Month: March 2013

The Art of the Steal (Doc of the Week #2)

“As through this world I wander, I see lots of funny men,” Woody Guthrie sang back in 1939, “Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.” Although Guthrie wrote those lines for the song “Pretty Boy Floyd” their relevance echoes far beyond the world of bank robbers and foreclosure-happy branch managers during the Great Depression. An interesting modern manifestation of his bon mot is in the field of art thievery. Here in the Boston area, there’s been much in the news lately about the FBI being close to solving the infamous 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This is a case where old-school bad guys gained entrance by posing as cops, tied up the guards in the basement and made off with a half a billion dollars worth of Rembrandts, Vermeers and Manets. But now there seems to be a more genteel way of relieving museums of their collections and the public of their cultural heritage. The newly-expanded Gardner Museum, like the Barnes Foundation depicted in the film below, was the quirky end product of a maverick art collector, places that (despite the last will and testament of their founders) can be tampered with in an age where top cultural institutions are beginning to look as monolithic as the too-big-to-fail banks.

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The Art of the Steal
(Directed by Don Argott—2009—101 minutes)

In “The Art of the Steal”, the corporatization of culture is seen as an invasive, extra-legal force trampling the legacy of the eccentric and combative inventor/art collector Albert C. Barnes, whose extraordinary inventory of early modern paintings were displayed at his semi-private foundation in a Philadelphia suburb. Argott meticulously traces the battle that began after Barnes’ death in 1951 between his foundation and the cultural/political establishment over ultimate control of a collection that came to be valued at around $25 billion. Barnes was born to working-class parents, worked his way through college, and made a fortune inventing an anti-syphilis drug in the days before antibiotics. He was a passionate and prescient art lover and in the depths of the Depression bought up hundreds of canvasses by the likes Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Renoir and Van Gogh. These works were ridiculed by Philadelphia’s cultural elite as “primitive” and “debased”, cementing Barnes’ disdain for high-society and causing him to decamp to nearby Merion (a mere five miles away from the detested Philadelphia Museum of Art) where he hung the works in quirky galleries and ran an egalitarian art school.

Argott deftly works this story along two parallel tracks: first as a parlor mystery that traces the subtle chipping away at Barnes’ will (which stated in no uncertain terms that the paintings were never to leave the Merion location) by elements both inside and outside of his foundation; and secondly to the greater question of what is the correct dispensation of world culture in an era when individual works of art can easily sell for tens or even hundreds of millions. As the controversy came to a head in the first decade of the 21st century, Argott was there as the institutional powers that be (the successors of those who once belittled Barnes’ tastes) slowly asserted themselves in the idea that the collection was now too great to be left so inaccessible—-and while an opposing protest movement started calling it the greatest art theft since World War II. This elegantly paced and visually striking documentary seems to be a staunch defense of the Barnes Foundation as a “handmade thing in a machine world”, a populist outpost against the relentless commodification of modern life. Others have perceived “The Art of the Steal” as being one-sided (probably a lot of the same people that Argott lists as declining to be interviewed) as the articulate group of talking heads seem to concur more with Barnes’ rebellious worldview, as impractical as it is, than with those who he saw as putting themselves on a “pedestal… to pose as patrons of the arts.” Argott is in effect holding accountable those who are going to get their way in the end anyhow, as good a reason as any for a non-fiction film. It certainly has struck a nerve as Q&A sessions after film festival showings have repeatedly turned into shouting matches, pointing out the strong emotions behind a contentious issue that Argott has brought so memorably to light.

(Those interested in this subject should look into the case of the Seward House Historic Museum in upstate New York. The painting “Portage Falls on the Genesee”, by Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, hung in the house for over 100 years before being summarily removed by museum’s overseer foundation. The canvas, recently appraised for a cool $18 million, was removed under police escort after the foundation’s unilateral decision that it was too valuable to hang in just any old historic home and needed to be sold off to a private collector at auction instead. The shocked museum operators may find only cold comfort in the promise that they will share in the proceeds.)

Lucky (Doc of the Week #1)

To go along with the (hopefully) imminent release of my indie book “Documentary 101: A Viewer’s Guide to Non-Fiction Film”, here’s my new weekly post that will spotlight a work of particular interest. This feature will mostly be titles that have come out in recent months since the book’s completion, along with some obscurities that deserve wider recognition or older non-fiction films that are being re-released. Documentary film is one of the most vital of all art forms and has arrived at a sort of golden age in the last couple of decades, with quality and variety of subject matter increasing exponentially, along with viewer interest. So there’s a lot to choose from. A doc a week? Well, with a mid-summer hiatus and maybe a break for the Christmas holidays, I think I can pull it off. Please check in on the weekend for the latest. Cheers, Rick Ouellette

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Lucky
(Directed by Jeffrey Blitz—2010—82 minutes—Docurama Films)

Ever enter a contest and have someone hit you with the old line, “nobody ever wins those things”? The same could be said to those buying tickets for one of the high-stakes lottery games that have become hugely popular in the U.S. in recent decades. Except, of course, we know that people win them all the time—you see them on TV holding up an oversized check for some astronomical sum (often in the tens of millions) then rarely hear about them again. The odds of knowing someone who has hit the Powerball jackpot must be about the same as actually buying a winning ticket yourself—about one in 180 million. So it’s up to documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz, who also directed 2002’s crowd-pleasing Spellbound, to make this fascinating case study of several winners and look at the first year results once the mega-bucks start rolling in. It’s all here, the good, the bad and the ugly and rest assured there is a bit of all three.

Blitz approaches this rather delicate subject with careful steps. Each of his subjects is first introduced with a five-minute segment. We get a feel for their personal backgrounds and the initial euphoria of their sudden fortune, making it more resonant when Blitz circles back and their stories deepen. First up is Quang, a Vietnamese immigrant working in a ConAgra meatpacking plant when he won $22 million as his share of a prize with several others in a company pool. This is a man who had been severely injured fighting alongside Americans in the war and barely escaped with his wife and his life after the Communist victory, luckily getting picked up by a French rescue craft instead of a Soviet warship. These kinds of hard experiences lead to the type of philosophical outlook and rational decision-making that bodes well, where sudden good fortune is seen as an opportunity to build on and not a magical escape hatch from drudgery.

Those less well-centered have more difficulty with their “good fortune.” James was a middle-aged bachelor who had lived with his parents. His employment situation and living condition nose-dived after their deaths and he was down to his last three dollars when he plunked it down on a ticket that replenished his supply to the tune of $5.5 million. But he still seems adrift, buying a needlessly huge house to keep his money away from perceived exploiters and missing the several dozen cats that used to live with him. Buddy, hailed by the local media a year before for saving a baby from a burning building, is said to have been rewarded by a $16 million gift from above. After his bad-news brother from hell re-enters his life, Buddy wonders if the devil didn’t have a hand in it as well.

The conundrum facing mathematician Robert is more subtle but no less important. He’s told by his university employer to “wrap up your work and we’ll find somebody else” almost immediately after breaking the news of his lottery win. The reaction is telling in a country that instinctively worships wealth, while the idea of one’s work being equal to one’s worth is slower to gain traction. The huge disconnect between “something you do” and “something you won” is something he never counted on while buying tickets on a lark. Most relatable of all may be the experience of Kristine and Steve, a solid middle-stream suburban couple with two teenage kids, who win a mind-boggling $110 million. “You work your whole life to be part of the crowd,” they tell Blitz. Becoming estranged to longtime friends who can’t help but be resentful is jarring—-telling your kids that they’ll have to have a pre-nup when they get married is just as disconcerting. No longer on the same wavelength as those still living from paycheck to paycheck (one even tells them she can no longer stand the sight of them) they decamp to an affluent Florida community, enjoying the lifestyle, doing charity work, managing their treasure and suspecting all the while they may never totally fit in there either (“we are our own species”).

Blitz presents all this in an attractive package, familiar though it may be in its modish, non-narrated way. The subjects are comfortable and candid at the hands of an unobtrusive director, who fills in the history-of-the-lottery backstory during appealing animated interludes. These subjects can end up being misguided—-throwing away in a few short years more money than the average person would make in a lifetime—-or canny enough to use the winnings as seed money to build businesses for future family generations to run, avoiding the brain-deadening results of trust fund indulgence (the Kardashian Effect, if you will). They are all treated with equal deference by Blitz and that’s as it should be. One informational sequence early on lets viewers know that lotteries have been around in America since Colonial times but were banned for several decades due to administrative corruption. When it started again in 1964, the top prize was $100,000. After watching Lucky, it’s not hard to feel it would have been just as well if it stayed at that but, say, adjusted for inflation to about $750,00 in today’s dollars. Three-quarters of a million will take the edge off most anyone’s financial pressures without catapulting winners into the warp-speed unrealities depicted here. But in today’s empathy-deficient global economy, where genuine economic security seems to be the domain only of top corporations and those already wealthy, everyday stresses and wishful thinking will lead people to the local convenience store time and again in hopes of riches beyond their wildest dreams—-even if most never realize just how much that will entail.

Once There Was a Time–R.I.P. Alvin Lee

A_Space_in_TimeIt was a shame to hear about the death of guitar hero Alvin Lee, especially since it seems it was a case of the dreaded complications during “routine surgery.” If I’m not mistaken, it’s similiar to the circumstances that ended Andy Warhol’s life. A horrible way to go and very tough on the surviving loved ones–you’re dropped off at the hospital for a minor operation and the next thing they know you’ve “rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible” (with apologies to John Cleese).

Of course, Lee’s band Ten Years After never really made it into the upper echelon of iconic British rock bands. True, they were a sensation at Woodstock and Lee’s famous speed-demon guitar runs were on full diplay when their signature jam “I’m Going Home” made it into the film. He and boyhood friend (and eventual Ten Years bassist)Leo Lyons made it to London from their native Nottingham in the early 1960s, playing and sharing bills with the likes of John Lee Hooker, Hendrix and Larry Coryell. “I’m Going Home” made their name but became a bit of an albatross–on their later double live LP knucklehead fans can’t even wait for this obvious set-closer, instead loudly requesting it after the second number. But the albums sold pretty well and they slugged it out on the arena circuit during the first half of the Seventies for audiences that appreciated instrumental virtousity or just loved to freak to Lee’s mind-bending solos on his trusty hollow-body Gibson.

(Check out Alvin Lee doing his thing in the TYA segment of Murray Lerner’s brilliant documentary “Message to Love” about 1970’s contentious Isle of Wight festval: http://youtu.be/2vZVVq7WJFY)

To his credit, Lee did move to broaden the band’s sound from the more basic blues-riffing and lengthy jams they were known for (by the time they finished their version of “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl” it was usually mid-afternoon). No one would confuse his songwriting with Bob Dylan’s, but on 1971’s “A Space in Time” he steered Ten Years After towards a dreamy, folk-rock sound that on tunes like “Here They Come” and “Over the Hill” recalled classic Traffic. That LP also yielded their one big AM hit, “I’d Love to Change the World.” But as that kitchen-sink protest song would suggest, finger-picking and not social commentary was Lee’s true calling. His real mission statement may lie in that LP’s rural-blues shuffle “Once There Was A Time.”

“And if I don’t get to heaven
And I go down there below
Better be a guitar when I get there
Or I will refuse to go”

Bye the bye, ever notice how rock stars of today just don’t sit around in meadows like they used to?

“Big Time” Waits for no man (on store shelves)

While at Barnes and Noble the other night I caught Tom Waits’ careworn visage glaring at me from the cover of the latest issue of Uncut magazine. Thing is, that photo looks like it was from 1973, the year of his first album (the piece is called “Birth of a Boho Legend”). Talk about an old soul. I didn’t pick up a copy (at least not yet) as I am still happily absorbed in the same mag’s special all-Kinks issue that my sister surprised me with for my birthday. But it got me thinking on two points. First I have to finish my article on the celebration of 1973 in general, the greatest of all rock years not recognized as such and now forty years in the rear view mirror. I’ll have it out here soon.

Secondly, why hasn’t “Big Time”, the great Tom Waits concert film from 1988, ever made it out on DVD? The VHS-to-VHS copy I once made after checking it out from the library can’t last forever. Yeah, you can watch it on YouTube nowadays but it just isn’t the same. It demands, like any good film, a decent size screen and no other distractions. “Big Time” is a variation on the off-Broadway play “Frank’s Wild Years” (written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan) and is similiar to the stage show on his 1987 tour supporting the LP of the same name. Songs like “Ol’55” and “Grapefruit Moon” made that ’73 debut (Closing Time) a worthy debut but Waits’ offbeat genius as a songwriter and conceptualist didn’t come into full flower until the Eighties and beyond. This is the best showcase for his famously expansive assortment of mid-century American character types: the homesick sailors, the farmboys off to the big city, the strippers and barflies, the beautiful losers and beatnik drifters that crowd into his songs like passengers on a rush-hour Tokyo subway.

“Big Time” was mainly filmed at the art-deco Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, Waits’ hometown and a place he knows well (he describes the theater as being located on the corner of “Friendly and Snooty”). The 50-year antiquity of the venue is a suitably scenic platform for the Waits’ usher/ticket-seller/hustler character whose droll activities are interspersed with the onstage action. Here the noirish stage set and the musical palette of accordion, honking sax and upright bass complete the picture. The Frank of the title is a downwardly mobile Sinatra wannabe who tells the “beautiful” crowd that he “feels closer to(them)than his own family” and wheezes his way through a song that insists he’s headed “Straight to the Top” where the air is “fresh and pretty clean.” More as himself, Waits either goes to his upright piano for one of his vaunted melancholic ballads like “Johnsville, Illinois” or gets up to front his crack band on deliciously manic performances of “Down in the Hole” or “Telephone Call from Istanbul” (“never trust a man in a blue trench coat/never drive a car when you’re dead”).

Wait’s dry between-songs witticisms are a hoot but by the end, when it’s clear that Frank and his long-shot dream of redemptive stardom are destined to be kicked to the curb,the heartstrings get a pulling during numbers like “The Train Song” and “More than Rain”, the latter betraying the Brechtian influence that crept in during that time. But Waits’ sly nature never gets vanishes for long and he’s compelled to sing the climatic ballad, “Innocent When You Dream” while standing fully-clothed in a bubble bath.

Tom Waits was never big on touring and I was happy to have had the chance to see him on that tour in ’87 at Boston’s Orpheum Theater (not at the corner of anything, but pushed to the back of a cul-de-sac near Park Street Station). From the moment he charged out of the gate with “Hang on St. Christopher” (a driver “jacked-up on whiskey” exhorts the patron saint of travellers through a bullhorn, telling him that “tonight the Devil can ride”), to when he encored with a rip-roaring “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, one of the best shows I saw in the Eighties. If the gig had been scheduled a few months earlier I probably would not have seen it: put off by his notoriously gravelly vocals, I had never giiven Waits a chance. But thanks to my new roommates heavy rotation of such LPs as “Rain Dogs” and “Swordfishtrombone” the light bulb went off just in time to ask him to be me up a ticket as well. An object lesson that musical discoveries are an ever-renewable resource for a better life. True, a guy as willfully eccentric as Waits will never siphon off many middle-of-the-roaders, but for his considerable cult audience and for those destined to discover, a proper home-video release of “Big Time” is long overdue.

The Strange, Forgotten Saga of the Medicine Ball Caravan

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Some 43 years ago, a much-hyped “youth” film was produced with intentions to capitalize on the success of “Woodstock”, Michael Waldleigh’s immensely popular (and Oscar-winning) documentary of the epoch-making rock festival. In the summer of 1970, Warner Brothers spent nearly a million dollars putting together the Medicine Ball Caravan, as 150 recruited hippies, accompanied by a French film crew, undertook a cross-country tour from San Francisco to D.C., promulgating the Aquarian lifestyle and staging a series of free concerts along the way. But when it was released to theaters in August of 1971, the youths stayed away in record numbers and Rolling Stone named it one of the ten worst films of the year. Fred Weintraub, the savvy New Yorker who had owned the star-making Bottom Line nightclub, got the gig as head of Warner’s youth market after taking a gamble on filming some three-day music show upstate that then turned out to be a decade-defining event. WB was eager for a follow up and Weintraub tried to conjure an event that would be a sort of Woodstock on wheels. The story of why “Medicine Ball Caravan” still barely qualifies as an afterthought in the history of rock documentaries says a lot about shifting cultural attitudes at the start of the Seventies, as well as to the potential pitfalls of filming pre-conceived “reality” events.

At the start of the film, as the viewer watches a telephoto view of the long line of buses, vans and trucks motoring over the Golden Gate Bridge, a real sense of possibility is felt. Soon after, “MBC” devolves into a series of caravan vignettes presented with little context. It’s really too bad. Organized by pioneering FM disk jockey Tom Donahue, the caravan could have surfed that last great cresting wave of the hippie ethos, a subject that still had strong innate appeal. The film was directed by Francois Reichenbach, fresh from winning his own documentary Oscar for “Arthur Rubinstein: Love of Life”. Reichenbach had been piling up awards and festival prizes since his filmmaking days started in the early Sixties but his winning streak ended here. “The truth requires not a cold witness but what I call a love witness,” the directed is quoted in John Grissim Jr.’s appealing 1972 book about the caravan called “We Have Come for Your Daughters” (the phrase was painted on the lead vehicle). But Reichenbach’s open-mindedness about longhair culture eventually showed itself as a lack of vision as to what the final work might look like. By 1971, random film scenes of hippie nudity, bus painting, reefer smoking and peace-sign flashing had passed into cliché and all are in abundance here. Matters were not helped by the many interview clips of inarticulate freaks held in front of their tie-dyed teepees.

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B.B. King rocks the arroyo

There is a higher success rate with the musical sequences, what there are of them. The featured performers were literally airlifted to the makeshift concert sites. There’s twelve wonderful minutes of a top-form B.B. King, the nattily-attired blues great holding forth from a stage in a sun splashed arroyo somewhere north of Albuquerque. Cajun music icon Doug Kershaw crosses over to the festival crowd with his warp-speed fiddling and playful scat singing on “Battle of New Orleans”. Alice Cooper practically invents goth with a searing rendition of “Black Juju” which culminates in Mr. Furnier showering the front rows with chicken feathers. But that’s about it, not counting the rather undistinguished Stoneground, the traveling “house band” that would later be responsible for providing three-fourths of the lineup for Pablo Cruise. If the studio had snagged their first choice, a Warner-Reprise act called the Grateful Dead, “MBC” would likely not be so obscure.


Sal Valentino, formerly of Beau Brummels and then singer of Stoneground, does a solo number in this scene from MBC that also features some nice caravan footage.

It was generally believed that the studio execs, by sending this freak circus out into the land of the Silent Majority, were hoping for some sort of climatic cinematic confrontation. But most of the straights that Reichenbach shows are cordial if not supportive while any conflicts in the film emanate from within the caravan’s own demographic. There’s a tense run-in with the Manson-lite STP Family at the Boulder, Colorado show and chaotic confrontations on the campus of Ohio’s Antioch College before a proposed concert nearby. There had been grumblings all summer from the New Left that Medicine Ball was a Warner Brothers scam, a ploy to usurp the counterculture by getting naïve hedonists to play act a plastic version of it.

Despite the fact that caravaners were only being paid expenses and counted among their number such bona fides as Wavy Gravy, suspicions about this “sell out” were exploited by provocateurs-without-portfolio David Peel and Tom Forcade, the latter of whom had been nipping at the heels of Tom Donahue weeks before they reached Antioch. Humorless young campus radicals were whipped into hysteria over the notion that corporate suits (AKA “capitalist pigs”) would dare make a movie that may appeal to some in their age group. In the fracas that followed, these summer-program students (“kept in school by their parents to keep them away from home,” says one caravan wag) try to shut down the show, forcing the traveling troupe to stand up for themselves, and defend their efforts to work within the system to spread the peace-and-love message. Suddenly, “Medicine Ball Caravan” turns contentious and interesting, but by then it’s almost over.

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Your ride is here

At least there was a film at all as “MBC” barely averted a post-production cancellation. According to eyewitness Grissim, many of the young French crew members partook of the caravan’s ample LSD supply and the result was a lot of mislabeled or blank film cans that could never be matched up with the related soundtrack as well as a lot of out-of-focus shooting and missed opportunities. Moreover, Reichenbach entrusted the first cut of his film to a handpicked editor back in France who did not understand English and had a bias against hippies. Warner Brothers were aghast at the desultory results and almost nixed the film when, at the eleventh hour, a young Martin Scorcese (who had also worked on “Woodstock”) was brought in to fashion a more upbeat 92-minute final cut. Some of the caravan’s spirit survives in Scorcese’s optimistic coda and the clear-eyed Grissim allows that at its best Medicine Ball “kick(ed) a lot of life into a wilted flower fantasy.” Both the documentary and the equally arcane “We Have Come for Your Daughters” probably deserved a better fate even if, as Grissim smartly predicted, the whole adventure was likely to “end up as a historical footnote (and) a small reminder that the Sixties did, after all, end on schedule.”

(I don’t believe “Medicine Ball Caravan” ever saw the light of day during the VHS era, probably being relegated to the very occasional screening in a college film-series setting. It is currently available on DVD from videobeat.com, the grey-market website for music and pop culture miscellany. A search for “We Have Come for Your Daughters” offered up a rare copy that would set you back a C-note. Try the library, especially if like me you live in an area where they are networked with ones from surrounding communities. I found one with little problem.)

My new book Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey is now available on Amazon and through my author page at BookLocker.com Please click on the book-cover image (or the link below) to access the 30-page excerpt at BookLocker.
http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html