavela Vargas, has a cameo in the film singing in a bar
scene) Diego didn’t care to
successfully hide his dalliances, including one with Frida’s sister, Cristina.
Although Frida’s relationship with Diego is interesting stuff, I think
the film privileges it a bit too much. What
suffers, as a result, is any real exposition of Frida’s relationship to her
art. What did the brush feel like
in her hand, what did the paint smell like, what physical sensations accompanied
the motion of putting brush to canvas? Did
she theorize at all about her art? Were
her obvious influences studied ones? Whom
else did she admire artistically, aside from Rivera and Picasso? I don’t feel the film does an adequate job of concretizing
her genius, nor her artistic process. I’m
not sure, though, how one would successfully do that cinematically.
I do, however, think that the Jackson Pollack biopic staring Ed Harris
manages to capture some of these intangibles better than the Frida film.
Hayek’s
performance is such a soulful one. We
don’t, as a matter of course, see these kinds of performances much anymore
(especially since Meryl Streep has become a bit stingier about gracing the
screen. Streep’s turn as the
titular character in Sophie’s Choice and her truly transformative
realization as Italian-born, Iowa-moored housewife, Francesca, in The Bridges
of Madison County, are the yardsticks by which I measure degrees of soul on
screen. Film performances of late
have become too “actory-ly.” By
that I mean that many of the so-called great actors of the last 25 years or so
constantly employ a stable of expressions and bodily ticks that pass as craft
(Jack Nicholson, Kevin Spacey, Tom Hanks can you hear me?), but which evince
nothing of the chi or the anima even of the actor nor of
the character/person being portrayed. However, Salma seems to have inhaled,
imbibed, and channeled the very essence of her subject. I'm not at all
sure of the nuts and bolts of how she accomplishes this, but she delivers
an emotional, affecting, self-aware and intimate performance the likes of which
I did not think her capable. Certainly, her work in From Dusk 'Til Dawn,
Time Code, The Velocity of Gary, Fools Rush In (all of
which I've seen more than once) in no way pre-sages this level of
intelligent, measured and impuriently sexy craftsmanship. It probably
helps that she is playing opposite Alfred Molina (The Man Who Knew Too
Little, Chocolat) as Diego. Molina’s
portrayal elicits such sympathy from me. For
years, I have so strongly disliked Rivera the person while still remaining awed
by his creative output. Molina and
Hayek together make me wish I could buy into the diluted storybook trappings of
the film romance, but I know better.
There
are some other glaring elisions and gentle contortions of truth that I find
curious in this film: After Leon
Trotsky's assassination, for which both Frida and Diego were suspected
conspirators, the two of them contumeliously repudiated their once fervent Trotskyism
and turned, instead, to Stalism. They did so even in the face of the
overwhelming evidence that Stalin was a mass murderer. In addition, Frida,
as evinced through the style of art she committed to canvas and through her body
art (meaning her affinity for really ornate native Mexican dress), was extremely
nationalistic. Nothing wrong with that on the surface, but the other side
of that coin is that she was rabidly anti-American. She truly disdained gringos.
That worldview is readily apparent in her diary.
The absence of these and other truths from the film do not make it
any less of a beautiful piece of life art, but I would have been very interested
to see how these revelations would further complicate an already complexly
reticulated biographical subject. I dislike the filmic tendency to engage
in hagiography of real life figures. Frida was extraordinary in her gifts
and the beautiful hyperrealism and surrealism she was able to capture on canvas. But what is equally fascinating are her faults and moral
ambiguities. But, you know, that's just me.
Frida,
as film, works on many levels: it’s a solid biopic; it’s a wonderful entrée
to Frida’s work; it’s a love story of the epic and operatic kind; and it’s
a love letter to a Mexico that no longer exists and to a native daughter who
adored her homeland, its people and its indigenous cultures. Go see it!
QUICK
PICK
Starring: Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, Catherine Keener, Mary
McCormack, David Hyde Pierce, Nicky Katt, Erika Alexander and David Duchovny
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay by: Coleman Hough
Review by Funkylb
Everything you've probably already heard about Full Frontal is true. It
does feel like a glorified Hollywood home movie. It is Soderbergh's grand, if somewhat whiney, "fuck you" to the Hollywood machine that at first
embraced him as a precocious auteur, then vilified him for failing to live up to his promise, and then loved him again to the tune of
several Oscar nominations.
This film does serve as a vehicle for really big Hollywood stars to "play indie." But more than anything, Steven Soderbergh's latest is an often
gratingly cheeky homage to himself. Moreover, the script that support's this cinematic onanism curiously reads like a page out of Julia Robert's
diary, under entries titled, "Shit I'd like to get off my chest, if only anyone would listen!" The script is liberally improvised and it feels like it.
Roberts and Blair Underwood play actors playing actors in a movie about a movie. Blair is Denzil Washington's stand-in here. I'll bet you Roberts
and Soderbergh tried to get Denzil, but he declined. There are many oh so unsubtle jibes at the institutionalized racism undergirding the interracial
kiss that never happened between Roberts and Washington in The Pelican
Brief. Underwood has a long-winded monologue about how hard it is to be
a Black actor in a system that only allows access to the movie star crown to one
Black person at a time. Blah, blah, blah...
Oh yeah, there are some other people in this movie, too. Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce play a couple teetering on the edge of a marital
bust-up. Keener thinks her husband is lacking in the ambition department, among other areas, and Pierce can't figure out why his wife seems to think
he's wack. Keener here plays yet another slightly deranged screw-up looking for love and passion in all the wrong places. I'd like to never see
Keener play this type of character again; there is nowhere else psycho-emotionally that she can take this kind of woman. Really, the work
she did in Walking and Talking combined with this year's Lovely and
Amazing covers the entire terrain. Enough already!
Everyone in the film is connected through their relationships, either personal or professional, with a producer played by David Duchovny. The
action in the film takes place in a single day and a party thrown by Duchovny is the capstone of the day's events. It is here that the audience
comes to understand how all of the main and supporting characters fit together, but by this time,
we don't care.
I love Soderbergh, but this film is a mess. It's the ugliest looking film I've seen in a decade. One true pleasure about a Soderbergh film is usually
how it looks, as he often acts as his own DP under the name Peter Andrews. Out of Sight was a beautiful
looking film. Soderbergh really understood how to photograph Jennifer Lopez to
breathtaking effect. He knew how to put both she and Clooney in the same frame and have them both burn up the screen
equally. Masterful, I tell ya! The Mexico sequences in Traffic were
at once overwhelming, foreboding and nostalgically warm without being
overtaken by a colonial gaze. Peter/Steven must have been drunk when Full Frontal was shot, though.
Parts of the film are shot in 35mm and others on digital video, but neither format illuminates anything about what's going on in the other, except
a highly reductive tape equals real life and film equals
movie/fantasy dichotomy. So what? Moreover, all of the scenes are poorly lit and none of them breathe or pull the audience into
their disparate frames. I've never felt more of a division between my own body and what's happening on the screen before in my entire film-loving
life. I, for one, go to the movies to limn the lines between me and the
characters on screen.
Shame on you, Mr. Soderbergh! This film makes Schizopolis seem accessible and charming. Skip this one, unless you're a rabid Soderbergh
devotee, but be forewarned that our hero has blundered egregiously. Let us
pray for his salvation...
QUICK
PICK
Starring: Michelle Williams, Anna Friel, Kyle Maclachlan, Oliver Milburn, Trudie Styler
Directed
by:
Sandra Goldbacher
Written
by:
Sandra Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat
Review by Funkylb
Let
me first disclose the fact that I adore Michelle Williams!
I watched the early days of Dawson’s Creek and correctly
surmised that she and Katie Holmes were real thespians who would find
substantive parts later in their careers despite having to deliver the tripe
that passes for teenspeak on that show.
I cannot bear to watch big-headed James Van der Beek and Josh Jackson
under and over emote, respectively, out at The Creek these days, but I do miss
seeing Michelle on a regular basis. Too,
Michelle and Chloe Sevigny were ferally captivating and sexy in the middle
vignette of If These Walls Could Talk 2.
Michelle managed to imbue her role in that film with
intelligence
and just the right level of steely but pregnant self-doubt. She then
beautifully recasts
those things into self-awareness and personal agency right before our
very eyes in the space of just 30 minutes.
She has the goods, prime-time soap-operish pedigree be damned!
I cannot wait to see Michelle and Christina Ricci in Prozac Nation,
which wrapped in 2000 but has yet to make into to theaters. I think it will get right everything that Girl
Interrupted did not. I
think, too, that La Ricci and Williams will be evenly matched leading ladies.
Neither of them will be devoured by the other in the way that frighteningly
brilliant Angelina Jolie stole Winnona Rider’s movie from her in scene after
scene. But I digress…
In
Sandra Goldbacher’s (The Governess) third feature in the
director’s chair, MichelleWilliams inhabits another fiercely intelligent
character, in this case one who comes of age across The Pond during the late
1970’s and the 80’s. I should
note that Williams does a perfectly respectable British accent here.
Among today’s American cinematic ingénues, Gwynnie is the most adept
at speaking The King’s English (I’m thinking Sliding Doors and
Shakespeare in Love). Renee
Zellwegger did an admirable job in Bridget Jone’s Diary.
Madonna, though not an ingénue or an actress, in my opinion, should
cease and desist with that speech impediment that she thinks sounds British. Okay, now I’m just being mean and otherwise losing my train
of thought…
Williams’
Holly is one half of a school-girl pact derived dual entity called, Harina.
The other half of the duo is Anna Friel’s, Marina. We first encounter
Holly and Marina as grade school aged free spirits and follow the ups and downs
of their friendship through a high school obsession with The Clash and all
things punk, through University and then into their late 20’s.
The film goes to great lengths in its opening scenes to disambiguate
Holly from Marina. Holly is the mousy, brainy but not beautiful one.
Marina, on the other hand, is the brash, outspoken, sexy, non-rocket
scientist toward whom the entire male species is drawn.
Immediately, I had trouble with these set roles.
Michelle Williams, to be clear, is a stone cold fox!
Anna Friel, while beautiful in a rather angular, smoldering way, cannot
hold a candle to Williams. Even as
the film tries to mute Williams’ obvious comeliness, it still shines through
in every scene. I was quite puzzled
by this choice of casting. Holly’s
rather provincial and distant mother
keeps reminding her daughter that it is more useful to be smart and clever than
to be beautiful. Marina’s party
girl mother, played with such wicked aplomb by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler,
also underscores the Marina is beautiful/Holly is smart juxtaposition. I don’t get it! Anyone
with good vision can see that Holly is the ENTIRE package, but okay…I guess
the audience has to play along.
The
reason the Holly plus Marina=Harina pact works is because each girl
perceives in the other something she is lacking.
Holly is riddled with insecurities about her looks and about her level of
hipness as a Jewish kid with opera loving parents, and Marina knows she’s not
as smart as Holly and envies Holly’s picture perfect family life.
Marina’s parents have a volatile relationship that her father
ultimately abandons. Marina’s mother is a serious party girl who fears
growing old and unsexy. What goes
unspoken between the girls, and what Goldbacher’s script and direction go very
far in explicating, is how complicated and messy it becomes to really love and
admire someone next to whom you feel woefully inadequate.
Both Holly and Marina suffer from this malaise which naturally breeds
resentment. The film, then, spends the majority of its time subtly (and a few
times not so subtly) exploring this complex enmeshment of apposite drives.
The film ultimately reveals that the outwardly steely Marina is actually
the more fragile of the two girls/women and that Holly, the insecure, shrinking
violet, is the ENTIRE package and merely needs to harness all of her innate
gifts. Holly can’t see those
gifts from within Marina’s shadow. Naturally, she’ll have to extricate herself from the skein
of co-dependence with Marina.
The
only problem is that the audience knows that from the beginning.
As an audience, we spend the last 2/3 of the movie knowing what needs to
be done and we have a pretty good idea about how it will happen. What saves this
movie from being an overly-predictable and uninteresting chick flick are the
performances. Anna Friel as Marina
breaks my heart. Her role is on the
showier side and could easily have devolved into grand gestures and kinetic
posturing that lead nowhere. Friel
definitely plays Marina big, but she beautifully negotiates the smaller, easily
overlooked body movements and other finer
details that tell us that underneath all of the bravado is a little girl lost.
The final showdown scene with Holly is a good example of Friel’s
non-grandiose acting chops, as is the final, quasi-reconciliation scene of the
film (I won’t give them away here—I talk too much sometimes!!). The audience
is set up to dislike, or at least, distrust Marina, and to root for Holly. Given
some of the things Marina does to her friend, it is sometimes hard to remain
sympathetic to her, but the audience does because Friel is so good at making
transparent the war of self-doubt that rages within her.
The
levels of magic in Michelle Williams’ performance are nearly ineffable.
See…good girl roles are bland, bland, bland; they’re like
monochromatic wallpapering for films. It
is a special actor who takes Pollyanna and plays against the inclination to make
her merely angelic and not at all complicated.
Williams brings a quiet intensity and incandescent
self-awareness to bear on Holly that is uncommon for the good girl part.
Williams also successfully makes obvious the constant struggle between
sentience and sapience within the character of Holly.
She does a remarkable job, without words, of showing the audience the
process of constantly absorbing Marina’s emotional blows and then
intellectually rationalizing them away. Holly,
the character, is complicit in the dysfunction of their relationship and
Michelle Williams, the actor, never lets herself off the hook for it.
Williams communicates all of that fecundity without the aid of dialogue. She is a joy to watch in this film!!!
Go
see Me Without You; it is a chick flick, but one of the finer,
more poignant ones.
QUICK
PICK
Starring:
Lauren Ambrose:Frankie, Joelle Carter: Josee, Jennifer Dundas: Nicolla
Directed
by: Robert J. Siegel
Screenplay
by: Robert J. Siegel, Grace Woodward and Lisa Bazadona
Genre: Drama
Review by Funkylb
Co-writer/director
Robert Siegel is a patient, lyric storyteller sans gimmicks in a cinematic
climate that lusts after direly anemic storylines as props for quick, puerile
jokes, car chases and tête-à-têtes with crafty aliens.
A case in point is his quiescently intelligent mood piece, Swimming.
To say that this film is a coming of age story wherein three very
different young women attempt to “find” themselves over the course of a
summer season is criminally facile? They
do, but the beauty, the complexity and the novelty is in the how as
communicated in the actors’ moving performances.
Frankie,
Lauren Ambrose from HBO’s Six Feet Under, and her brother run a
seaside bar and diner in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Resident bad girl and Frankie’s best friend, Nicolla, runs a tattoo
parlor adjacent to the diner. As
the film opens, the women are gearing up for the summer encroachment by
tourists. Frankie looks upon the
perennial ritual with dread. Nicolla (Jennifer Dundas), however, approaches it
with salivating anticipation of new men to tease and please and new women over
whom to establish corporeal superiority. Within
the first few frames, Siegel establishes the central and titular metaphor for
the film. Frankie lives in this
coastal paradise, but does not swim in the ocean, ever.
Swimming for Frankie, who dresses tomboyishly in baggy shirts and
overalls, would require an engagement of her body in a disrobed state and make
bare the changes in it that young adulthood precipitates.
Swimming also symbolizes tepid exploration of the unknown.
Frankie has been stuck in this town working long hours in the family
business for some time. She
doesn’t even have a car with which to venture outside of her usual environs.
She’s stuck, but she paradoxically welcomes the familiarity of this
suffocating space she inhabits.
Nicolla,
on the other hand, is raging to break free; the binge drinking and rapacious sex
that usually define her summers on the beach don’t sustain her high anymore.
She is the Freudian id to Frankie’s superego.
The longstanding dynamic between the two seems to be that Nicolla gets
wild and crazy and Frankie watches her, vicariously enjoys it, but ultimately
reins her friend in before Nicolla manages to self-destruct. It’s a co-dependent relationship destined for upheaval.
That
fissure arrives in the guise of Josee (Joelle Carter).
Josee is the vivacious, dissemblingly unaware beauty who has men falling
over themselves to assist her with whatever.
Usually, that whatever is a warm bed, a place to stay and a job.
Josee comes to work for Frankie and her brother at the diner and her
breezy self-confidence hooks Frankie immediately. Nicolla, of course, sees Josee as a threat to her putative
ownership on the hot guy pool and to her stronghold on Frankie’s imagination.
This triad is rife with homoerotic undertones.
Frankie does have a crush on Josee, but it’s complicated as friendships
between women are wont to be. Nicolla
probably has a thing for Frankie, also complicated by an already intense
friendship. These kinds of vaporous
cross-attractions happen all the time in seemingly platonic relationships
between women and girls alike. One
of the profound pleasures of this film and a testament to its innate
intelligence is its lazy, but still purposeful refusal to be pedantic and
exploitative of this homo-psycho-sexual undercurrent.
Nothing about it gets overstated or labeled, much like the way sexuality
or sexual identity alternately comes into focus and then turns on its head for
some young people in real life. A
further explication of the swimming metaphor could be Frankie’s nascent
lesbianism, but all of that is left prudently open-ended.
Open-ended is an apt descriptor of the overall tenor of this movie. Siegel and the other screenwriters pose many questions about the parameters of friendship, both the chimerical and the concrete forces undergirding close female relationships, inchoate sexual identity formation and the painful process of leaving behind the people and the things that once sustained us before full-blown adulthood. Siegel, however, never directs the audience to neatly delimit nor to straightforwardly delineate resolutions to these complications. This is a director who stays out of the way on so many levels and paints with a languorous and subtle brush at all times to outstanding effect. Plot development and the film’s overall pacing here are a somnambulist’s wet dream in the best possible way. It is a very rare thing for an audience to have the delight of just watching characters on screen live and breathe without an overabundance of either vacuous dialogue that reveals nothing substantive or didactic music whose lyrics tell us exactly how we should be feeling in the moment. Often, too, directors rely on commercially based music to tell the story that miscast actors are incapable of telling through dialogue or by way of emotive facility.
Let’s talk about the casting here for a moment. Ambrose’s Frankie is note perfect as a sensitive young woman quietly molting her way to real subjectivity and personal agency. Ambrose manages this transmogrification with no soap operish histrionics, no soliloquies about how hard it is to be a girl and no belabored method acting. In fact, for a lead, Ambrose has relatively few lines. Everything that need be communicated is ably done so by her deeply expressive face and sagacious eyes. You never doubt her intelligence and you’re always aware of the inner steel beneath her shockingly pale skin and the layers upon layers of baggy sartorial armor. Joelle Carter’s Josee is a bit of a revelation here, for me, because I’ve only seen this actor in cinema-lite productions. I did like her in Lane Janger’s indie Just One Time, a film about a man who wants his girlfriend to agree to a ménage a trois with another woman before they tie the knot. The part, however, was not very deep. Carter maps out an interesting trajectory with Josee in this film. She’s almost a phantom character here; she’s the one that everyone either loathes or desires, the person upon which everyone projects their neuroses, insecurities and sanguinities. Those kinds of characters usually become inconsequential in a film; become the chemical catalysts that lose their stable molecular structures in the service of producing a reaction. Carter, out of sheer force of technique and innate dramatic faculties, never fades. While the focus is clearly on Frankie’s transformation, Carter/Josee remains the light beneath the closed door that doesn’t quite illuminate the room, but that leads people to take notice of it and to wonder from where it springs.
This film and the performances, which provide its tapestry, are outright gems. I am barely able to give just attention to all of the little, real life things it gets right. Siegel has masterfully cast actors who understand, on a deep level, the people they are portraying. Without the actors’ significant gifts and insights, one would be left with mere archetypes: the tomboy, the bad girl and the beauty queen rebelling against the title’s usual prescriptions and proscriptions. With those types intact, Swimming would be standard high school and post-high school coming of age pabulum. This is a pithy film, though, for adults who are fortunate enough to have done the inner work necessary to appreciate when someone is telling it like it really is/was. This ain’t no Dawson’s Creek, folks!
Go see Swimming; you’ll adore it like I do.
QUICK
PICK
La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot and Benoît Magimel
Written and Directed by: Michael Haneke
Genre: Drama
In French with English Subtitles
Review by Funkylb
The
cognoscenti of the music of Europe’s Classical Period generally posit that
Franz Schubert composed deceptively simple melodies imbued with such lyricism
and often-melancholic expressionism that he carved out a category all for
himself. Schubert’s métier,
then, ran counter to the overwrought intellectualism and chafing
rationalism that defined the creative output of his contemporaries.
In grounding his film, La Pianiste, and its protagonists in
Schubert’s oeuvre, director Michael Haneke effectively warns us that
beneath a seemingly inscrutable, cold and detached exterior, may lay facile yet
febrile inner landscapes. Moreover,
in this his latest cinematic masterstroke, Haneke has fashioned a deeply
disquieting tone poem (a song form at which Schubert excelledd) about the ability
of human beings to create our own psycho-sexual inner horror.
This particular horror tale is set to music in the key of E for erotic
egression. Send the kids to bed…it’s about to get deep up in
here!
Haneke
takes on double duty as director and as screenwriter with this film, and it
becomes apparent in the first 20 minutes that the writer in him is clearly
steeped in the theoretical preoccupations of Lacan, Freud, Anaïs Nin and the
Marquis de Sade. What that means
for the rest of us is that many questions, some chillingly immodest, will be
posed about the ties between our sexual selves, our creative selves and our
intellectual selves. And like all
good queries, the answers are myriad and are not to be found laid out before us
on screen, but in the innermost crevices of our individual pockets of principled
do’s and don’ts!
Haneke’s
leading lady, Isabelle Huppert, is true to form here and completely owns the
screen from the first frame with her portrayal of a virtuosic pianist and
teacher with an affinity for melodies of the dissonant, depraved and slightly
deviant kind. To wit: we encounter Erika Kohut (Huppert), a Schubert
specialist who teaches piano at a Viennese conservatory, in a tiny music room
grooming a host of potential Glenn Gould(s) and Charles Ives. Erika has the
exacting taskmaster routine down to a science, but as the camera moves in
closer, something unsettling becomes visible.
This is not the face of a woman moved by and filled up with a passion for
music. There is anger; there is
disdain and there is a gaping, aching emptiness. This piano teacher seems to have little patience for her
musical charges. She is cruelly
discouraging to the lot of them and is coolly dismissive to pushy, but
well-meaning parents, who all believe that they’ve produced prodigies.
Erika’s
cruel and contentious relationships with parents and students mirror the one she
has with her own mother (Girardot). The
two come to fisticuffs one evening at home.
Pushing, shoving and slapping and verbal recriminations seem to follow
the evening news as a matter of course in this household.
Erika has failed to live up to her potential as a concert pianist, and it
is this shortcoming, on the surface at least, that fuels her mother’s anger
toward her. Mother, the character
is known by that moniker only, is the typical domineering and suffocating stage
mother who vicariously lives out her own aspirations through her gifted
daughter. That explains why Mother always seems to be hovering and watchful of
her daughter, but she also shares a bedroom with conjoined beds with Erika, who
is at least forty. What gives?
Things get creepier still as Mother often calls the homes of pupils and
friends to make sure Erika is where she says she will be after hours.
Mother also routinely searches Erika’s handbag and closet for evidence of a
verboten sexual life. In Mother’s
way of thinking, piano and music are to be Erika’s only passions. She has
not noticed that Erika’s attachment to music is anything but passionate.
Mother needn’t have worried about the presence of men (or women, for that matter) in Erika’s life because there are none as the film opens. Erika is, however, ever resourceful about finding solitary sex play. She is a voyeur who frequents peepshows to watch other couples have sex. Erika heightens the thrill occasionally when she stalks the drive-in movie grounds looking for couples in coitus in their cars so that she can secretly watch, masturbate and climax along with them. She also engages in masochism. A bathroom scene with a razor is the first indication that the viewer gets of Haneke’s purpose with all of this sexual and intimate frankness. He doesn’t actually mean to titillate; this isn’t a Paul Verhoeven/Joe Eszterhas film collaboration, afterall. All of the graphic stuff, and there is an abundance of it, takes place beyond the view of the camera. Haneke’s aim is really to provide us with a blueprint for how fear, loneliness and emptiness inextricably inform our desires, however defined. The proof is never in the specific details but in the overarching mood and tone. Hence, the camera never needs to record the particulars, but it must capture the broader strokes, the ambient sounds, the white noise. Besides, none of the sex in this film is fun. It’s uncomfortable and a bit frightening. This is indeed a horror film.
Erika,
it seems, likes her sex nightmarish, but has had to go it alone, or at least
from a distance, because she has not found an intimate partner she deems worthy
of second chair in her carnal orchestra. That is until she encounters
twenty-something Walter Klemmer (Magimel), a disinterested, haughty but gifted
pianist. Walter, unlike others
around her, colleagues, students and friends alike, is not cowered by Erika’s
musicianship or by her intellectual superfluity.
He playfully mocks her at their first meeting and sets out, through
performing a rather showy and difficult Schubert piece, to disabuse her of some
of her opinions about the composer’s motivations. No one takes the great professor to task in this way!
Erika is smitten. Here is where things get really interesting.
Erika has been inwardly working on a kind of romantic danse pour trois
for years. Her idea of romance,
though, includes domination, violence and humiliation, and it is scripted down
to the slightest detail. She writes
Walter a multi-page letter of instructions, some of which prescribe the presence
of her mother, about the kinds of sex acts she wishes him to force her to do. Erika wants to demean and to punish her mother for years of
the overbearing stage mother treatment. Too,
part of Erika’s motivation for the letter is to ensure that she remains in
control at all times. She wants to
be dominated, but on her own terms.
Needless to say, Walter is repulsed by the letter’s suggestions, but in the film’s twisting denouement, he ends up giving Erika exactly what she wants. The difference being that Walter wrests control from her and powerlessness in this way, for Erika, is just not sexy. The scene where Erika’s fantasies see reality are nearly impossible to watch. It is in these moments of having her fantasies brought to light and then maligned is where we see the first cracks in Erika’s armor. One of the things undergirding her impenetrable exterior for her entire adult life has been the sweet expectation that revenge would be exacted upon her mother precisely as she had planned and that there was nothing innately shameful and depraved about the freak within. The difficulty was in finding the proper partner, one who could, perhaps, be intellectual as well as emotive about this kind of sex play. It never occurs to her that her urges could be miscast as mere sickness. But she is depraved, right? Haneke doesn’t let the descriptor fit comfortably. He does not glibly damn his heroine. So what are we to do as an audience?
QUICK
PICK
Starring: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin and Michael Constantine
Written by Nia Vardalos
Directed by Joel Zwick
Genre: Comedy
Review by Funkylb
This is a zany comedy from writer/actor Nia Vardalos loosely based on her own marriage to a non-Greek man. Toula Portakolos (Vardalos) is a thirty year old, frumpy daddy's girl with bad skin who longs for a better quality of life. Her family thinks that this ugly duckling will help run the family restaurant for the rest of her life and never marry. Toula meets hunky, WASPy Ian (John Corbett) while helping out at the family's traveling agency. Ian and Toula make cute and fall in love despite Toula's certainty that the relationship cannot reach the level of marriage because her parents will never accept her marrying a non-Greek man. So, what to do? Ian converts to Greek Orthodoxy, of course. He sets out to win over the family and to learn to be a good Greek husband and son in-law. But this is no normal family to which Ian is trying to gain entrance! Dad (Michael Constantine) can find a Greek origin for any English word, thinks that Windex can cure any physical ailment and believes that women should never be educated lest they interfere with the natural order of things. Mom (Lainie Kazan) and the rest of the extended family thinks that eating, especially huge cuts of lamb, is a day long undertaking. Ian's vegetarianism and his modest appetite, then, are viewed as serious afflictions. Much hilarity ensues as Ian tries to learn to speak and comprehend Greek, and as he attempts to get to know all of the loud and gregarious aunts, uncles and cousins. You get the idea.
This is a fairly accomplished script for first time screenwriter Nia Vardalos. The better written characters are the supporting ones. The comedy, after all, is to be found among the extended family members. The film moves along well when the fish out of water theme takes a front seat. Things get a bit torpid during the well-meaning emotional moments between Toula and her parents as they try to adjust to the fact that she is leaving the nest. Vardalos' real gift as a scribe is for comedy, it would seem then. No matter, the more serious scenes are kept to a minimum.
Do see this film, though, as there are at least a dozen scenes that had me weeping from laughter. That just doesn't happen for me at the movies anymore. I also really love watching Lainie Kazan and Andrea Martin (who steals every scene she's in here. She did the same thing playing the way too progressive mom in the gay, romantic comedy, All Over the Guy) play ethnic. They can do Jewish, Greek, Italian and Latino with a high level of verisimilitude. It's always a treat to encounter them on film. They help to make this movie well worth the price of admission.
ZOOM
RHYTHM TRACK 123 (DRUM MACHINE)
Review by Funkylb (2004)
Let me just state for the record that I am not a drummer, nor am I fiend for beats. Melody and harmony mean more to me than complex rhythm, although that is gradually changing as I devote more time to playing my jazz bass, Bhudda. There are, however, gals and guys who spend a lot of money on equipment devoted to putting together beats. I’m just not one of those people. And the Zoom RT 123 drum machine/sequencer is just the right kind of toy for the lazy beat seeker that I am.
Salient
Features:
|
300
on-board looped drum patterns with accompanying bass patterns. |
|
Two
drum kits and one bass kit. One
drum kit sounds like a studio acoustic rock kit and the other is more of a
medley of electronic derived percussion. |
|
99
unfilled user patterns to tailor to your liking. |
|
Line-In
jack: this allows the user to mix the RT 123’s signal with, say, an
outboard external effects rig. I
run my Zoom 506 for bass through here and my guitar’s Pandora PX3 effects
box. I wouldn’t run my
instrument direct through the RT 123 because there is no volume control for
the external instrument. You’ll
need a signal boost of some sort. |
|
MIDI
IN: works with any MIDI device. I
run this through to my keyboard’s MIDI OUT.
Strangely there is no MIDI OUT on the RT 123. |
|
Groove
Play: allows instantaneous changes in patterns.
The RT 123 used in this mode is a great tool for DJ’s. |
The
Zoom RT 123 is usable right out of the box.
You get 300 patterns at your fingertips immediately.
The patterns are repetitive (you have to build you own variable
tempo’ed songs—more about that later), but they work as grooves to jam to or
with which to capture nascent song ideas. What’s
cool about these pre-set patterns is that the machine’s pads light up to show
you which piece of percussion is being utilize as the pattern proceeds. The user can tap the onboard drum pads to add percussion
parts. You can also switch to bass
mode and add bass parts of your own to the pre-set patterns using the onboard
pads. The only down side is that
you cannot save these embellishments for future use. Pattern mode
works well as a basic rhythm accompanist. My
three complaints are that I wish there were more jazz-inspired preset patterns,
that there were more highly syncopated hip-hop patterns, and that there were
more Latin sounding patterns. There
is a good cross-section of styles, but the machine is heaviest on rock, techno,
and R&B-lite (think Jodeci, Jagged Edge and folks like that).
It simulates those styles well; I just wish there weren’t so many of
them here. There are a few good simulacra of funk patterns.
I’ve been able to approximate the drum parts of most of the songs on
Meshell Ndegeocello’s Cookie…album.
This is a good thing. That’s
pattern mode…
The
other working mode on the RT 123 is Song
mode, and that, my friends, is a totally different beast altogether.
The idea behind song mode is to allow the user to string together
individual patterns to make varied and complex rhythm tracks for original songs.
Okay…good idea, but programming has to be done one-step or unit at a
time and you have to be a fair to good drummer to get the “hits” just right.
The pads are very real-time sensitive and expressive, but that doesn’t
seem to help me any. I bought this unit in the first place ‘cause I ain’t a
drummer, yet. Programming in song mode makes my rhythmic deficiencies woefully
apparent. Programming in song mode
gets tediously drawn out for me. Mama
don’t like musical drudgery!
The cost of this unit is what makes it a stand out addition to my instrument arsenal. I paid just under $150.00 for it. I don’t think there’s a drum machine out there as versatile as the RT 123 at that price. Even though I only use its preset patterns, the RT 123 is well worth the money. It’s a cool little groove box. The drum and bass kits are high quality and admirably cover the spectrum from the coolest jazz to the most frenzied techno. One day I’ll figure out how to quickly and effectively program my own tracks. Hell…it took me a year to figure out how to record well using Cakewalk’s studio software for Windows. I think it’s more about my own impatience than the machine’s innate impairments. Get the RT 123 if you’re a solo instrumentalist who wants to have a portable, mostly user-friendly band in a box.
