Beat Them Gherkins
Now Playing: Kelly Jean Caldwell--"O Do Not Be Afraid!"
New blog name? Maybe. Or "The Gherkins Deal"; there's one that just screams epic scope.

I was mistaken for the member of a company the other day. It was the weirdest thing; La Jefa had sent me to take a delivery over to a downtown office building, a gorgeous old place that used to be the city's main organ factory, and there were still a few well-preserved specimens in the lobby (musical, not biological) that I examined on the way out (like I know shit about organs). The office looked like the popular image of one of those myriad dotcoms that went under in the late 90s, with goateed boy geniuses in toque hats knocking hackysacks around while chatting via mildly primitive cellphones to their brokers on NASDAQ. Or what have you. My customary attire on outdoor excursions is a wool hat, jacket, and scarf, the latter frequently worn over my mouth and nose, as the wind's been especially lacerating recently. Before taking the elevator back down, I put it all on and joined a couple of those "business guys," as Mike Nelson calls them.

"Down?"

I nodded and inserted myself between them as unobtrusively as possible.

"That is a fantastic-looking office," said one.

"Yeah, this place used to be an organ factory." The guy turns to me. "How long have you guys been there?" He obviously hasn't seen the chef pants, although I guess I should be relieved that he hasn't been looking there in the first place.

I raise my hands in a noncommittal shrug.

The other guy shakes his head. "That's not his company, man."

"That's not your company?" the guy asks me in apparent disbelief.

I shake my head. Mind you, it was a cool office.

"You don't work here?"

Again the shake.

"Who the hell are you?" asks the other guy, laughing. "Take off that mask!"

The elevator reaches ground level and we all have a good chuckle.

"It's cold out there," I whimper in partial explanation.

I hope I get sent there more often. I had to go there again that day, and was that time hassled by one of those homeless guys, the one who goes around screaming religious invective in a manner recalling Arsenio Hall's preacher character from Coming To America. La Jefa broke the news of my second traipse in sorrow-laden tones, not realizing that she was just throwing me in the briar patch.

Madisonfest: A Farewell Show (2007): Shawn Wernette's documentary portrait of this, which I was able to see in a rough cut Thursday evening at the Bluish Barn, a very cool little place north of Kerrytown, home to local musician Timothy Mephi and a number of friends. They're showing a different movie every Thursday, and the next few weeks' roster strongly tempts me to become a semi-regular patron. I'd had a number of enjoyable and increasingly intoxicated conversations with Shawn and Ryan Balderas about movies, and was thrilled to find out that he'd finally edited all the footage together and was showing it in Ann Arbor. I'm a little biased, but I think it's wonderful. Some of the performances onscreen maybe last a little long in comparison to others, but that's the only major criticism that sprang to mind. One of the big pleasures was to see performances I'd missed at the time (I tried my damnedest, but even I can't entirely make it through a nearly twelve-hour set of music without a break). Of those, Zach Curd was probably the most impressive, with one foot in folk and another in the kind of quasi-cabaret stuff that worked such wonders for Bowie around the time of Hunky Dory. There were also priceless bits of performances I'd seen but hadn't wholly appreciated--viz. Vince and Matt's facial expressions during the Dabenport set. Glorious. I'd actually expected it to be a straightforward portrayal of the music, and so I was very pleased to find a timely and well-placed selection of interviews in between performances and leading into them, with Ryan, Brandon, Fred Thomas, and Steven from Canada, all of whom put their own contributions into the context of the local music scene, and particularly the opportunities Ann Arbor allows folk musicians, in contrast to garage rock's longtime predominance in Detroit. Brandon waxes particularly eloquent over Great Lakes Myth Society and how they have to deal with the potential trivialization of their subject matter in non-Michigander eyes by artists like Sufjan Stevens. I watched it with an audience that had an often distractingly--but in the end bracingly--critical attitude towards the performances. I won't mention the specific performer, but she was playing with a poor glockenspielerin who got a merciless (though somewhat justified, in my mind) ragging from the peanut gallery in back. "The glockenspiel player doesn't give a fuck!" "She's wearing business casual!!" (the latter hissed in a manner others might reserve for... I don't know, live infant evisceration or something). The film led, as the show did in real life, to Chris Bathgate's supremely evocative performance of "We Die," the final song ever played at the Madison House. The credits played, alongside Adam's photos, to Saturday Looks Good To Me's "When You Got To New York." It's weirdly appropriate in two ways--the last song on the most recent record of probably the best-known Ann Arbor band (2004's Every Night), and a reference to Brandon's present life in Brooklyn. Full disclosure: I'm thanked in the credits; I still have little idea why.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006): A genuine Grimm-style fairy tale modernized (well, 1940s, anyway) and fully realized. Even the interminable commercials through which one must helplessly sit at Showcase Cinemas in Ypsilanti found redemption through the movie's greatness. It was strange, too, as it took me half the movie to warm to it (when I did, though, I did with a vengeance). Many disparate themes come together towards the end in a rewarding and in one case very gutsy manner. Guillermo del Toro's work has somewhat eluded me in the past; I enjoyed Cronos but didn't like The Devil's Backbone as much as I thought I would (probably a case of thinking it was going to be the most awesome movie ever made from the reviews--that's screwed me over more than once). Young Ofelia (the amazing Ivana Baquero) finds herself and her invalid mother saddled with a wicked stepfather who also happens to be a captain in Franco's army. It's 1944 and though the Spanish Civil War has been over for half a decade, there are still isolated pockets of resistance in the northern mountains (the dialogue hints at Aragon). Ofelia quickly discovers the nearby woods to be haunted by ancient spirits, who assign her a quest that will take her away from her wretched mortal existence. After a rocky start, del Toro ably contrasts Ofelia's "fantasy" world with the oppression and degradation of the "real" one, all the while subtly (and sometimes not so much) hinting at similarities between the two. As in all the best horror movies, themes of sacrifice surface in a way that recall some of the best specimens of the genre. All that takes place against a truly gorgeous physical backdrop. The verdant, mountainous countryside is fine enough, but the fantasy scenes make for delicious icing on the cake; the "banqueting hall" is one of the most evocative and well-rendered sets I've ever seen in a movie, period. Sergi Lopez makes a superb villain as the stepfather; the most horrific scenes in the movie are the ones in which he tortures suspects (or, more precisely, is about to torture them). Now I'll have a movie to root for at the Oscars!

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939): In his excellent essay "Hero in Waiting" that accompanies the DVD, film scholar Geoffrey O'Brien makes a case that John Ford's biographical masterpiece was something of an American answer to totalitarian propaganda titans like Triumph of the Will and Alexander Nevsky (and wouldn't you know it, Sergei Eisenstein's 1945 essay "Mr. Lincoln by Mr. Ford" appears right after O'Brien's). There's a definite ambivalence towards "the American way" in this one; as O'Brien observes, Lincoln's relations with the Springfield townspeople epitomize the constant tug-o-war between individual and society. An ostensible account of Lincoln's early Illinois legal career in the 1830s, Young Mr. Lincoln makes its subject (Henry Fonda, whose garish false nose one forgets after about five minutes) human while making the frequent historical foreshadows part of that humanity, instead of turning the man into a statue (which does happen, quite literally, but only at the very end of the movie). There's a dominating plot concerning Lincoln's defense of a pair of brothers accused of murder, but it's the little touches that shine through for me, particularly the appearances of a hilariously smug Stephen Douglas (Milburn Stone)--every time there's a shot of his face while Lincoln's speaking (particularly in medium or long shots), you can just tell he's thinking "hick moron!!!" Along with that comes a plethora of small-town Americana: covered wagons, state fairs, lynch mobs, pie-eating contests, parades... the kind of deceptive and occasionally corny wholesomeness that Ford's genius turns to high drama, and a perfect stage for his subject. Lincoln, the most fascinating of Americans, needed no such transformation, but Ford renders him an American cinema hero for the ages.