Day: November 22, 2017

Three sentence movie reviews: Lady Bird

Good depictions of mother-daughter relationships are hard to come by in film.* That makes this coming-of-age story a rare gem that manages to capture the senior year attempts at growing up, as well as lay the patchwork for the eventual mother-daughter separation.** Ronan & Metcalf are brilliant as the mother-daughter pair, and props also must go to Beanie Feldstein as the stalwart best friend, and Odeya Rush as the vapid rich girl.

Cost: $9.00 (pre-Thanksgiving treat!)
Where watched: Hollywood Theater. My showing sold out. (!!)

*This is partially because of the general absence of women in film, but also because it’s hard to get the nuance of loving someone who also drives you crazy.
**It’s also a very funny film.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2017/lady_bird.html

The Orange Door: Guitarless


In the spring or summer of 1989 my mother drove us to a music shop on Chinden Boulevard, where she paid $40.00 for an acoustic guitar.  (It may have been $60, but for years I’ve called that guitar the Forty Dollar Guitar.)

She bought me the guitar–and also lessons–so that I could be in ninth grade Jazz Band, playing jazz guitar. When it came time to pick who was going to be in Jazz Band, there was another guy who was very good at the guitar and would have made a great addition to the West Junior High Jazz Band. But he refused to take both Concert Band and Jazz Band. I said I would take both, and thus I became the jazz guitarist. This was a terrible idea, as I’m not the kind of person who can go from no knowledge of an instrument to jazz-level competence over a few months.  We placed last at the 1990 Lionel Hampton Chevron Jazz Festival, though I like to think I wasn’t the only cause.

After that failure, I picked up the guitar intermittently.  My musical talent includes learning new instruments quickly, progressing to a certain point of mediocrity, and then going no further.  I played a lot in 1995, when the transition between College Part I and II didn’t go as smoothly as I wanted.  And I made a full push to really learn this guitar, dammit, in 2006, even taking lessons and practicing regularly.  That’s when I bought the current guitar.  That push ended when we bought the house in 2007.

I have fond memories including guitars. There was my introduction to Rise Up Singing, that day at Cottey when Jennifer Comeau got out her guitar and we sang together in the parlor.  The year my boss turned 50, we had a summer plan to assemble a songbook for her 50th birthday party.  Daily, we got out our guitars and worked through songs, getting the song in the best key for singing and the chords in the right place for people to play along with. We used the forty dollar guitar for a couple of years when we sang every day at 10am.  She would play and we both would sing.

And that’s the problem.  I never really took to the guitar.  I think I’m a horizontal musician, not a vertical one.  When you learn chords on the piano, there is a straight line of keys laid out before you, and it’s easy to see how they are formed, and easy to move up or down an octave.  On the guitar, you first learn the pattern your fingers take, then maybe eventually the notes that make up the chord.

Also, with a guitar, when you want to play you have to remove your instrument from a box (or hook, or stand) and fiddle with it to make sure it’s in tune.  When you go to play piano, you just sit down.  For some reason, those extra steps were more of a barrier to practice.

I never got good enough at the guitar so I could play and sing at the same time.  And since I love singing more than guitar playing, it made sense to let the guitar go. Even knowing that, it was hard to do.  I still have the fantasy of an impromptu jam session breaking out in the living room. But it’s been 10 years, and that hasn’t happened yet, so it’s time to let the guitar go.

Here’s to admitting something isn’t going to become my thing.

Bleachers Tiny Desk Concert

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I have the day off, and I’m working on getting the gumption to go work on the side yard project.  To distract myself from that unfinished project, I’m working on the another (endlessly) unfinished project: the Great 2017 Blog Catch Up.  Having written Song of the Ponth posts for October, I was letting the Mountain Goats autoplay while I wrote and edited.  At some point I clicked back and the computer algorithm that YouTube uses suggested a bunch of Tiny Desk Concerts.  And here were Bleachers.  Given how often they’ve been on my song of the month list (either as Bleachers or as one-third of the now-defunct fun.) I clicked.

And what a great Tiny Desk Concert.  I loved the first song a lot. It manages to use saxophone without inducing terrible 80s-pop-song flashbacks.  There’s a funny bit where Jack Antonoff asks, “how often do you do this?” and disappointment or uncertainty flashes over his face when someone answers.

It’s also interesting to see this version of “Don’t Take the Money,” (In contrast to the Tonight Show Version I referenced previously) and to see how he fights to keep up with the drum machine that is coming out of the boombox.  It doesn’t quite work, which, in an era of overproducing music, I quite enjoy.  Stick with it thorough the end of the song and you will get to see a different charming mistake.

For contrast, here’s the album version of the first song, Everybody Lost Somebody.