Month: October 2015

“Extraordinary Tales” and Dream Geographies: The animated Poe and Beyond

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Extraordinary Tales
Directed by Raul Garcia–2015–73 minutes

The delectable new animation anthology “Extraordinary Tales,” where five of Edgar Allan Poe’s most notable stories each receive a distinctly different visual treatment, came along at just the right time and place. I had been scoping around for a suitable seasonal post but was at a loss until I heard of the film’s release. I would have settled for a straight review. Then I realized just how fitting that this limited-release title landed at the AMC Loews Boston Common. This 3-story, ersatz movie palace may be home of the $6.50 small popcorn but at least the downtown multiplex has returned movie-going to the center of the city after so many cinema closings there in recent decades. It also overlooks Poe’s hated Frog Pond in Boston’s famous public park across the street and is less than two blocks from the recently-installed Poe statue close to his birthplace. But I had a notion that the geographical connections went deeper than that (often to the point of being subterranean) and all-in-all made for an interesting night out at the pictures. But more on that later; I almost forgot about the film.

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“Extraordinary Tales” was directed by Spanish filmmaker/animator Raul Garcia and produced under the auspices of Film Fund Luxembourg (don’t laugh: little Luxy is a hotbed of animation team-building, check out “Song of the Sea” or “A Town Called Panic” for starters). Each story is boiled down to its core element of terror and dread and narratively speaking the film is a little thin. I imagine that’s to be expected given 21st century attention spans as well the density of 19th century expository writing. (Exhibit A: the 60-word opening sentence of “The Fall of the House of Usher”).

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And it is “Usher” which kicks things off after we are introduced to the framing device. This has the spirit of Edgar in the form of the famous Raven ruminating over his literary legacy with various female-figure statues in a curiously beautiful pastel graveyard. The sharp-lined antique-y style of “Usher” suits the grim tale of a family’s doomed bloodline as that old self-imploding greathouse is practically the main character. Christopher Lee’s great portentous narration here turned out to be his last film part before his passing last June.

The next narrator also sweeps in form the pale beyond as a scratchy period recording of Bela Lugosi reciting “The Tell-Tale Heart” is matched to stark B&W imagery in homage to Argentine comics artist Alberto Breccia. Ben-Day dots and colored overlays define the look of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” wherein an exercise in applied hypnotics goes way off the rails. The old warhorse “The Pit and the Pendulum” gets the quasi-realist look of an Xbox game and a Guillermo del Toro narration, the mechanics of the pendulum are especially well represented.

The concluding “Masque of the Red Death” may be the cream of the crop. The vibrant hues of its oil-on-canvas style (with visible brush strokes) are a feast for the eyes. The literal feasting—and dancing, card-playing and sexual byplay—of the royal partygoers, who cannot keep the Black Death at bay is portrayed without narration or (except for a couple of lines voiced by Roger Corman) dialogue. The slightly overexcited (universal) desire to partake of life’s rich pageant before death (Black or otherwise) comes a-calling was understandable enough without words.

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DREAM GEOGRAPHIES

When these cinematic pleasantries concluded, I stepped out to a clear late October night and crossed into the Common, with Poe’s repeated motif of falling or being trapped underneath fresh in my mind. There’s the Usher mansion collapsing into an abyss, the prisoner imagining a drop into a bottomless pit before facing the pendulum and the master with the dodgy eyeball getting sectioned off below the floorboards in “Tell-Tale Heart.” As Tom Waits once had it “There’s a world going on underground.” Between the Poe plaque at the corner of Boylston St. and what was once the top of Poe-birthplace Carver St. (now a service alley named Poe Way) and the AMC Loews there are several places that would make great locales for this man’s stories. There’s the trench-like row of crypts in the Central Burying Ground (a one-stop shop for all you “Premature Burial” needs!), Steinert Hall, a recital auditorium four stories below the Steinway store (built by the piano-making clan in 1896 but closed to the public since 1942) and an urban-legend pedestrian tunnel from the tiny Boylston subway station possibly up to the Schubert theater two blocks away.

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It was Edgar Allan Poe’s literary successor H.P. Lovecraft that really put this macabre Ley-line notion into sharp relief. He once said that “there are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths.” While in real life this is not very comforting to acknowledge, in the aesthetic world it is super cool. In Lovecraft’s short story “Pickman’s Model,” the titular painter is banished from the upper-crust Boston Arts Club when his subject matter gets a little too hairy for the “Beacon St. tea-table” crowd. To wit: “There was a study called “Subway Accidents” in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.” (And you thought the T was bad nowadays). Those monsters, who may not be imaginary in the context of the tale, supposedly roam around in an extensive network of tunnels that fan out under central Boston from an opening in Pickman’s decrepit North End building, from where the artist muses, “these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace.” No kidding, right?

The dreaming part of that statement certainly resonates with me. I can look at that block of Tremont St. and see the AMC Loews and a vestige of the façade of the wax museum that used to be next door and the great hulk of the Masonic Temple on the corner of Boylston (I’d love to get a look at their sub-basement!) but a shade behind it all is a reoccurring dream landscape that I have visited periodically for decades. This REM wonderland is a densely-packed district of curio shops, chop suey stalls, burlesque theaters, pinball parlors and Art Deco shopping arcades–an urban archetype of the collective unconscious. Maybe writing about will bring it back because I haven’t landed there in over a year.

Walking back to my car, I passed by the Poe statue again, the morbid and magnificent author seemingly striding as quick as he can out of town (with his trusty Raven by his side) a cold shoulder turned to the dreaded “Frog-Pondians” of the city of his birth. In the “Extraordinary Tales” postscript he petitions for immortality in view of the six-foot hole. Mission Accomplished. Nowadays, our Subterranean Homesick Edgar is as iconic and indispensable in October as Charles Dickens is in December with “A Christmas Carol.” We can almost walk along beside him, dreaming gorgeously, one step ahead of the black zone at all times.

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We’ve All Gone Solo #11 (Danny Kirwan)

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To millions of music fans, Fleetwood Mac means Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, along with the founding rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie and recently rejoined singer-keyboardist Christine McVie. It’s not hard to see why. They were the most commercially successful incarnation of the band (remember a little record called Rumours?) and for the last forty years, the only incarnation. But before rock music’s timeline became so stretched out, there were of course two earlier stages of the band. The psychedelic blues combo fronted by guitar legend Peter Green and, after Green left in 1970, a transitional period in the early Seventies that saw the addition of Christine and, for a while, Bob Welch. Straddling those two periods was Danny Kirwan, who was born in South London in 1950 and joined Mac as an 18 year-old guitar prodigy in ’68. By the time he left in 1972, Kirwan was the de facto leader of the band, but was let go amid tales of alcohol abuse and erratic behavior.

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Someone like Kirwan, who developed mental health issues and was out of the music business by the late 70s, is an easily forgotten by the average pop fan. But for the passionate baby-boomer music buff, who have big record collections and read legacy rock magazines like Mojo and Uncut, a guy like Danny is often revered beyond what would normally be expected. And that’s how it should be. With the earlier version of FM, he was part of a formidable three-guitar formation (the third axe played by Jeremy Spencer) who carved out indelible rock classics like “Oh Well,” “Albatross,” “The Green Manalishi” and “Black Magic Woman.” In the post-Green years, the band developed a more ethereal and at times folk-rockish sound and, with the addition of Christine McVie, developed a feminine mystique that would that would really broaden their appeal a few years down the road.

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With a front line of Kirwan, C. McVie and Welch, the group made two excellent albums (1971’s Future Games and 72’s Bare Trees) that certainly set the table for that mega-success to come. Kirwan had a hand in composing about half the material on those records and his maturing writing style on songs like “Woman of 1000 Years” and “Dust” was central to their aesthetic appeal. But like a lot of the people I’ve profiled in this series, Kirwan’s step up from role player to nominal leader didn’t seem a good fit. There were stories of it being a stressful arrangement and Kirwan’s developed a serious drinking problem, leading to bad behavior which alienated him from band members. In the end, Mick Fleetwood was the only one he was still on speaking terms with, if only to let the guitarist know he was out of the band.

Kirwan’s first solo album wasn’t released until 1975, when his Second Chapter came out around the same as Fleetwod Mac, the curiously eponymous LP that was the first to feature the Buckingham-Nicks team. In some ways, Kirwan’s offering was a continuation of his more low-key offerings with his former outfit: thoughtful, melodic, attractively folkish if a tad under-produced. “Ram Jam City” is a sprightly uptempo number to kick things off, but not nearly as driving as its tittle may suggest. The rest of the old side one is an enjoyable set of songs analogous to Nilsson or early 70s Paul McCartney. It’s on the second half that the record deepens and Kirwan’s engaging voice and nimble guitar work are put to best use on songs like “Lovely Days” and “Silver Streams.” An air of melancholy like a premonition has already edged in by the time we get to the beautiful closer “Cascades.”

Danny Kirwan’s second chapter would be an abbreviated one. There would be a few more undervalued solo LPs to follow, while his old band, mining a similar musical vein but with more of that ineffable “It Factor” went mega-platinum. Many have said that if Kirwan’s issues could have been worked out, that his talents would have contributed greatly to the Buckingham-Nicks lineup, even if it would have been a crowded stage. But the vicissitudes of a pop musician’s life are many and often fall unkindly on the more deserving. Kirwan would spend part of the 80s and 90s homeless in London, occasionally being shadowed by tabloid reporters who on at least one occasion made fun of his alcoholism in a news story. Things may have improved some since then but tentative talks about a one-off reunion of early edition Fleetwood Mac (with Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer who, despite life problems of their own, are musically active) don’t hold out much hope that Kirwan can be included. Never say never, but in the meantime, astute and sensitive fans still have Second Chapter as a great Sunday morning listen while wondering what could have been.

Postscript: Alas, there would be no personal or professional redemption for Danny Kirwan, who passed away on June 8, 2018.