Paula Cole and fellow musicians take a bow at City Winery
I had good intentions for my third day in New York, but only one of those come to fruition. Due to the ongoing effects of jet lag, I only got four and a half hours sleep the previous night, and I was in no shape to hit the streets of the city. By midday I was back in bed, and thankfully caught up on much of the sleep I missed out on during the night. I was up and about again by five in the afternoon, and felt more than ready to attend my first major gig of the visit--Paula Cole at City Winery.
I have dubbed this visit, my New York City Art & Music Tour, due to the numerous gigs I have pre-booked, and also due to the memberships I have taken out with the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum. You can expect therefore plenty of art and gig reviews in subsequent posts. But on to Paula Cole.
Paula Cole was performing a selection of music by John Lennon and Joni Mitchell, which I take is a departure from doing her own material. Cole first came to my attention when I saw her performing as the back up singer for Peter Gabriel during his ‘Secret World’ concert tour. I should point out that I did not actually attend any of those shows, I had seen a clip on an Australian late night music show called Rage, which was taken from the DVD of the tour.
Last night's show was a delight from beginning to end. Paula performed with a three piece ensemble before a very appreciative audience. Unfortunately I didn't quite get all the names of the musicians, but Max Weinstein was on drums. The young guitarist's name sounded like Milay Sohar, but my spelling of his name is more of a guess than anything, and I completely missed the bass players name. Sorry about that gentlemen. Towards the end of the show she introduced Janie Barnett, a fellow singer who added extra backing vocals to Joni Mitchell's Free Man In Paris, and Big Yellow Taxi, as well as to John Lennon's Instant Karma.
Paula Cole was in great form, and she sang Joni Mitchell songs with the voice of the 40-year-old Joni. These songs were pitch perfect, and if you closed your eyes you may well have thought that Joni Mitchell herself was on stage. Her interpretations of John Lennon's best loved songs was also great to hear. I thought her selection of Lennon's very personal song, Mother was a very brave choice by Paula, and while I'm not sure she pulled it off as well as she would have liked, it certainly kept me riveted to my seat to see how she would approach it.
The night started off slowly and quietly with Joni Mitchell's Blue and Night Ride Home, and continued in a muted tone with Lennon's Love, Julia, and another Joni Mitchell song Little Green, about the daughter she gave up for adoption very early in her career. The show really hit its straps when Paula and the band ripped into Lennon's, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and Come Together.
Here's the full set list:
====================
Blue (Mitchell)
A Case Of You (Mitchell)
Love (Lennon)
Julia (Lennon)
Little Green (Mitchell)
Mother (Lennon)
Beautiful Boy (Lennon)
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Lennon)
Come Together (Lennon)
Night Ride Home/Give Peace a Chance (Mitchell/Lennon)
Strawberry Fields (Lennon)
Free Man In Paris (Mitchell)
Big Yellow Taxi (Mitchell)
Instant Karma (Lennon)
[Encore]
Across The Universe (Lennon)
Both Sides Now (Mitchell)
Imagine (Lennon)
My apologies to Lennon & McCartney for stealing their song title and hacking it to suit my purposes, but here I am again, three days into a three month extended stay in America -- most of which I will spend in New York City. The trip from Australia to New York went smoothly enough, but after 32 hours of air travel, extended transit stops and time spent traveling between accommodations and airports, you can be sure I was more than happy to collapse into bed once I arrived at the Washington Heights apartment at which I will be staying.
I spent the first day close to home base, and did little more than walk to a local AT&T store where I swapped my Australian SIM card for an AT&T GoPhone SIM ($54.43). This gives me unlimited data (6Gb high speed/shaped after that), as well as unlimited local and international phone calls each month.
I had dinner (quesadilla and a beer; $22.00) at my local 'go to' nosh house, the Hudson View Restaurant at the corner of 181st and Fort Washington Avenue, before finishing my day with some grocery shopping ($78.17) at Frank's Gourmet Market on W 187th street -- though I'm not too sure about the 'Gourmet' designation. Now that I think of it, the Hudson View does not exactly live up to its name either, but I guess that's marketing for you.
Marsden Hartley’s Maine @ The Met Breuer
The following day, Sunday, after buying an MTA Pass ($121.00) giving me unlimited travel for the next 30 days, I rode an M4 bus as far as East 75th street, and went to the Met Breuer to see the Marsden Hartley exhibition that finished that same day. It was a large collection from this American artist who spent his final years in his home state, Maine -- hence the title of the show, Marsden Hartley's Maine.
The exhibition featured many oil paintings and a smattering of other media from this local artist. I myself had never heard of Hartley until I read about him on the Met Museum website in preparation for this visit. For the most part I found his work engaging, with its strong masculine themes, bold and colorful flourishes, and dark, foreboding land and seascapes.
Here are a few images from the exhibition and the location:
Entrance and ticketing counter
Marsden Hartley's Maine (Note: exhibition now closed)
Above: The Lighthouse; Marsden Hartley
Above: Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Above: Flaming American (Swim Champ); Marsden Hartley.
Above: Lobster Fishermen
Knotting Rope; Marsden Hartley.
Above: Information panels.
Above: The Wave; Marsden Hartley
The Met Breuer
Corner E 75th & Madison Avenue
*Prices: Students, $12; Senior $17; Adult $25 ; children under 12 free
*Suggested prices only.
Dear Reader, you may notice strange formatting for this and subsequent blog posts. Sadly, using my aging iPad 2 to update this blog is not turning out to be the exciting and innovative experience I was hoping it would be. However, under the circumstances, right now it is the best I can do.
One of the great things about music, any genre of music, is its ability to cross boundaries, breaking down walls, prejudices, and long-held misperceptions about other cultures as it goes. Today I am featuring three videos from performers who are working across genres mashing up traditional instruments with contemporary rock tunes. I love the hybrid sound that results from these performances. It makes me realise that there are many ways of approaching traditional instruments and many ways too, or reinterpreting songs that have become classics in their original form.
In the videos below, Stary Olsa, are a group out of Belorussia, who play a mix of traditional and contemporary music on medieval instruments, many of which they have made themselves. They cover Metallica’s song, One. Meanwhile the young Korean gayageum player, Luna Lee, performs and instrumental version of B.B. King’s, The Thrill Is Gone. Lee has been garnering much attention for her reworking of many modern rock and blues songs, and has even appeared at a SXSW Showcase. My third selection features the American mountain dulcimer player, Sam Edelstein playing one of the first big hits for the Rolling Stones, their 1966 classic, 19th Nervous Breakdown. Sam lives in Connecticut, and has won awards for his dulcimer playing.
I don’t know if the original bands or musicians have seen these videos, and if they have, what they think about them, but I’d like to think they are more than happy with the musicians below who have found ways to reimagine the original songs and share their interpretations with the rest of the music world.
Stary Olsa (Medieval Instruments): One, by Metallica
Stary Olsa, first came to my attention last year after I saw their very successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. The group, from Belorussia, had set a goal of $7000 to fund an album of rock songs performed on traditional Medieval instruments. The campaign was so successful (they raised $29,890), that Stary Olsa were also able to undertake their first tour of the United States.
Stary Olsa have also covered AC/DCs Highway To Hell, Deep Purple’s Child In Time, and many other contemporary rocks songs, many of which were released on their 12th studio album—the one funded by their Kickstarter.
Here are Stary Olsa performing Metallica’s One, on the Belarusian television show Legends:
Luna Lee (Korean Gayageum): The Thrill Is Gone, by B.B. King
I don’t know how old the Korean performer, Luna Lee is, but she looks too young to be playing the traditional Asian instrument called a gayageum so expertly and fluidly. Clearly she has been learning the instrument since she was a young child.
Luna Lee has filmed many videos of herself reinterpreting a wide range of contemporary rock music, as well as classic blues songs. Looking at the many videos on her YouTube channel, it is obvious that she, or someone in her inner circle of support, is very adept at producing quite complex video productions which often include multiple windows when she multitracks on numerous songs. Here is Luna Lee performing to a backing track, B.B. King’s The Thrill Is Gone:
Sam Edelstein (Mountain Dulcimer): 19th Nervous Breakdown, by The Rolling Stones)
To quote directly from Sam Edelstein’s Facebook page:
I believe that dulcimers are among the world's coolest musical instruments. People deserve to know about dulcimers, the way that people already know about harmonicas, ukuleles, and xylophones (to name a few examples).
Even though dulcimers are used primarily for folk music here in the US, they're great for many other kinds of music. In fact, they're natural rock & roll instruments. (Cyndi Lauper and Joni Mitchell perform on mountain dulcimer, and I once saw one in a Rolling Stones exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!)
I believe in exposing people to interesting and surprising music on dulcimers.
I have just spent an hour or two going through thousands of images stored in my Google Photos Cloud account. Some of these go back to 2011.
Now, if you are a traveller like me and travel light, which in my case means with an iPad, and you automatically backup up photos and other documents to the ‘cloud’, you will know how useful this feature can be. Having access to images, documents and other files stored in the cloud, no matter how far away you may be from home, is fast becoming an essential service for the convenience it offers to travellers of all descriptions—especially tourists and business people.
I’m a good example. For instance, I always take screenshots of receipts, concert tickets, booking information, flight itineraries, and sometimes even screenshots of information when I am online checking my bank statements. Of course I always try to remember to delete the most personal information after I have made use of it (Of course you do, Jim!)
HOWEVER!
On reviewing the photos and screenshots in my Google Photos account today, I was shocked to find all sorts of personal information, such as passwords, bank statements, credit card numbers, passport details, security codes, my home address, email accounts, and much more ‘safely’ backed up to the Cloud.
The implications of this are obvious. We assume that these types of backup services are safe and secure from hackers and snoopers, and that may very well be the case. But if I had lost, or had my smartphone or iPad stolen, an enterprising and knowledgable person would find it simple enough to scroll through my Google Photos account on the off chance that personal information had found its way there. And in my case, they would have found plenty!
“But wait,” you say, “Surely everyone needs an email address and passwords to sign into their online accounts.”
Well, yes, but the helpful engineers at Google have a solution for that. They have designed their software to automatically save our sign-in details (after asking permission first), thus make the log-in process quick and painless, and if you are anything like me, you will have happily agreed to this time saving feature. Needless to say, any enterprising snooper will also be grateful to you for implementing these shortcuts!
One way of protecting ourselves from this type of deliberate or even inadvertent snooping is to log out of every application after we have finished using it. But of course, we all know how irritating it is to log into a service every time we want to access it.
So what’s a hard-pressed traveller to do?
Screenshot of files backed up to Google Drive
Well, you could disable all automatic backups to your cloud service providers, but that is not always the ideal option. If you do continue to use cloud services, the smart thing to do is make sure you sign out of your accounts like Google (and all other apps and programs) once you have finished doing whatever it was you were engaged in at the time. This is a better option than not using backup services at all. And if you can’t be bothered doing even that, then for goodness sake, at least check the files and photos stored with your cloud service provider on a regular basis, and delete those files that contain your personal notes, documents, screenshots and other private information.
While you are at it, check through Google Drive, the other Cloud backup service that may be storing important documents and information you would rather not share with the rest of the world.
And when you have finished doing that, you may also need to check your Dropbox and Apple iCloud accounts, or any other of the dozens of backup services now available, which is exactly what I am going to do now.
Well, it has taken me much longer than anticipated, but recently I finally caught up with Martin Scorsese’s latest epic, Silence. A quick online search reveals that the film has elicited mixed reviews from a wide range of viewers—both regular filmgoers and film critics—so today I thought I would add my own two cents worth to the discussion. But first, a brief synopsis:
In 17th Century, two Portuguese Jesuit priests Garupe (Adam Driver), and Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), travel to Japan in search of their mentor and teacher, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). The Catholic Church has lost touch with Ferreira, and what is worse, rumour has it that while under duress, Ferreira has committed apostasy (that is, renounced his religious beliefs).
This is the third major film from Martin Scorsese that examines aspects of different religions. The first was his 1988 adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the second was the 1997 film Kundun, which is based on the life and writings of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Of course, if you have been following Scorsese’s career from the beginning, you might remember the open scenes of his breakthrough film Mean Streets (1973), which begins with Harvey Keitel’s character, Charlie, in church holding his hand over a burning candle, while ruminating on Catholic guilt and redemption, a theme that crops up throughout the film. But back to Silence.
The two young priests refuse to believe that Father Ferreira’s apostasy was due to the torture and abuse he received at the hands of his Japanese authorities. They are convinced that their mentor would never apostatise no matter how severe the suffering he was forced to undergo. Firmly convicted of this belief, the two men make the perilous journey to Japan to search for Ferreira and to continue spreading the Catholic view of the Gospels to the Japanese peasants they encounter.
Things progress well enough for a while, but with the Japanese authorities closing in on their hiding place, the two priests separate in the hope they might evade their pursuers at least for a while longer. At this point in the film Adam Driver/Garupe disappears for pretty much the rest of the movie and attention is focused on Andrew Garfield/Rodrigues.
A powerful moment between Andrew Garfield/Rodrigues and a villager played by Shin'ya Tsukamoto.
To begin with, I was not convinced that Andrew Garfield—who carried two-thirds of the film on his shoulders—was up to the task, but as the film progressed, I was drawn further and further into what became a very powerful, and believable performance. Of course, he is soon captured by the authorities and before long his own faith is tested in ways that he (and we the audience), never imagined possible.
To my surprise, apart from the opening scenes filmed in the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Macau, China, the rest of the film shoot took place on various locations on the island of Taiwan. The cinematography is stunning throughout, and as you might expect from a master storyteller like Scorsese, he is in complete control of his actors and the story he wants to tell.
Since I am not a practising (or lapsed Catholic), and indeed since I hold no religious affiliations whatsoever, I did feel somewhat removed from the emotional heart of this film. I was certainly able to appreciate the film on an intellectual level, but at certain points during the film I could not escape the voice in my head that insisted on reminding me about the cultural imperialism of the Catholic Church, and its often brutal proselytising among other cultures that were, and have been perfectly happy with their own homegrown religious practices. Of course, this ‘going out into the world to convert the heathen’ was not confined to the Catholic Church. The proselytising of today’s Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and representatives of other faiths shows that while the language may be different, the aims are still the same.
The wonderful Issei Ogata in his role as the old samurai.
However there are other lessons to engage the non-believer and agnostic in Silence. Reflecting on the film and the nature of belief, I couldn't help thinking about the current crisis plaguing Europe and other parts of the Western world. I am referring to the rise of Islamic extremism, and the ongoing ‘war on terror’ that Western governments and their extensive security forces, are no closer to winning today than they were following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or for that matter since the terrorist attacks on New York City, and elsewhere in America on September 11, 2001.
It seems to me that just as the Jesuit priests of the 17th Century were prepared to face the harshest conditions imaginable, as well as the trials and tribulations meted out to them by local authorities intent on protecting their own positions of power, so too are the foot-soldiers of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Moro Islamists in the Philippines, Indonesia’s Jemaah lslamiyah, and other murderous Islamic splinter groups.
It also seems to me that just as the Jesuit priests in Silence refused to renounce their faith in the Catholic Church and their God, so too are hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists confined to prison systems around the world refusing to renounce their own beliefs and faith in the tenets of Islam, as interpreted by their local religious leaders. Should we be surprised at their dedication to their various causes? Should we applaud the commitment to their faith? Or should we inflict so much suffering and pain on them that they are forced to recant and deny their own Gods?
And yes, dear reader, I am well aware that the vast majority of the world’s Christians are not strapping suicide vests to themselves and blowing up concert goers in Manchester and Paris, or gunning down diners relaxing in restaurants and cafés, or driving cars and trucks at high speed through suburban streets running down pedestrians. However, I am also aware that a study of Christianity reveals a history of murderous inquisitions, bloody Crusades, and death by stoning, beheading, fire and more.
A still from the crucifixion scene.
While it may seem that I have trodden a path well away from the one I started out on, that is, a review of the film, Silence, I am not so sure. After all, the film explores the nature of faith, belief and God, and the consequences of sticking to those beliefs—or not as the case may be—no matter what. It should be said that the film also examines the nature of love, betrayal and forgiveness.
Despite its length (160 minutes), Silence is a film that can bear repeated viewings, not only for the excellent acting, stunning locations and beautiful cinematography, but also for the opportunity it gives the viewer for reflection and contemplation. There is much to appreciate in Silence, and I am delighted that I had a chance to see the film in a cinema with a big screen, which allowed me to appreciate its scope and grandeur even more.
If you haven’t seen the film, here is the official trailer to help wet your appetite.
