Too Much

Tonight I’ll be seeing Sufjan Stevens in concert at the Sydney Opera House. I’m psyched to say the least. I’ve waited a long time for this. I missed him seeing him play his instant-classic Illinois with a full orchestra in New York a few years ago, forlornly waiting for a scalper in the lobby of Lincoln Center to no avail, and I was gutted; later I missed a performance of his song cycle about the BQE. Years of missing out will end tonight. (Hopefully I won’t get hit by a truck on my way there.)

About a year ago I saw Andrew Bird play in the same room (the main Concert Hall). It was a fantastic show, an early peak experience in the euphoria of migrating to Oz. You might say Bird and Sufjan are kindred musical spirits in the whole indie folk thing, and inspire similar passion in a similar fanbase. So I have an inkling of what tonight can be like. The Concert Hall is a good space.

Sufjan’s music means that much more to me because he’s a Christian, one of the few among indie musicians that I can name. Why does it matter? Where to begin? Well, it’s odd being a Christian who’s… I’m not sure how to finish that sentence. A Christian who’s passionate about underground music and independent film and art? Who’s dedicated to tolerance and social justice? Who’s into funky beats and dancing all night? I know, I know, it’s supposed to be incompatible. Religion isn’t cool – I read it on the internet, so it must be true. Anyway, I don’t want to say it’s lonely, because that would sound like I’m bitching. But I guess it’s a bit odd. So I cherish Sufjan like he’s one of my own, like the way Ivorians must cherish Didier Drogba. The way Jamaicans cherish Bob Marley.

It’s a feeling that runs a lot deeper than critical thinking. He could probably do no wrong by me. But the fact that he’s one of the most innovative and acclaimed musicians working today is not only an incredible bonus, it’s something that I actually invest hopes and dreams in. Too much riding on it. As if I’m from another planet, trapped in a world where no one understands me, confused, hardly aware of who I am. And Sufjan is like a messenger from my people, someone who has the power to help me realize why I’m here.

You are the life I needed all along
I think of you as my brother, although that sounds dumb
And words are futile devices…

Wait, does that sound too intense? Um, yeah. A bit lonely. Spend a lot of time downplaying it, or changing the subject, trying to find an explanation, a way to talk about it matter-of-factly, wondering if I’m being a wuss, making cryptic statements. Death isn’t the end you know, there’s something else. Could you pass the hot sauce?

I keep waiting for the balloon to burst – to find out it was all a dream, or a joke. I half expect to read an interview with Sufjan one day, and he’ll say, “Christian? No, I’m not a Christian. Not really. Not anymore. The religion thing was just a hook, something I used early in my career to get attention. It sounded good, didn’t it?”

Anyway, I don’t mean to make a big deal about it. For one thing, Sufjan doesn’t. He presents his music and ideas as a personal expression and asks it to be judged as it would be for anyone else. And he gently deflects questions about it during interviews. But – and this is important – his faith is obviously a big part of what he does. He made an entire album about it – 2004′s Seven Swans, which many consider his best. And it forms a crucial subtext for his whole body of work. When he sings about trying to understand and forgive John Wayne Gacy; when he sings, “I made a lot of mistakes,” followed by the uplifting chorus, “You came to take us,” I know right where he’s coming from. If it didn’t mean anything, he’d give it up and forget about it, just like a lot of other artists do.

But he hasn’t, and he’s only gained more fame and respect. It’s because he makes fantastic music; but I think it’s also because he’s not really evangelical. Changing people’s minds about religion is not what his music’s about. It’s highly personal music: you might say it’s confessional. It’s about his problems, his obsessions (including, famously, history and geography), his issues with himself, with his faith. And he’s very frank about having a lot of issues. He struggles. And that’s what’s so important to me, because I struggle, we all struggle. You can put a brave face on it and not talk about it. Fine. Or you can share it and try to work it out. That’s what indie is all about. Purely devotional music is a fine thing, but it’s different, it’s got its own time and place. (Although, now that I think about it, devotional music of various kinds influenced George Harrison, Carlos Santana, Jeff Buckley and countless others, including Sufjan himself of course. And gospel is part of everything from bluegrass to Detroit techno. So, yeah, at the end it’s all music, it’s all love.)

Personal. Devotional at times. But also visionary. His label’s website says his songs incorporate “religious fantasy.” Yes, he sings about God, but his focus is on the transfigurative, the transformative, the transcendental – the aspects of the divine that are beyond dogma, beyond explanation, and sometimes scary. The ghostly aspect of the Holy Ghost. On the apocalyptic title track of Seven Swans, he sings,

He will take you
If you run, He will chase you
For He is the Lord

It ain’t a lullaby. It always reminds me of the work of William Blake, the great 18th-century artist, mystic and religious dissenter who created some truly otherworldly and sometimes disturbing images of God and angels and divine warfare. Who wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” thus shaping the careers of Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and Jim Jarmusch.

It gets even more mystical on Sufjan’s latest album, The Age of Adz. He’s has been clear in interviews that he was tired of writing narratives about grand and important subjects, and wanted to make music more elemental, more sensual, even more personal. A lot of people are saying the new one is darker and weirder than his earlier stuff. Sufjan was often pretty weird before; but it’s all-out on the new album. He sings about inner turmoil, about despair, about breakdowns, about physical pain, about sex, suicide, volcanoes erupting, the world ending, outer space… and love, too much love.

Vesuvius
Are you a ghost?
Or the symbol of light?
Or a fantasy host?
In your breast
I carry the form
The heart of the Earth
And the weapons of warmth
Vesuvius
The tragic oath
For you have destroyed
With the elegant smoke
Oracle, I’ve fallen at last
But they were the feast
Of a permanent blast

Sufjan’s primary influence on The Age of Adz, from the title to the cover art to the theme of many of the lyrics, was another visionary artist named Royal Robertson. A paranoid-schizophrenic minister and self-proclaimed prophet from Mississippi, Robertson spent his life painting lurid, comic-book-style art depicting angels, gods, demons, spaceships and space creatures drawn, he claimed, from the visions he had each night. He was convinced that he was a messenger of the world’s end, and his art was filled with semi-literate texts pronouncing doom and destruction. Meanwhile he also had a rather unsavory and disturbing attitude about women.

Sufjan has said that he appreciates the complete freedom of expression found in Royal’s art. But there’s no question he’s visiting the dark side too. So when he sings,

I know I’ve caused you trouble, I know I’ve caused you pain
But I must do the right thing and get real
I know I’ve lost my conscience, I know I’ve lost all shape
But I must do myself a favor
I must get real, get right with the Lord

he’s playing with us. There’s the thrill of hearing him testify, but also the realization that he’s singing as much about Royal as he is about himself, and daring us to see him as a freak.

The new lyrical mode is accompanied by a radical shift in the music too: all but abandoning the folky twang of his most popular music, The Age of Adz finds him trying electronic sounds and experimenting with song structures and weird orchestral arrangements – experimenting with everything – like never before. Again, Sufjan has never made conventional pop music, has always manifested avant-garde influences like Steve Reich. But he’s really gone into outer space with this one. It’s a busy, explosive, sometimes crazy sound, bright and murky at the same time (maybe like the fire and smoke of a volcano?), playful and disturbing at the same time. It brings to mind similar transitions made by Björk, Radiohead and the Flaming Lips. As each of them discovered, electronic instruments are not only a way to get more abstract and daring with sound, but also ironically a way to get even more raw and personal with performance than acoustic instruments can allow.

And it’s worthy of those comparisons. This is a great album. I wasn’t sure what I thought about it at first; it’s difficult music. But so is Kid A. It’s difficult, it’s sprawling, but strangely it’s also more pop than any of his other music – he’s messing around with Auto-Tune, with electro, with indietronica, with the sounds of R&B radio and the clubs. And as you can see in the amazing video for “Too Much,” he’s matching the music with bold visual art, wild styles and colors, borrowing from Kanye and MIA and everything about the 80s, launching into a pure graphic space odyssey. He’s trying all kinds of things. But it’s coming together into a vision. A big vision. Too much love.

12 of ’10

These are the 12 best films I saw in 2010. They aren’t ranked in any particular order. Or maybe they are.

I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see. These happen to be the films that came into my life and that I loved.

 

Honey

(Semih Kaplanoğlu, Turkey/Germany)

The third installment (following Egg and Milk) in Turkish auteur Semih Kaplanğlu’s ”reverse trilogy” about the life of a poet won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, inspiring lots of headlines about, you guessed it, bears and honey. In its evocative Black Sea forest setting, Honey recreates the fragmented, dreamlike world inhabited by all children better than any film I’ve seen. Kaplanğlu employs stillness, ambient sound and painterly technique to make shots of everyday things like a toy wooden boat or a boiling kettle seem thrilling. Though there’s not much dialogue, the relationship of the boy Yusuf with his father is depicted with fine perception and compassion. Melancholy, exquisite, slow as honey pouring out of a jar, but just as satisfying.

 

 

OK, Enough, Goodbye

(Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, Lebanon)

A loopy and meandering tale of a selfish, clueless 40-something bachelor’s attempt to live on his own after his mother walks out on him, and a smart and vivid snapshot of life in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli. The debut feature from Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia is a manifesto of sorts for the rights of Middle Eastern films to be weird and funny and personal in a highly politicized world. Its scenes of urban alienation, its long takes of difficult conversations between lonely people, could take place anywhere. But the story’s Jarmuschian quirkiness belies its poignant human insight and subtle commentary on globalism. “OK, Enough, Goodbye” was also year’s funniest and most universally translatable catchphrase.

 

 

Gesher

(Vahid Vakilifar, Iran)

The quietly stunning debut feature from director Vahid Vakilifar tells a loose, naturalistic story of migrant workers at the world’s largest gas field – where they pathetically live in abandoned concrete pipes facing out to the Persian Gulf. Using documentary techniques, Vakilifar captures the field’s vast infrastructure with the transcendent detachment of photographers like Edward Burtynsky, while on the other hand getting right into the pipes with the men to portray the toil and camaraderie in their daily lives with restraint, dry humor and great empathy.

 

 

Space Tourists

(Christian Frei, Switzerland)

Impressionistic, slyly ironic documentary about the different ways civilians are involved in space travel, from the spoiled Iranian-American heiress who buys her way onto a space station, to the scavengers in remote Kazakhstan who collect the scrap-metal debris of rocket flights. Jonas Bendiksen’s eerie photos of abandoned cosmonaut training centers set the tone – it’s a beautifully-made film. Weaving different strands together, director Christian Frei avoids conclusions, simply showing us people and things that are very interesting, and often funny. But in revealing the business of space and musing on how we conceive the future, Space Tourists achieves as much impact as any of the heavy-handed docs that litter the market.

 

 

Exit Through the Gift Shop

(Banksy, USA/UK)

If Banksy’s much-anticipated debut film had been a boring talking-head doc about his own iconic and incendiary street art, it would’ve been a lot easier for the Twitterverse to digest, and might have sold more tickets to boot. But Banksy doesn’t do anything cheap or easy; this diabolically twisted study of an eccentric scene-hound and would-be artist named Mr Brainwash gleefully trashed expectations, exposing the hypocrisy and stupidity of the contemporary arts scene and causing dumbfounded speculation that it was all a vast hoax. It’s one of the year’s most thought-provoking films, as disturbing as it is freaking hilarious, and establishes Banksy as a filmmaking force to be reckoned with.

 

 

Red Hill

(Patrick Hughes, Australia)

My favorite Australian film of the year rides the trendy resurgence of Ozploitation, but is more ambitious and emotionally engaging than the run of the mill. Debut writer/director Patrick Hughes effectively mashes up horror, western and crime thriller in this tale of an escaped convict gunning for revenge in rural Victoria, drawing on myriad influences from Eastwood to Tarantino to No Country for Old Men. It’s a gritty and violent film, but refreshingly low on pointless blood and gore; Hughes builds suspense with old-fashioned restraint and a flair for Aussie mythmaking, and with help from a good turn by True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten, we end up caring about the characters.

 

 

Zephyr

(Belma Baş, Turkey)

“Slow cinema is for fascination and magic,” says director Belma Baş. Her entrancing debut feature illustrates this ethos perfectly – even literally, illuminated as it is with beautiful macro shots of snails along with other fauna and flora of the lush Black Sea region. The sad, slow-burning tale of the troubled relationship between a boyish adolescent and her vagabond mother is set against an elegiac ode to the simple pace and rugged beauty of life in the mountains. As the story unfolds like a fable and the girl’s state of mind unravels, Baş’ transcendentalist touch makes even the disturbing and traumatic seem part of the fabric of nature.

 

 

Inception

(Christopher Nolan, USA/UK)

Away from the restrictions of the Batman franchise, Christopher Nolan went another level down, constructing a sprawling masterwork of action, suspense and twisted dream logic worthy of comparison to Blade Runner and The Matrix. It’s not a sequel, is not based on a TV show, features no babyfaced stars (unless you count Ellen Page, whom I adore), contains no sex scenes or vampires; it has no R&B on the soundtrack, no song and dance. Furthermore it actually dares to challenge and puzzle the audience. Yet it made truckloads of cash. To me it didn’t so much raise the bar as put it back in place; we’ve always deserved blockbusters this good. Hollywood, get back to work.

 

 

Orion

(Zamani Esmati, Iran)

This harrowing drama, about a hapless college student who ends up in legal trouble after ending an affair with a shallow older professor, is worth watching for the extended opening sequence alone: director Zamani Esmati brilliantly utilizes the narrow streets and enclosed spaces of the ancient city of Yazd to create tension and claustrophobia, as the girl pays a secret visit to a shady surgeon. Soon she is pulled into a vortex of judgment and mortification in a chillingly existential commentary on contemporary Iran. I don’t favor films based only on their social relevance; but like many other Iranian directors working today, Esmati is able to reflect his nation’s troubles with crucial cinema. And it’s hard to shake the thought of Esmati’s mentor (and uncredited supervising editor) Jafar Panahi, who now languishes as a political prisoner.

 

 

The Oath

(Laura Poitras, USA)

An astonishingly intimate portrait of a former Al Qaeda operative named Abu Jandal, who was once a personal bodyguard to Bin Laden. He quit the cause and renounced violence, and now drives a taxi and raises a family in Yemen. Meanwhile his old comrade and brother-in-law is held prisoner at Guantánamo Bay. Director Laura Poitras lets the intrinsic drama unfold organically, with an unobtrusive but steady gaze that also provides a valuable portrait of daily life in an Arab backwater. There are no quick cuts, no voice-overs, no easy conclusions. Much of the film is simply the charismatic Jandal talking to whomever will listen – the Arab media, his customers, Poitras and, presumably, us. He’s adamant and articulate in his beliefs, but also friendly and down-to-earth, and it’s amazing how much he reveals to the camera. Jandal’s chilling war stories draw the viewer in, but his candid guilt about his brother-in-law and his ambivalence about his own extremist past are what make this film so memorable.

 

 

Certified Copy

(Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy)

In his first film made outside of Iran, starring smoking-hot Cannes poster girl Juliette Binoche, beloved auteur Abbas Kiarostami utilizes his cool, über-naturalistic style to deconstruct a vaguely romantic story about an art collector and a writer who meet, flirt and spontaneously take a road trip in the Tuscan countryside. The screenplay revolves around ideas of art, authorship and authenticity; and on the surface, it’s meant to be a pisstake, Kiarostami toying with narrative convention. But what begins as a cerebral, talky exercise grows more compelling and eerily enigmatic as the journey continues, and becomes wrenchingly emotional in the end. As lean and original as the best kind of indie, but it resonates like a classic; I couldn’t get it off my mind for days.

 

 

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival is often bestowed on films that are accessible to large audiences (Pulp Fiction, The Piano). But not this year: “Joe” Weerasethakul’s meditation on death, memory and regret in rural Thailand is oblique and ponderous and weird as it wanna be. But I was never bored. (Well, give or take a couple of extended shots of people doing nothing.) I just sat back and let myself be pulled into the exquisitely composed vision  – greatly enhanced by some really cool, Miyazaki-esque ghosts and fantasy sequences. I compare this kind of work to the deceptively “ambient” music of Brian Eno or Kompakt Records: abstract, slow and quiet, yes. But also powerful, dreamlike, switched on, creating space for many emotions from dread to euphoria.

 

 

Honorable mentions:

The Tree

The Life of Fish

Toy Story 3

Police, Adjective

GasLand

Somewhere

Road, Movie

I Am Love

Nostalgia for the Light

True Grit

Last Train Home

Cirkus Columbia

The Furious Force of Rhymes

Marquee Night

Saturday was a nice night for Picnic at the Beck’s Festival Bar at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum here in Sydney. The Festival Bar is one of the main music venues for the massive Sydney Festival, which runs most of this month, and as such it’s got a very interesting lineup of gigs, including Gold Panda, Wire, Holy Fuck, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and a Mad Racket party featuring Octave One.

Picnic is an on-again off-again house music party run by DJ Kali, whom I happened to meet last week. Though I’m new on the scene in Sydney, I’ve already formed a favorable impression of Kali’s taste in music – both in her record selection and in the DJs she books for her parties.

Harvey is a legend all his own. A journeyman from the London scene, he’s been spinning records for a very long time indeed, and was one of the prime movers in the development of modern UK garage and house. He’s famed for his grungy disco re-edits and for the hard-to-find releases on his own label, cheekily named Black Cock. Lately this bearded geezer, known as quite a character, has been living part-time in the States and travelling the world, disseminating his brand of “Sarcastic Disco.”

When I saw that Harvey was to be joined on the decks by DJ Garth, a founder of the San Francisco scene that was such an influence on me back in the day, I figured Picnic was one not to miss on a hectic Festival schedule. And I was right.

When I arrived the Festival Bar was already crowded and I sensed an enthusiastic vibe – lots of activity and noise on the dancefloor. First of all I was completely psyched about the space itself. I’d been here once before last year, but I’d forgotten how superb this temporary venue is. The Barracks building – designed by convict architect Francis Greenway in 1818 to house, you guessed it, convicts – is an impressive brick structure, a living part of Sydney’s history and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The brick walls and courtyard of this edifice form a generous and even majestic setting for an event. Sweeping over part of the courtyard is a huge canopy – or, as I believe I’m supposed to refer to it now that I live in Australia, a marquee. Under the marquee is a wooden dancefloor that holds hundreds of people, fronted with a stage and DJ setup. The rest of the wide courtyard is a place to mingle and have drinks in the open air while being treated to views of the nearby park and Sydney’s cityscape – especially Centre Point Tower, the tallest building in Australia, which fairly looms right overhead. Elaborate video installations and light shows grace the grounds, including ghostly projections on the walls of the Barracks, and a fantastic writhing helix-shaped multihued flourescent light sculpture that overhangs the dancefloor. Kids, this is a great place to have a party.

A sign posted by the bar informed us that Harvey would be on for three hours. Nice; an epic in the making. Speaking of the bar, this brings me to my first complaint: only Beck’s beer was available. Listen, I’m cool with the evil corporate sponsorship thing so long as no one gets hurt, and I’ll drink Beck’s if I have to (and I did that night). But I don’t like pissy generic lager as a rule, and to have no other choice of beer is lame. So henceforth I’ll try to refrain from calling the bar by its proper corporate name; that’ll be my little revenge.

As for the  music: I’ve known about Harvey for a long time, I’m familiar with his records, and I’ve had friends who’ve known him and played with him. But for some reason all this time I’d managed to miss hearing him spin. Well, I was seriously impressed – and I’m hard to please, even by a legend.

It’s not easy to mix old disco and garage records – and by mix, I mean really mix. Plenty of good DJs with great taste in old tunes have a tricky time matching the beats of the live drummers, especially since those musicians didn’t follow well-worn (not to say boring) patterns and formulas the way dance producers do nowadays. Some famous and much-practised DJs don’t even really try to beatmatch a lot of the time – François K for example. But Harvey was smoothly mixing these old nuggets like nobody’s business. Maybe it’s because of all the bootleg edits he’s done for himself. Even better, he was throwing in a lot of new records too. And just when I was about to get tired of the signature popping basslines and tambourines of underground disco and garage, out comes a proper house classic, with synth bassline and crisp machine-produced drums. Or something much more electro and weird. It goes beyond being awed by his skills and the selection: at a certain point, you realize he’s making a statement about the unity of all music.

It’s fun to watch him, too: looking less like a DJ and more like a hippie roadie, he was clearly enjoying each of his tunes, singing and clapping along, sometimes stalking impishly around the stage.

Harvey kept the energy of the dancefloor going for a long time, and the punters really got into it, riding his long disco instrumentals, and clapping and cheering for the soulful call-and-response and soaring choruses of the vocals. This is was nice to see. I mean, Harvey’s big on the underground and all, but he ain’t exactly challenging Tiësto’s hold on the market. It’s great when someone – especially a geezer like him – can draw people in just by being himself and playing exactly what he pleases. And it was a good mix of people of many races and ages; my friend said she was relieved there were a few older people there, and I was too. Recently I’ve been at a couple of parties in Sydney where I’m clearly the oldest one by far, and it’s not fun.

After hours of obscure, grimy disco and spacey funk excursions, Harvey closed down his set with a murky bit of psychedelic rock, then lurched into Olivia Newton John’s “Magic” (from Xanadu, y’know), as if it was the most obvious thing, and somehow it was perfect. I wondered if he’d been looking through his record bag and saying, “There must be something Australian in here!” A great unpretentious touch. My friend went nuts.

Garth played some great tunes upon taking over the decks; but his mixing suffered by comparison, and my energy started to flag about the time about the time I noticed a lot of the remaining crowd were pretty drunk. (Too much Beck’s I guess.) Soon it was time to catch the last train across the bridge. But I’m looking forward to a couple of return trips to the mighty Festival Bar before they fold up the marquee.

There’s a modified version of this review on the Australia-wide dance music site inthemix, where I contribute regularly. I’m linking it here mainly because it’s accompanied by a nice photo set that shows a lot more of the venue, the great installations and light shows, and Harvey’s beard.