R.I.P. Ornette Coleman

"It's like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally, like a drummer. That's what Coleman means to me." 

— Charles Mingus, Down Beat, May 26, 1960

"[The day I met Ornette], it was about 90 degrees and he had on an overcoat. I was scared of him."

— Don Cherry, Jazz, December 1963

"[Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz] causes earache the first time through, especially for those new to Coleman's music. The second time, its cacophony lessens and its complex balances and counter-balances begin to take effect. The third time, layer upon layer of pleasing configurations -- rhythmic, melodic, contrapuntal, tonal -- becomes visible. The fourth or fifth listening, one swims readily along, about ten feet down, breathing the music like air."

— Whitney Balliett

***

"How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That's what I try to do with my horn."

— Ornette Coleman, Esquire, December 14, 2009

Coleman with Prime Time on the April 14, 1979, episode of Saturday Night Live

I had no clue what to do with "Lonely Woman," upon popping The Shape of Jazz to Come into my laptop three years ago, but this encounter would not be the last with Ornette Coleman. At the time, I didn't have much choice: I was interning at Milestone Films, writing the press kit (online here, for what it's worth) for a Shirley Clarke gem they unearthed, Ornette: Made in America, and to do my job right I needed to know this man. The more I read about him and by him, the less I, frankly, understood: Here was the pioneer of "harmolodics," a theory whose tenets still elude me; a man who almost voluntarily castrated himself; a reticent genius who lived through stints of violence and poverty without complaint.

All humans are indefinable, I suppose, but Coleman knew that, for him, only jazz could express those multitudes within — just not the jazz of Bird or anyone else he might have heard. His work, from Shape of Jazz to Come to Sound Grammar, sounds unlike any other record of its time, and despite the former's prophetic title, it has not been followed since. Coleman's innovations belong to him, and his son Denardo, and Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins and his other immediate contributors — for a guy who alienated many colleagues ("Are you cats serious?" — Dizzy Gillespie, to Coleman's Quartet), Coleman was a supreme collaborator. I'd say that is what reifies his newness into some of the last century's hippest, finest, most meaningful music. Beyond Coleman's taxed, honest embouchure and unpredictable stops and starts, a song like "The Fifth of Beethoven" pulses with Haden's bass and Ed Blackwell's drums, all players locked in perfect sync if only still deciding where to go. 

I may never know Ornette, the man, but I now know his music, and that's a knowledge to be shared, disputed and studied still. For thinking and living through his art, Ornette Coleman leaves us with an image that will never gloss into stasis, always two notes ahead.

*If you don't already have it, Atlantic reissued Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings in March and it's on Amazon for a steal.

In Memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman

Courtesy of Santi Slade

*Co-written with my friend and fellow Sun editor Sam Bromer*

Philip Seymour Hoffman, a prolific and widely revered character actor whose Oscar-winning role in Capote made him into an unlikely household name, died Sunday in his West Village apartment. The New York Times reports the cause of death was an apparent heroin overdose, the culmination of a tragic relapse of drug abuse that started last year after 23 years of sobriety. He was 46.

A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Hoffman hit the ground running with loud, schlubby, scene-stealing supporting characters. After playing a squirrely classmate alongside Al Pacino in 1992’s Scent of a Woman, Hoffman befriended Paul Thomas Anderson and nailed a four-movie streak in his early films Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. As a gay boom mic operator hopelessly infatuated with Mark Wahlberg’s pornstar in Boogie Nights, Hoffman undercut the free-wheeling, sunny vibe of that film to capture its downbeat core. He aimed for a much different effect in Punch-Drunk Love, where, in his most memorable scene, he shouts, “Shut! Shut! Shut! Shut! Shut Up!” with such syncopated zeal that the clip’s popularity on Internet forums is not hard to fathom. Other early roles include Jeffrey Lebowski’s boastful assistant (“They’re the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers…”) in The Big Lebowski, a spot-on Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, the cultured object of Matt Damon’s lethal envy in The Talented Mr. Ripley and, of course, the slimeball who “sharted” his pants and single-handedly made Along Came Polly something worth watching.

Hoffman began to nudge his way into the mainstream through his riveting portrayal of author Truman Capote. Capote follows the author as he researches a shocking quadruple homicide in Kansas. Hoffman’s effeminate, soft-spoken performance contrasted with his earlier work and earned him several accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. A year later, in 2005, he paved the way for Heath Ledger and other legitimate thespians working in action blockbusters by pulling all the stops as Mission: Impossible III’s terrifying villain. Hoffman received an Supporting Actor nomination at the Academy Awards the following year as a foul-mouthed Greek in Charlie Wilson’s War, a mostly forgettable film buoyed by his in turns hilarious and prescient performance.

After playing an emotionally-crippled history teacher in The Savages, Hoffman took his vows, taking on the role of Father Brendan Flynn, a Bronx priest accused by his parish’s nuns of abusing a young alter boy, in Doubt. Hoffman was a commanding presence in every scene, eliciting sympathy while at the same time drawing the viewer’s disgust; for this role, he received his second consecutive Academy Awards nod. Overlooked by the Academy but not by some influential critics (Roger Ebert named it the best film of the the decade), Synecdoche, New York is a difficult beast, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman at his most reflexive and cryptic. No matter how one makes sense of the plot, at least on first viewing, few fictional characters in this millennium confront our deep-seated fears of death, deterioration and failure like Hoffman’s Caden Cotard. Usually a surreal, highbrow experiment like Synecdoche answers only to the vision of its auteur, but Hoffman pushed through all the obfuscation to unleash something raw and absolutely devastating.

More recently, Hoffman channeled his inner cult-leader in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. The film, a disorienting look at delusion and psychological torment, finds Hoffman as the founder and leader of a philosophical group named “The Cause.” In one scene, Hoffman, portraying Lancaster Dodd, battles with a doubter of his movement, played by the also recently-deceased Christopher Evan Welch. Hoffman’s fury approaches madness as he protects his life’s work — at one point, he calls his opponent a “pig fuck.” Ravenous, unscrupulous and headstrong, Lancaster Dodd presents the actor at his absolute best. Even in his more “commercial” roles, such as his turn as Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Hoffman managed to bring his subtle sense of drama and humor to the forefront. In that film, he manages to keep the viewer fully in the dark about the intentions of Heavensbee, a member of the establishment. Though he is not on the screen for many scenes, his confidence as an actor is clear throughout, whether he is ballroom-dancing with Katniss or orchestrating violence from the Capital.

So, look: We know Philip Seymour Hoffman was only an actor, belonging to a different class of celebrity than, say, Nelson Mandela. Our culture tends to holds its famous faces in too-high regard, equally eager to rip them apart at the scent of the slightest wrong. Hoffman earned his reputation through his work alone. He kept his private life private, and it seemed like he could not care less about the awards his peers showered over him. His premature passing only affects those who know him, but the incredible thing is that we number in the millions. He realized some of the most complicated characters in recent cinema beyond their originator’s wildest dreams, guaranteeing we will return to formidable epics like Synecdoche and The Master for years to come. He smuggled real quality into the mainstream. There, here, we mourn the passing of a name, a voice, a face that, together, formed an icon of quality and promised something greater than mere entertainment.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Here's to You, Lou

Courtesy of Santi Slade and Zander Abranowicz

There is a point in every music lover’s life when things get ugly. Dissonance, atonality and heavy, dirty subject matter assault your ears and your precious illusion that all music is supposed to sound nice and pretty and easy to dance to. It’s how you react to this challenging aesthetic that defines your relationship with music: Stick with the old for the comfort you see as its mission to provide, or sneak toward this abrasive yet alluring New?

More than anyone over the past half century, Lou Reed, who passed away Sunday at the too-young age of 71 years, turned us onto this other side of music. Before him stands Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and in his wake, we have Johnny Rotten and Tom Waits. Sometimes I would rather listen to Waits than The Velvet Underground, the immortal rock band Reed fronted with John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. Hell, most of the time I’d take “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or “Get Lucky” over the both of them. But I love Lou Reed most of all for exposing me and so many others to music’s oft-guarded potential as art, and for making that discovery so immediate, delirious and fun.

It was mid-2006. My family had lived in Weston, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, for about a year, with the three-part crescendo of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma still on our minds. Put it on our storm shutters, luck or my privileged naivety, but the storms didn’t bother me too much. In fact, they brought on a sort of rush, an awareness of the world’s capabilities for entropic destruction cushioned by the sense that this awareness was always on the cusp of my knowing. In some perverse way, bearing first-hand witness to nature’s fiercest work affirmed a long-dormant feeling that the world was unpredictable and strong and violent. It was the perfect time to discover The Velvet Underground.

Rolling Stone had recently republished “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in book form, and for all the complaints I charge that list with today (No Pixies or Radiohead in the Top 100? No Guided by Voices at all?), it was a perfect primer for middle school me. Before I flipped to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, what caught my eye was Andy Warhol’s taunting cover art for The Velvet Underground & Nico. “The Velvet Underground … ‘heroin’ … hmmm … this does not look like it should have a banana on it.” And so the art of irony entered my life, where it has stayed. When I biked over to the library to check out this album and burn it on my dad’s computer — six stars, GTA-style — I was riding some waves, let me tell you. All that before I even listened to a song.

What can I say about the music? It threw me off, at first, as the delicate xylophone from “Sunday Morning” came in and I thought, shit, this might actually be some kiddie music with a stupid banana on it. But if The Velvet Underground teaches you anything, it teaches you patience: just relax, the music will sort itself out and, if it doesn’t, you better sort yourself out, man. Layers of instruments and reverb coat this psychedelic track, lulling you into comfy complacency until — DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA. Are those pianos? Really? I’ve heard of the Wall of Sound but this thing is a freight train. The aggressive opening to “I’m Waiting for the Man” throws you for a loop before Reed’s unflappable voice comes in, as he sings about the “26 dollars in my hand” to buy smack from an “always late” dealer who “wore shoes and a big straw hat.” What a delicious look at the grit of not just drugs but of the New York from Midnight Cowboy. Reed embodied in his fashion, character and art the spirit of Gotham you can’t touch today. Bless Laurie Anderson — Reed’s wife and a respected artist of her own — for sticking with him.

His music felt too close for comfort, as if it violated your conceptions of how the medium that gave us Schubert’s “Ave Maria” was supposed to work. It’s life-changing stuff. “Heroin,” the centerpiece on The Velvet Underground & Nico, slunk in and scratched at my core. Here is a song that lets melody drop in and out, fall out of sync with rhythm and just push ahead into pure chaos. It hits you in the gut with lived-in experience, with the sensations of heroin use that Reed and Cale were gracious enough to convey through music so some suburban kid can hear and feel how the other half lives (I don’t think that was their intention). Reed’s cool “Ha!” after “When the heroin is in my blood” in the last verse always haunted me the most, as I realized that this was not some P.S.A. about the ills of drugs. He let us know he enjoyed what he did, even as it ravaged him with the fury of Cale’s screeching electric viola.

To rattle off a few other Reed masterpieces: “White Light/White Heat,” which presaged The Stooges and all of punk; “Sister Ray,” a 17-minute opus where organ solos sound like amp feedback and vice versa; “Sweet Jane,” where, out of nowhere, he sexes up the bourgeoisie; “Walk on the Wild Side,” a sparse, spacy ditty that sounds to me like what e.e. cummings would make if he was a rock star; “Satellite of Love,” where he recognizes his voice is so smooth that he pretty much just talks the lyrics, leaving David Bowie to do the belting. Then you have Berlin, a rough, sad rock opera that has long fought for recognition; Metal Machine Music, over an hour of just noise; and Lulu, his loathsome collaboration with Metallica, where you can hardly hear his voice.

Lou Reed may not have been at the peak of his career when he passed but I always loved how he still managed to so relentlessly troll the scene. He was pure id, although he sure had one big ego. “It’s maybe the best thing done by anyone, ever. It could create another planetary system. I’m not joking, and I’m not being egotistical,” Reed said in regards to Lulu.

What an asshole. But we nearly bought it, now didn’t we? After all, he promised nothing that he did not already deliver before.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Remembering Roger Ebert

Courtesy of Nils Axen

I write these words on Sunday, about 72 hours after the news broke, and it will take around the same amount of time for this finished column to find its way into the paper you are holding or the website you are browsing. Six days is an eternity in the world of op-eds, but it’s barely enough time to process the New York Times alert that lit up my phone Thursday afternoon: “Roger Ebert, Longtime Film Critic, Dies at 70, Chicago Sun-Times Reports.” I was just starting to study for an accounting prelim I had later that evening, and it’s putting it lightly to say that I was in no mood to hit the books. For many of us, this is a celebrity death without precedent.

President Barack Obama summed up Roger’s legacy in an official White House press release, surely the first for any late movie critic: “For a generation of Americans … Roger was the movies.” While I would amend the statement by making “generation” plural, the essence remains true. Roger changed how we, the general public, went to the movies. Watching movies was no longer sufficient — you had to think about, talk about, even yell about them, as he and Gene Siskel did on TV for over 20 years. Their passion exposed art house, independent and foreign films to a worldwide audience, and Roger’s accessible reviews provided a roadmap for all those who felt in over their head. For Roger, insight did not require obfuscation, and elitism did not equal good taste. Star Wars and Indiana Jones were not below consideration, for they were and are treasures of cinema alongside Badlands, Nosferatu and Vivre Sa Vie.

These disparate films all met Roger’s strongest writing in The Great Movies, a series that has filled three published books and might furnish a posthumous fourth. Moving past his famous “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system and the legendary one-liners he hurled at trash like Armageddon, we find Roger to be a critic of great nuance and optimism. In The Great Movies, he took a magnifying glass and a mirror to classics and hidden gems alike. He would scrutinize a scene’s composition and lighting in one paragraph and reflect on themes like death (Gates of Heaven), existence (Persona) and greatness (Amadeus) in the next. Even as he broke down the most confounding films, his words remained personal, brilliant and unpretentious. Look no further than his essays on The Tree of Life, 2001: A Space Odyssey and La Dolce Vita, three favorite films of his that now align with my own. It was his praise that inspired me to see them, think about them, see them again and purchase their posters that now stare at me from the walls of my room.

Then you have his more recent reviews, like his write-up on Synecdoche, New York, which might as well be the most beautiful piece of film criticism ever written (and which I shamelessly ripped off for my Perks of Being a Wallflower review last year). On his blog, he talked politics, love, science, religion, memory — everything, really. These themes carried over to his bustling Facebook and Twitter accounts, platforms not accustomed to Roger’s sincerity and original wit. (A memorable tweet: “To a friend uncertain about moving: Every city you move to already contains friends of a lifetime you have not yet met.”) Staunchly liberal yet disdainful of political correctness, Roger adhered to no rules but his own, which he always admitted were subject to change. His words were not some Holy Truth so much as true — to himself, his feelings and his engaged and unironic worldview. What other public figure won his fame and fortune through honesty, levelheadedness and common sense?

I regret never meeting Roger, a man I knew so well. My mom reminded me over spring break to reach out to Roger and express my gratitude, but after a halfhearted attempt at finding his email address, I abandoned this simple task. What would I even say? Besides, I will graduate in a couple years, and then I can make movies or write about them with Roger as a peer, though certainly not an equal. And, before that, I will find the time to go to his annual Ebertfest, at least, when it doesn’t conflict with school…

So, yeah. This loss cuts deep. Roger ignited my love for the movies. Roger tackled the issues of his time, and all time. Roger inspired the world in his open struggle with cancer. Roger loved Chaz, his wonderful wife. Roger was a presence. It is fitting that he titled his last blog, published two days before his death, “A Leave of Presence.” In it, he announced the return of his cancer, his resignation from day-to-day reviewing duties but also his excitement “to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.” I had the bitter fortune of reading it the day before he died, and I left a comment that ended with the note, “I look forward to sharing many more movie-watching years with your prose guiding the way.”

In retrospect, I realize that “years” was pushing it, considering his ailments. Then again, I consider the blog’s last line, the words he might have known he was parting us with: “I’ll see you at the movies.” If he meant what I think he meant, then, Roger, I’ve been seeing you for years.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Tony Scott: Action Architect

The sad and untimely death of Tony Scott, a director who continually raised the bar for blockbusters since the early 1980s, will confuse his fans for years and those closest to him for even longer. The New York Times reported that Scott jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge over Los Angeles Harbor at about 12:30 local time Sunday afternoon. Authorities have found a suicide note and all signs point to such a conclusion.

I did not know the man but those who did, colleagues like director Duncan Jones (Source Code) and actor David Krumholtz (Numb3rs), took to Twitter and described him as a “warm,” “lovely” and “rambunctious cinematic spirit.” Tony Scott’s death saddens those of us who enjoyed his prolific output of quality entertainment. Stranger yet, his final choice stands at odds with the optimistic energy consistent throughout his work.

His older brother, Ridley, claims icon status for cinematic heavies like Alien, Gladiator and Blade Runner. Tony’s filmography commanded less critical acclaim but reeled in equal if not, by some measurements, greater commercial success. Top Gun, his biggest hit, ruled 1986, cementing Tom Cruise as an official movie star and spawning an immortal quote — “I feel the need … the need for speed!” — scrawled on vintage T-shirts and the most successful racing video game franchise in the world. The phrase “crowd-pleasing blockbuster” that we now bestow upon witty and slickly choreographed summer fare like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man was in large part defined by Scott’s work.

Many obituaries yesterday started with ‘Top Gun Director’ in the headline, which makes sense since it made the most money of Scott’s films and occupies a [rather large] spot on the ’80s pop culture tapestry. College-age observers (very likely you) have little connection with Top Gun, Scott’s other Tom Cruise flick, Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout or even Beverly Hills Cop II. Most of us can recall his kinetic output since the late ’90s, with Brad Pitt in Spy Game, Keira Knightley in Domino and Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Denzel Washington was clearly Scott’s go-to actor; the pair honed a formula with Washington as the conflicted but always sympathetic lead against Scott’s stunning set pieces and steady firepower. See Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Deja Vu, Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Unstoppable. They told thrilling stories with human characters and boasted Hollywood’s greatest action scenes.

True Romance will likely solidify as Scott’s most memorable accomplishment. While one of his least profitable movies, the 1993 crime film is constantly revisited because of its script, written by a young Quentin Tarantino, hot off the heels of Reservoir Dogs. I watched it for the first time this summer and was struck by how Scott molded the violent screenplay with a genuine sincerity absent from Tarantino’s darkly ironic films. There are two famous bedroom brawls — one, a fistfight between Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini, and, two, a full-scale shootout between basically the entire cast. They each cut shot-after-shot with that effortless logic natural to Scott while affectively reflecting on all the human carnage. Shots of colleagues, friends and lovers bleeding next to each other — whether physically so or effectively through cross-cutting — punctuate the destruction and convey a tinge of loss that adds a third dimension to the zany bloodfest. It is not a stretch to think of Scott as a romantic; he threw his many characters into such extreme circumstances and always ended on a happy note, as if to assure us no evil can vanquish good.

So the necessity to reflect on his life, at this time and under these circumstances, shocks me still. Suicide is the most personal decision one can make, so no one will ever know the extent of torment that drove him to that bridge. Why would we want to, anyway? Scott already won the respect of his colleagues and millions of moviegoers. It is safe to consider Tony Scott one of the great masters of his craft; the others who come to mind are Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones), James Cameron (Terminator), John McTiernan (Die Hard) and John Woo (Face/Off). They create entertainment with the intent of pleasing the audience. Clarity of subject and technical precision rule every shot. And, for Scott at least, there was a heart beating beneath it all.

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.