jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Two reviews of movies opening this week just went up on About.com: David Gordon Green’s drama Snow Angels and the Jason Statham heist flick The Bank Job.  This afternoon, I’m seeing Michael Haneke’s U.S. remake of his own Funny Games, and press screenings for New Directors/New Films start tomorrow.

In the meantime, a few items of note:

• Fresh off of etree, listen to a track from last week’s MMW show.
• David Hudson reports that Kriemhild was stabbed!
• Major Cyrillus’s Mystic Trip to Mars finds its tragic end, just in time for Commander Koenig’s birthday. Herzlichen Glückwunsch — just don’t celebrate with this guy! (NSFW)
• Dan Sallitt on Michael Clayton
• Lars von Trier’s music video for the Kingdom theme song.
• HiddenTrack’s Cover Wars feature Not Fade Away.
• In case you managed to miss these mashups: Saul Bass does Star Wars and The Red Crayola meets Thunderbirds.
• K. Silem Mohammad on Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades.
• Joseph Campbell’s Ten Commandments for Reading Myth.
• Faust image swiped from Tom Sutpen.

Snow Angels. David Gordon Green, 2008. **
The Bank Job. Roger Donaldson, 2008. **

I’ll take bubbly pop over self-righteous posturing any day, so we’ll lead this post off with the Pet Shop Boys’ brilliant cover of “Where the Streets Have No Name” (with a touch of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”)

With that out of the way, my review of U2 3D is now up at UGO: “You’ll thrill to the sight of a hundred thousand stoked fans! You’ll duck from under Bono’s flying sweat! You’ll read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — in 3D!”

• My review of U2 3D 

U2 3D. Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, 2008. ***

These are bittersweet days for the nostalgic Phish fan. The tenth anniversary of the legendary Fall tour of 1997 is bringing a few things into sharp relief: how lost we are with Trey in rehab and Mike in hiding, how we still haven’t gotten over Coventry, and how embarrassed we still are by just how much we love this band. Mike was right: they had another 21 years in them, easily. That’s the bitter part.

And the sweet part? As always, the music. I’ve been embroiled in a fiendish listening orgy, making my way through the tour set by set, often dropping everything I was doing to stand in awe of the continuously developing sound and earth-shaking improvisation. Since they first graduated to arenas in 1994, Phish had perfected its tension-and-release jamming for big venues, but it wasn’t until the low-pressure European tour of 1997 that they discovered new spaces and rhythms in the music — a style that came to be known variously as cow funk, intergalactic space funk, and porno funk. Whatever you call it, it was groovy and psychedelic and very, very tasty. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

At the time, that magnificent noise, sometimes driving, rising, sometimes standing still in imperceptibly morphing waves, sounded like the future to me: this was the mothership. Now it comes heavy with nostalgia for a season when I was setting off on a road trip from the Deep South to New York City with a new haircut and a brand-new girlfriend, a promising writer with a funny name and an even funnier sensibility. I met my future Schwiegereltern, saw movies that never made it to Mississippi, and crashed the Mayflower Hotel with Andy Gadiel’s crew for an epic holiday run at the Garden — only the first of four memorable New Year’s Eves I spent with Phish. Ten years later, the band is gone but the girl’s still with me.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be listening to a lot more Fall 97, and I doubt I’ll be able to resist posting about it again. For now, here are a few tunes from the beginning of the tour, sorted by ascending dankness: Black-Eyed Katy is friendly enough, but anyone except the hettiest brahs might get hurt listening to Tweezer and Run Like an Antelope. (These are all audience recordings, which accounts for the somewhat muffled quality. Just turn it up. If you dig any of this, I highly recommend Live Phish 11, the official release of 11/17/97 Denver.)

From 11/13/97 Las Vegas, Black-Eyed Katy, a new song that defined the tour and later, with added lyrics, became The Moma Dance.

[audio:Phish-BlackEyedKaty-971113.mp3]

Gumbo from 11/14/97 Salt Lake City

[audio:Phish-Gumbo-971114.mp3]

Timber Ho! from 11/16/97 Denver

[audio:Phish-TimberHo.mp3]

The half-hour Tweezer that opened 11/17/97 Denver, and a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ Fire. Again, you can get this in soundboard quality on Live Phish 11.

[audio:Phish-Fire-971117.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Tweezer-971117.mp3]

Also Sprach Zarathustra and Run Like An Antelope from 11/19/97 Champaign

[audio:Phish-AlsoSprachZarathustra-971119.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Antelope-971119.mp3]

• More from This Month in Phish History
• Download every show from Fall 1997
• Setlists from the tour so far after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

All week, I’ve been checking back on PhilLesh.net, hoping for the promised photos from the show, reasoning that you can’t possibly post about Ryan Adams’ birthday party without at least one good shot of Ryan’s green knit pom pom hat. I’ll update if any hat photos ever surface; in the meantime, my own camera-phone shot of Phil seen through my friend Walter’s white shock of late-era Garcia hair will have to suffice.

The shows? Phenomenal. After Halloween’s cover extravaganza, Tuesday’s sets mingled classic rock standards — Dixie Down, Brown Sugar, Revolution — with Grateful Dead warhorses like Deal and Shakedown, and seeing Phil drop Other One bombs from the rail was bone-shatteringly good. I was just beginning to miss the ballads when Death Don’t Have No Mercy, sung by Jackie Greene, provided a rare treat, topped off by a sweet, sweet Brokedown Palace for which I happened to be the audience member closest to Phil. A deeply satisfying concert, as good as anything I’d ever hope to see from anybody who didn’t use to be in my favorite band.

But Monday was the real reason I’ll keep on coming back as long as this music is getting played. After a first set loaded with primal late-sixties Dead grooves enhanced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin on sax, the second set was pure Deadhead heaven. It happened to be Ryan Adams‘ birthday, reason enough for Phil to splurge and extend the show until after 1am for four hours of music filled with some of the best tunes in the Dead catalog, played with vigor, love, and inventiveness.

An informal poll conducted on the way out confirmed what we already knew: “That was profound” and “Wharf Rat dominated my skull.” Walter, who’d come in from Düsseldorf to see Phil for the first time since 1994, could hardly have picked a better time–if you’re going to take a transatlantic flight to a rock concert, this was the night. Two more shows this weekend top off what by all accounts has been a stellar 11-night run. Thank you, Phil.

Phil Lesh and Friends, Nokia Theater, 11/5/07
Set 1 (with Steve Berlin)
Brown-Eyed Women, The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion), Viola Lee Blues > Operator> Viola Lee Blues> Next Time You See Me> Viola Lee Blues, Chest Fever, Sugaree
Set 2 (with Ryan Adams)
Happy Birthday Ryan, Eyes of the World> Scarlet Begonias> China Cat Sunflower> Bird Song, Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad, Ripple, I Know You Rider> Uncle John’s Band> Dark Star> Franklin’s Tower> Dark Star
Encore: Wharf Rat

Phil Lesh and Friends, Nokia Theater, 11/6/07
Set 1: Bertha> Deal, Big River, Gone Wanderin’, Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Cosmic Charlie
Set 2: Brown Sugar> Shakedown Street> Revolution, Beat It On Down The Line> Cryptical Envelopment> The Other One> Death Don’t Have No Mercy> The Other One> Brokedown Palace
Encore: Not Fade Away

Tunes
For your listening enjoyment, audience recordings of Monday’s skull-dominating Wharf Rat encore, Tuesday’s Revolution, and Death Don’t Have No Mercy. Torrents for the Nokia run are up at etree.org in flac format, but if you’d rather grab mp3s, you can download 10/31 (312 MB), 11/5 (247 MB), and  11/6 (229 MB) while the bandwidth lasts.

[audio:WharfRat-071105.mp3]

[audio:Revolution-071106.mp3]

[audio:DeathDont-071106.mp3]

YouTube has a pro-shot clip from the 2005 Jammys, when Ryan first came out as a Deadhead, also with Wharf Rat. If you squint, you can spot me in the audience. Carefully, this clip is brutally cut at the ten minute mark — and Ryan’s not wearing any green knit hats, either.

A trippy comic book about the search for eternal life. The go-to adjective for Darren Aronofsky’s first film since Requiem for a Dream is “ambitious,” but Métal Hurlant has been churning out stuff like this for decades. In three overlapping stories, Hugh Jackman is a meditating spaceman traveling to a dying star, a conquistador unearthing secrets of the Maya, and a doctor trying to save his wife (Rachel Weisz) from a brain tumor. Weisz also appears as Isabella, queen of Spain. The spiritual mumbo-jumbo never adds up to more than the old saw about death bearing the kernel of life, but the pull of the grief-stricken moments between present-tense Jackman and Weisz is difficult to resist.

The psychedelic visuals are tasty, but when it’s all said and done, I was disappointed with the way the three stories finally hook up. We have to take it on good faith that the low-rent Ken Wilber in the space bubble, the poorly lit Apocalypto outtakes, and the melodrama about the doctor and his dying wife are related in a meaningful way, and The Fountain doesn’t reward that faith very well. It’s a comic book that mistakes itself for something much more profound.

Made me want to watch Solaris again.

The Fountain. Darren Aronofsky, 2006. **

• Official Site
• The Fountain at RT: 51%
• Devin Faraci’s Rave
• Steve Silberman on The Fountain

Bonus audio: In honor of Izzy, here’s Phish covering Jimi Hendrix’ Izabella, Madison Square Garden 12/30/97. Totally legal audience recording, which is to say the sound isn’t great.

[audio:Isabella - Phish.mp3]

[tags]film, 2 stars, darren aronofsky, hugh jackman, rachel weisz, space, maya, eternal life, scifi, trippy, spain, inquisition, metal hurlant, audio, phish[/tags]

Heady, like getting your frontal lobes kneaded by a slightly sadistic masseuse, but with a booty-shaking happy ending.

• Comments/partial setlist on the MMW forums
• Pretty good photos I’m not allowed to blog
• Out Louder
• MMW
  

Two tunes for your enjoyment: a very pretty “Julia” …

[audio:MSMW - Julia.mp3]

…and, more representative, the set-closing “Hottentot” from the Electric Factory in Philly the week previous:

[audio:MSMW - Hottentot.mp3]

Download more live MMW/MSMW.

[tags]music, john medeski, billy martin, chris wood, john scofield, jazz, funk, nyc, bowery ballroom, shows, audio[/tags]

I bought this book as a joke, an afterthought, just because I’d already spent twenty minutes in the dusty Prenzlauer Berg used book store where the salespeople were playing Warcraft in the corner. “Kinski’s always good for a laugh,” I figured, and forked over my three Euros. Little did I know that the joke would blossom into a full-fledged obsession. I’d grown up with an idea of Kinski based mainly on the German TV shows I saw during the 80s: Gottschalk, talk shows. Whenever Kinski was on (and he seemed to be on a lot), he could be counted on to rave and rant and make a public spectacle of himself.

We watched Woyzek in high school, and it freaked me out. Since, I’ve seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and countless of the two hundred B pictures, Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations he appears in, and Herzog’s mean-spirited My Best Fiend. Still, Kinski’s artistry seemed to consist of Kinski just being Kinski, a megalomaniac who could outcrazy everybody on screen because he was a madman offscreen, too.

No longer. I can’t say that I understand him after reading his outrageous, boundless autobiography, but at least it’s possible now to imagine what the world looked like from inside Kinski’s head. As he puts it, everything about him was too too: he felt too much, loved too intensely, reacted too quickly, fought too viciously; a raging, fucking, screaming beast of a man whose emotions were too close too the surface, whose appetites where too ravenous, who had no sense of proportion. Put him in a TV studio and ask him idiotic questions about his international success or the endless bad movies he appeared in, and he would show his disdain, question the intention of the hosts and refuse to answer. He talks too quickly and he pounces too early, but you can’t deny that he has a point.

Rewatch his films, and you can see it there, right on the surface: every twitch of his soul is written on an unbearably intense face, threatening, seductive, almost too alive. The agony, the joy, the madness–if our senses weren’t so dull compared to his, we would appear mad, too. It’s no surprise that before the backdrop of mid-20th century German mainstream culture, a creature as fearless as Klaus Kinski should seem completely nuts.

Read the rest of this entry »

_{Photo by bouche}

Hadn’t seen the Benevento Russo Duo since the GRAB run with Gordo & Trey this summer, and it was good to see just the two of them again, locked in, grinning, and wicked noisy. They filmed the show for a potential DVD release, but the crowd seemed a tad too laid back, they kept the set short and Joe looked exhausted by the end. Some great way-out improv though, and a killer “Becky” that went surprising places, including a section that sounded like Danny Elfman was sitting in, which led into a heavy jungle techno groove.

For your listening pleasure, a Becky>Mephisto from a year ago. Takes about two minutes to really kick in.

[audio:http://jurgenfauth.com/audio/Becky-Mephisto.mp3]

[tags]music, audio, shows, nyc, the duo, marco benevento, joe russo, organ, drums, wicked, becky[/tags]