Los Angeles: Pastrami, Tacos, and Chili Dogs

Would you eat a pastrami sandwich from a place that also serves tacos and chili dogs and burritos?

The Lost World with Dengue Fever at SF International Film Festival

I am a big advocate of live music to film. I've curated and performed such shows myself. I think it's a great way to experience the art of music and theatre and film and performance all together in an exciting vibrant spectacle.

It's great that film festivals more and more are programming these kinds of events. At San Francisco International Film Festival this year, Dengue Fever performed a live sountrack to the silent stop-motion classic The Lost World (1925).

I'll acknowledge that I'd not heard of Dengue Fever, which people uniformly pronounced "Dengay Fever." The conductor-less group struck me as first and foremost a band. Which is to say, they are quite interesting and cross-cultural and great musicians, but they appear to traffic primarily in a pop idiom and are mostly comfortable working in song structures.

Apparently they are quite popular, and given their strengths, The Lost World was an excellent choice for them as a vehicle for performing a live, original score.

The Lost World features extensive stop-motion dinosaur action by animator Willis O'Brien, who later did King Kong. Especially remarkable were scenes including the heaving breaths of a fallen dino and closeups of snarling dinos. On the big screen at the Castro, with the live music, this was better than Jurassic Park. Dengue Fever's music, with contemporary beats, live trumpet and trombone, and effective keyboards, gave the film a great energy, and made it feel quite contemporary.

Today at a screening of Kimjongilia at the Kabuki, I was engaged in conversation with some other festival filmgoers who had also attended the Lost World program. Although the Lost World audience was terrifically enthusiastic (despite the guy next to me texting during the movie... what is it with some people?), not everyone, it turns out, was convinced.

While I was a little surprised these festivalgoers could be critical, I was able to pin-point what was at issue for them, having some expertise in these matters.

While Dengue Fever did play throughout the entire film, the music was structured primarily as a string of songs, not as actual underscore. So the main difference between their performance and the music you might ordinarily expect to accompany a motion picture was a difference of form. In cinema, the moving image typically creates or dictates the form of the music, which will fluidly accompany, support, and react to the film. Dengue Fever, as a band, is clearly more at home with song form. This was particularly in evidence when the band would stop at some points, and the audience would applaud, as it were the end of a song. Clearly for many in the audience, this was a Dengue Fever concert with film, which is okay too. I was told that some people in the audience had come wearing Dengue Fever t-shirts; if this is a popular band that brings in a new audience to experience live music with film, great. I can certainly forgive them their issues with form, which all musicians go through.

Another interesting facet of The Lost World relates to race in film. While the film is ostensibly set in London and the Amazon, there is included in the cast an obligatory blackface comic character who speaks (in intertitles) in the requisite jargon. He's paired with a cockney-accented British fellow, and they are both, as you might expect, servants or helpers or whatever you want to call it.

The film has been restored, but still appears washed out, with low contrast, and the color is inconsistent. It was suggested to me this was intentional tinting in the original, but I don't know about that. It was also suggested to me that this restoration was done on a very low budget and privately finanaced; this page seems to support that idea.

Notes from GALA 2008: Kislev Cowboys

July 13, 2008. Knight Concert Hall, Miami.  Captain Smartypants.  I loved their set, and in particular this number!  Behold "Kislev Cowboys," if you didn't catch it at GALA.

One of the many challenges facing the GALA choral movement is ethnic diversity.  

I could see this in quite a few large choruses, from highly diversified regions of the United States, which underrepresented people of color, especially African Americans.  It certainly wasn't for lack of trying, as evident in their programming; these groups routinely and respectfully attempted multicultural material.  But by and large at GALA, it seems the Africans have rhythm and bang on things, the Natives (American Indian, Maori, Polynesian and otherwise) are happy, and the Jews are miserable and sing about peace.  I am reticent to cite musical selections, because doing so would identify the choruses in question.  (Trust me, I have a list.)  These choruses are all fine groups which do not deserve to be raked over the coals for honest attempts at inclusion and musical variety, many of which were effective crowd pleasers.

To be fair, there is a history in the gay community of "Village People" type multiculturalism, celebrating diversity through stereotypes reduced to well-intentioned sexual objectification. Perhaps that's fine, but will it encourage African Americans and people of color to join the chorus?  Now, as far as the Jew material, I feel I am entitled to comment.  Please buckle your seat belt.

I want to address why "Kislev Cowboys" is funny.  Writing about humor is not amusing or witty, so this may sting a little.  "Kislev Cowboys" is not funny because there's no such thing as a Jewish cowboy.  No.  Maybe that's why you laughed.  Fine.  That's not the joke.  That's like laughing at the final verse of "Zip Coon" because obviously a Negro could never run for President.  (apropos, huh?  If you are lost, google "Zip Coon.")

"Kislev Cowboys" is funny because dreidel is a stupid, boring game.  It's on par with Candyland.  No one likes to play dreidel.  The joke is that these fun-loving cowboys would want to play dreidel.  

Let's parse this a bit.  What are the funniest moments of the song?  The best is certainly when the cowboys play dreidel on stage.  Why?  You can see how lame it is.  It is a fitting non-sequitur to both the active life of the macho cowboy and the quiet stillness of the prairie. Why the blazes would cowboys play dreidel? Well, what else is there to do?  The Pony Express must be late with the Netflix again.  Or, maybe it's how cowboys determine who gets to be in the saddle.

The other highlight is any prominent solo line like "I made it out of clay" or "Dreidel I will play" delivered all hammed up with cowboy shtick.  This is because one set of musical conventions has been substituted for another, and it works completely.  To do "Dreidel" as the sing-song childish nursery rhyme it is would be appalling.  To substitute another equally appalling but unexpected cliché is funny.  Get it?  It's not your Bubby's dreidel, but it's still cheesy!  It's all about the cheese!  (Oi that's a milchigte luau!)

Captain Smartypants got it right.  I don't need to be pandered to with some weepy fiddle and shalom this and that.  Give me a break.  Or how about some nice I - N6 - I - N6 - I - N6 - iv - I ?  As Morrissey put so eloquently, "It says nothing to me about my life."  Hey, why don't you buy a copy of Heeb magazine and get a little up to date?

At a bleary 10am on Saturday July 19, Eric Lane Barnes held a master class workshop for small ensembles.  The composer of "Kislev Cowboys" made a salient comment: if you don't have a good Hanukah number, don't insult the Jews by doing a bad one. I applauded.  And I think this applies to all attempts at multicultural programming.