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Adventure Log Entry 2 Sept 29th – Detroit

Published on October 11, 2010 in Reviews and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Chicago blurring away in our dust!

Day 13 – 9/29/10 After we leave Palatine we drive late into the night and stop at a rest stop in Jackson, Michigan to spend our first night in the back of the van. The van is comfortable and the curtains I hung in the back ward off the blinding semi truck brights. We discover that rest stops make for great places to crash for a good night of sleep and a crappy place to powder your nose in the morning – there’s no hot water! So we make our way to a gas station a few miles away to freshen up and eat breakfast out of the back of the van. Alice calls her step-mom Ellen, who grew up in Detroit, who advises us to check out Cass Street and Forest Ave where she used to live to see a typical Detroit neighborhood. The evidence of a city brought to its peak by the auto industry and then sent crashing down after its withdrawal is all around. We hit Detroit a few hours later and quickly find out that confidence in strangers is a bit lacking here after stopping at three different gas stations to try and find a bathroom, all to no avail.

We stop at Cass Cafe to eat and sit for the majority of the day at the suggestions of Lauren Begent and Seth Walker, another traveling duo that we came to Detroit to meet up with who aren’t able to spend the day with us because they’re in the process of struggling with the Detroit police to get Seth out of jail. You can read more about their encounter with the Detroit po here as well as Seth Walker’s other Facebook notes on the right to travel with out a license, etc.:

READ MORE HERE

Later, we meet up with Seth and Lauren at The Sweet Epiphany Cafe where they’re playing their last feature set after a few weeks in Detroit. Seth and Lauren have been on the road since before the National Poetry Slam in August and have shows booked across the country all the way through February. They’re true gypsies and even teach a workshop on Guerrilla touring. Read more here:

The crowd at Sweet Epiphany is slow to gather and at first it seems like the show is going to be a wash, but eventually a good crowd builds and the MC for the evening, singer-songwriter Deekah, takes the stage with her acoustic guitar and opens up the night with a powerful cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and a handful of her own original compositions. Then the open mic begins and it quickly becomes evident with all of the snapping, hollering, and cheering that this crowd can put out as well as any bar full of drunks. Between performers, DJ Untitled (aka Chris), who invited us out to the show to open for Lauren and Seth and cooked a whole tray of delicious veggie pasta just for us, keeps it bumping and also gets up to the mic to share a few great poems of his own. I’m feeling under the weather, so Ezra fills in for me on the mic, spending a good portion of his 15 minutes doing a capella rap verses, which wins him the crowd. A woman named Maia even jumps up on the mic later to proclaim, “If you buy Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka Flame, and all that other nigga shit you should buy his shit!” (It should probably be noted here that Maia is black.) Ezra loves Lil Wayne, but decides to take it as a compliment, though probably not a good quote to go in his bio. Next is the main event: Seth and Lauren take the stage and deliver an unbelievable show. Lauren rips it up on the violin, playing a few minutes of her own wicked variation of a concerto by Mendelsohnn. Seth brings the entire audience close to tears with show-stopping performances of his pieces “Glowstick Girl” and “A Tree Story.” It’s inspiring to see such a strong performance of pieces that he’s probably been doing three times a week for their whole tour. Afterwards, we have to sneak out early to get on the road – next stop Geneseo, NY!

The 2007 Western 180°

Published on October 23, 2008 in Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I finally saw Andrew Dominik’s much praised film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). This top-notch demonstration of filmmaking, along with two others that also came out in 2007, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, all exhibit a radical shift in the employment of the most American genre of all time, the western.

The western is a story so closely tied into American history that it creates such convoluted lines as to force the critic, and the historian, to ask themselves,” which came first? The western or the ‘American dream’?” Of course, it was not until long after the west had been won that the western started to reign as a film genre, but at that point the story had already been told a million times in the form of pulp fiction novels and commercial landscape painting.

The transparent traits of westerns, such as the anti-hero, glorification and eventual conquest of the wilderness, and strict moral code as supreme law, make this genre immediately identifiable. Consider John Ford’s Stagecoach and its desolate plains subjugated to the powers from the east, or Ford’s My Darling Clementine where the morality of revenge is weight against the morality of corrupt business practices. Revenge wins out. The “American dream” flies its flag high and proud throughout stories such as these.

The “American dream”, an elusive and capitally annoying term, means something different to everyone. No one would dispute that it totes the virtues of the industrial age Material prosperity is democracy! In the western this materialism is translated into expansionism, and a moral code that bends under materialism. The western would tell us that every man (and woman?) has the right to seek happiness though fulfilling his need for stuff.

The three films of 2007, amongst the best of the year, all display these attributes of the classic western. What is unique about them though is that they turn that morality on its head and question defining it by the terms of the “American dream” as specified by the industrial age. Instead, the sentiments of Americans today seep out as readily as blood in these films.

In the The Assassination of Jesse James the titular character lives his life by his own lawless moral code and in old age finds himself depressed and terrified. His life is ended in the most cowardly of fashions by his biggest fan who hates him for not living up to his name. In this allegory James is the American dream, a broken man who fails to attain fulfillment though wealth. One moral code against another (or complete lack there of as seen with the character Anton Chigurh) defines the western aspects of No Country. The entire plot is based around the pursuit of a bag of money in which miles and miles of land are covered, and survived, by the cowboys who conquer it. Lastly, in There Will Be Blood Daniel Plainview finds no solace in the materialism of the avaricious oil industry. Neither does his parallel and archenemy, Eli, in his capitalistic pursuits of religion.

Clearly, the western is a genre that will never die no matter how over done it becomes. To forgo the traditional perception of the American dream as seen in classic westerns is to recreate the genre and breathe life back into it. It is in the just portrayal of society that master story telling resides. In these films that society is one demoralized by materialism, corrupt government, and war.