Author: BeatrixKiddo

In Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s new movie “Birdman,” Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a washed up actor who had played the flying superhero ‘Birdman’ three times and refused another sequel, only to watch his career fade and disintegrate over the years. Although Iñárritu insists that the story is intended as a reflection on his own insecurities, the casting is seems far too referential to be coincidental –  Keaton, of course, played Batman twice and, largely disappeared from movies after turning down a third installment.

We find Thomson backstage, scrambling to prepare for the premiere of his first Broadway play, which he has written (adapted from Raymond Chandler’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,”) and is directing and starring in. For Thompson, this is a last ditch attempt at legitimacy and relevance, an effort to salvage his sadly diminished reputation (“I’m a trivial pursuit card,” he moans) by establishing himself on the stage.

The deep mess of Thompson’s personal life is quickly revealed through interactions with his cast and crew as they clamber to prepare for the three opening previews: his girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough) reveals that she is pregnant, his ex-wife visits and makes tragicomic, regretful allusions to their chaotic shared history, his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) has recently emerged from rehab and works as his sulky assistant, her presence serving as a frustrated living rejoinder to her father’s self-centered career obsession.

Meanwhile, a falling light fixture immediately knocks out Thompson’s bumbling lead actor, and he must replace him with the conceited but talented Broadway star and method actor Mike Shiner (a brilliantly overbearing Edward Norton), whose histrionics threaten to derail both the show and his relationship with the lead actress (Naomi Watts).

While the camera weaves through the labyrinthine backstage (a set artificially crafted on a soundstage to make the halls appear narrower and more claustrophobic), catching glimpses of the increasingly entangled cast arguing, flirting, smoking and rehearsing, the frazzled Thomson retreats to his sparse dressing room, where he monologues to himself in the disembodied voice of Birdman, levitates, and moves objects with his mind (generally to smash them). “Birdman” never decides whether Thompson’s powers are ‘real,’ even as our hero eventually flies through the city streets and conjures up blockbuster style explosions with crazed despair/delight. The surreal conceit works largely because Keaton’s intense, personal performance anchors us to the fantastic: Keaton’s Thompson is by turns brokenly self-reflective and fiercely manic, both burned out and crazily sustained by the mission to perform.

Much like the occasional fantastic departures from reality in Louis C.K.’s Louis, whether or not we think the fantastical moments in Birdman are taking place in Thompson’s psyche or actually happening, we follow because we understand how the preoccupied mind can inadvertently project itself outwards, how weirdly personal the world can get when we accidentally experience it through the lenses of our own consuming inner messes. At one point, as Thompson stumbles drunkenly down the city street, the homeless man who has been ranting about God in the background turns to Thompson as he passes and makes the plea of an auditioning actor – did that sound good? Should I try it differently?

Though “Birdman” explores deeply personal themes (aging, relevance, legitimacy of different art forms, parenthood), it does so with a flashy stylistic melding of the theatrical and cinematic: in constant motion, the camera follows the cast through the theater hallways in a series of lengthy, carefully staged and choreographed takes, which Iñárritu has spliced together through a mix of clever editing and CGI to create the illusion of a single, long take. The style isn’t just an impressive gimmick –  the perpetual motion of camera and actors creates a rattled, exhilarating energy, while quietly evoking the foreboding feeling that Thompson has lost control of his personal life and his art. Antonio Sanchez’s excellent, sharp percussive score keeps the feverish energy up as the show’s previews go comically wrong, conflicts between characters come to a head only to get weirder, and the narrative practically spirals towards opening night.

By the time I exited the theater I was wound up and mildly exhausted, but also soothed by the lingering, poignant catharsis that  comes from watching a truly great comedy. It’s a serious feeling, mostly because it’s one of the basic bummers of being human that we’re going to be periodically, upsettingly disrupted from the necessary assumption that we are Important by the basic suspicion that life might just be completely ridiculous. “Birdman,” centers around this deep, tragic need to be important, acknowledging that we are ridiculous but endearingly so, invoking serious empathy with the flailing ex-superhero, making us laugh.

I first heard about Charles Bradley about a week before I saw him at the Blind Pig, when I discovered a youtube video of Bradley performing the song ‘Why is It so Hard’ with the Menahan Street Band. The sweat beads on the perfomer’s face as he belts about the hardships of trying to make it in America, his powerful voice channeling pastgospel and soul legends. Born in Gainesville Florida, Bradley ran away from home at the age of fourteen due to poor living conditions, and lived on the streets for two years until enlisting in the job corps and training as a chef. A recently released documentary  on Bradley’s life, called ‘Soul of America,’ follows Bradley’s story, describing how he endured extreme poverty, life-threatening illness, and the murder of his brother. In 1997, after moving back in with his mother in Brooklyn, Bradley began moonlighting as a James Brown impersonator under the moniker ‘Black Velvet’ in local clubs and bars, where until he was discovered and signed by Daptone Recodrs. Daptone is a label known for their retro-soul revivalism, signing and producing artists who celebrate the feel of funk and soul music from the 1960s and 1970s (such as the renowned Sharon Jones). Since his discovery, Bradley has worked with The Menahan Street Band, releasing several songs co-written by guitarist Tom Brenneck on Bradley’s debut album in 2011.

This past Thursday, Bradley played at Ann Arbor’s The Blind Pig with a seven piece backing band billed as his ‘Extraordinaires.’ Bradley arrived onstage after enthusiastic keyboardist MC appropriately hyped the crowd, and burst into an hour and a half long set.

The Extraordinaries consisted of a tenor saxophone and a trumpeter, who exhibited their restrained yet synchronized dance moves while generally leading the band, an enthusiastic funk keyboardist, who MC’d while Bradley exited for a costume change, and a typically languid drummer and subdued bassist exchanged meaningful nods with each other, and two guitarists. The band was tight and high energy, with the outstanding horn section dominating the backups in the style of Sharon Jones’s backing band “The Dap-Kings’. Bradley himself appeared older and smaller in stature than in the videos I had seen, but he gave a highly energetic performance, complete with dance moves and outfits that he may have retained from his James Brown impersonation. But while his stage presence was dynamic, Bradley’s voice was truly the star of the show, a force of nature whose sheer soul and power has led critics to compare Bradley to Curtis Mayfield and Al Green. Bradley’s voice was was powerful in the small venue, and he interspersed songs with some with abbreviated story-telling, occasionally declaring – gospel-style, while the bass and drums still pulsed at an instrumental break– that we were not his fans but his brothers and sisters, or urging us to all find true love. He seemed truly connected to the audience, touched by the screams and cheers of the packed venue, and the fans reciprocated, reaching out to touch the singer, shake his hand, and exchange words.

The performance was dynamic, high-energy, and touching. The first song I heard of Bradley’s, Why is It So Hard, was also the singer’s encore performance. Though I had interpreted the song as a response to the hollow reality of the American Dream, or an ode to the traumas of Bradley’s life, the energy behind his delivery was overwhelmingly positive.

The show ended when Bradley spontaneously jumped off the stage and into the crowd, the Extraordinaires pounding out the chorus as the divo made his way towards the back of the venue, hugging fans and shaking hands.

For me, the spring progression towards the end of school – this time of year –has always kind of felt like falling off a cliff. At the same time that you’re cramming desperately for exams, you suddenly start remembering that school is not necessarily the full length and breadth of life. A certain melancholy might set in, as you remember on emotional level that the boundaries between which you live, the standards of success and failure that create your day-to-day requirements, are not only made up, but made up by someone who isn’t you. So how do you keep your sense of autonomy within the structure of the academic world? And what do you do when that structure dematerializes in a day?

Last night, two of my friends sat in the Michigan House kitchen and talked about dropping out of college. Ana had stopped attending school a year ago, while Isaac was thinking about dropping out next fall. “The hardest part about it,” said Ana, “is dealing with other people. If you’re not terrified of dropping out, then you probably haven’t fully considered other people’s reactions.” Isaac thought about that while we broke into a pan of staling cinnamon buns. “But I have considered the consequences. And I’m generally fine with breaking social norms.” He twisted off the tops of two cinnamon buns, switched them, and smiled.

Earlier that day I had watched Isaac leaning against the gate in the Mich house backyard, as the sun slowly set and the tendrils of smoke from a struggling dinnertime bonfire drifted upwards towards the sky. He looked young, but also determined – like within his clothes he was setting up a mold for the man he would be, a person that would solidify inside the jean jacket, the long-johns, the earring, the eyebrows that tilted upwards with sudden joy at catching a strand of creative thought. Meanwhile, graduating seniors Katie and Kat were causing a ruckus: like most of Ann Arbor they had been somewhat demented by the early spring influx of sunlight, and were standing on benches, hitting crumpled PBR cans into the air with sticks. As drops of months-old crappy beer/backwash pelted my forehead, I stopped thinking and started to laugh.

A periodic shaking off of my own persistent thoughtfulness might be kind of good for me. To quote the late David Foster Wallace, “probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education –least in my own case – is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in the argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” Maybe I am ambivalent about academia, and maybe academia does structure my life, but I’m not ambivalent about life. I suffer no uncertainty about drinking coffee in the afternoon sunlight with good friends while listening to them improvise songs to the people across the street, no doubt about the bikeride with my sister before work, no hesitation about going to see that oddly named band at the weird venue with the new friend.

And abridging self-imposed routines can be as important as fighting back, with friends and coffee and music, against the suffocation of work and school. One of the first days of spring I was suffering through a run in the Arb with a sore Achilles tendon when I remembered something – despite the hurry I was in to get home, shower, and do my homework, despite the anxiety that if I didn’t get enough exercise I wouldn’t be able to sleep, despite the tiny numbers in the window of my ipod telling me that I had another forty minutes left in my workout, I did not have to keep running. I yanked my earbuds out of my ears, and as the tinny music stopped, abruptly my other senses returned. Half of the meadow had been charred in a controlled fire, and as the cool breeze lifted the remaining grass, the smell of burnt organic particulate drifted hazily in the sunlight. I wandered towards the swaying pine trees at the edge of the meadow, and laid down on a slightly damp patch of pine needles and clay soil – the ‘O horizon’ in the soil profile, I remembered dimly from an ecology class. As the leaves above me swayed and blued in the sunset, I sank through the soil horizons, trying to center myself somewhere within the bedrock. The sensation of falling off a cliff dimmed. By the time I stood up to walk home, I forgot about the numbers ticking away on my ipod.

David Foster Wallace couldn’t really tell me how to fight off springtime melancholy, and I couldn’t really tell you how. I think it has something to do with paying attention to the beautiful, organic strands of love (cinnamon roll, pbr, bike, bedrock) that weave their way through the seemingly impermeable boundaries of routine. I think it has something to do with understanding and remembering the relative impermanence of the academic thread, both in its greatness as an avenue to achievement and its dull everyday pressure. Maybe, between all the essay-writing, beer and coffee-drinking, running and studying, you should really just let yourself be demented by the sunshine, stop thinking, and laugh.

As much as I wanted to write a beautiful poem in honor of National Poetry Month, poetry is just not my craft: I’ve never worked on it, never gotten feedback on what I do haphazardly throw together, and usually I prefer to use anything that I write in poetic form as inspiration or building blocks for a song or essay. So although I pretty quickly decided to write an homage to a poet instead of a poem this week, I didn’t expect one poet to come to mind so immediately, clearly and irrefutably as an artist I want to honor: Charles Bukowski.

It might be because I’m back in food service, working at the North Quad dining hall. North Quad isn’t too bad; I can say with confidence that I’ve worked worse jobs. But there’s something about banging your head on the oversized milk prep tubs, about showering off that thin layer of grease after working grill, about reaching your arm into the garbage disposal up to the elbow and pulling out a consolidated wad of raisins, egg, yogurt, sausage and napkin, that is so goddamn far from poetry. There’s something about the burns on your forearms, the lingering smells of bleach and sour milk, the small, infected cut on your palm, that feel at once too dull and too intimate to abstract from. How do you transpire from sore feet? From hairnets? I don’t mind food service – sometimes I even like it – but there’s a certain embarrassing something about human nature that comes out when people are getting fed. The day drags on, the polite customers start to irk you, the rude ones suddenly deserve to die, and suddenly you feel weighed down by the sheer amount of grease, trash and dirty pans that go into feeding the masses. So how do you come home stinking like chicken grease and escape a mindset that accidentally, subconsciously derides the idea that your human experiences are worth making art out of?

Well, that’s when Charles Bukowski comes to mind.

My middle-school friend Montana Welton had made a startling jump from a propensity towards pulpy, serialized vampire novels in sixth grade to a suddenly refined preference for Kerouac, Salinger and Punk Rock anthologies in seventh grade, and she first lent me ‘Ham On Rye,’ by Bukowski around that time. The grim autobiographical narrative covered Bukowski’s childhood during the great depression, describing a childhood and young adulthood plagued by abuse, poverty, chronic acne, and isolation. I was intrigued and drawn in to Chuck’s gritty, proletarian world, and when I went looking for more novels I discovered that Bukowski had written volumes upon volumes of poetry.

The poems are forceful, declarative sentences separated by line breaks, elaborating on basic themes of Bukowski’s life: drinking, horseraces, women/whores, menial labor, and cheap hotels. Through the narrative of Bukowski’s body of poetry, we seem the poet as a laboring, legendary tough guy, a kind of superhero of everything voracious and brutal and secondrate. Bukowski’s “lowlife odyssey” has been described as a kind of comic-book world, the production of a poet who comes to the brink of self-reflection but can’t quite give up the need to be the hero of his own narrative – a pride that ultimately condemns him to be a ‘conventional writer.’ And it’s true that Chuck’s fierce pride and bravado might ultimately limit his capacity to self-reflect.

Yet presence of this ludicrous, whore-mongering, horse-betting, hyper-masculine character has stuck around in my life and my thoughts, because he gave me the tools to understand how poetry – how art – could be pulled out of the least lofty of human experiences. Would Bukowski shy away from writing about the grime of the dish machine, the spilled antidepressants, the shiny scars left by a mysterious rash, the cruel or stupid lover? Though Bukowski’s poems may caricature the poet as a colorful character, an uncomplicated, comic-book serialization, they resound with me because they took pride in the insanity of life. Where poets often seem to be trying ruefully acknowledge life’s gritty mess in an attempt to transcend it, Chuck just rolled around in it. And that’s what I love about him, because that’s all that we mortals can really do.

My friend Fiona has historically been the facilitator of most of my impromptu-concert-going. Once during my freshman year I was studying in the East Quad basement when Fiona called me offering a ticket to see Girl Talk at the Blind Pig if I could make it to a street corner across town “on Packard next to the brick house” within ten minutes. More excited by the adventure than I was mildly psyched to see Girl Talk, I ditched my backpack with a friend and jogged to Packard and hill to join her concert-going caravan. But I got out of class this past Thursday, charged my phone and found a text from Fiona inviting me to see Mac Demarco at the Magic Stick, I was excited both to have some much-needed spontaneous fun and to see one of my favorite new musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mac since about the time that everyone became a fan of Mac, when he found commercial success with the release of his laid-back but straightforward album ‘2,’ a series of carefree odes to cigarettes, apologies to his mother, and tender love songs. A word-cloud of reviews and write-ups on Demarco would probably come up with bolded key-words like ‘stoner’ (though he doesn’t touch the stuff), 90s-alt, and ‘hat (he fields a lot of questions about his omnipresent baseball cap),’ but I like better comparisons to solo John Lennon and My Bloody Valentine. Demarco himself does nothing to combat more casual descriptions of his music, calling his style ‘jizz-jazz,’ but his refusal to take publicly take his own music seriously seems to just reflect a kind of ambivalence towards his sudden success. Demarco’s newest album ‘Salad Days,’ released April 2^th, is now being heralded as a finessed elaboration on ‘2,’ with the same laid-back rock’n’roll feel applied to more serious, reflective lyrical subject matter.

The Magic Stick sold out at a capacity of 275, and the venue was already filling up by the time we arrived. “ It’s when I come to shows like this that I remember – there actually aren’t that many hipsters in Ann Arbor,” Fiona laughed as she surveyed the crowd, where pastel colored hair, dreads, PBR, beards and plaid abounded in a pretty comprehensive exhibit of the new crusty edge of hipsterdom.

As soon as Mac and three person backing band wandered out onstage to do their own sound check, I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to be able to see anything and jumped at the chance to sit on the edge of a table above the crowd. The seat turned out to be a godsend for a short kid, especially when as the first song started the crowd unexpectedly began moshing in an odd but endearing show of enthusiasm for the laid-back rock’n’roller. The performance itself was full of infectious, genuine enthusiasm. Tour reviews often cite the musician’s odd proclivity to strip completely naked and/or get obscene with drumsticks, but the set was mostly gimmick-free, besides the dutiful singing of a happy-birthday song to a brave 16 year old mosher. My vantage point gave me a great view of Mac’s onstage dynamic – laid back but engaged, grinning through his gap-tooth and joking with his band members. Although Demarco actually records every instrumental part on his albums himself, he tours with three of his old friends on guitar, bass and drums, forming a crew of musician-friends that clearly enjoy playing together.  When Demarco occasionally put his guitar aside to play keyboard and sing with the mic in his hand, he closed his eyes as though earnestly soliloquizing – but beyond the occasional tender moment, Mac gave a generally buoyant and upbeat performance. By the time he gleefully took off his omnipresent baseball cap and crowd-surfed back and forth, the crowd greeted him like an old buddy.

We waited to meet him afterwards in a queue that was less like a line and more like an anxious vortex of iphones swirling around the tired musician. He seemed exhausted, dutifully throwing up peace signs for instagram pics, signing girls’ jean jackets in lipstick, and gracefully accepting a demo tape someone slipped into his jacket pocket, but sometimes staring off into space between groups of people. I almost felt bad for him by the time Fiona and I made it to the front of the needy vortex, and we both made it a point to look him in the eye and thank him for the great show. “Sure,” he said, “thank you.” As we shuffled off, he quietly accepted a fan’s offer to trade hats, and a skinny kid walked away grinning wildly, wearing what looked like a very well-loved, very dirty white baseball cap.

Wes Anderson’s new feature film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ hit theaters this past week, drawing audiences and critics with its distinctive Anderson-Aesthetic brand of comedy. At this point, many filmgoers know what to expect from an Anderson film, as the director’s cult popularity has gradually introduced his style into the popular consciousness. While the director’s films may explore new plots, sets, characters and colors, audiences understand that they are unlikely to plunge into truly unknown territory, instead embroidering on familiar themes and landscapes. Anderson’s cinematic storytelling often expands on a certain aesthetic theme, with Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and the Life Aquatic centering in turn on the structures of a high school, a tenement house, and a submarine. In a similar vein, Anderson’s new film centers on a hotel. The ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ operates against a painted mountainous background in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka. Depicted in a juxtaposition of flashbacks to a sumptuous golden age and present day decline, ‘Zubrowka’ evokes political sentimentality reminiscent of the declining Ottoman empire – or maybe of any degenerating empire.

Jude Law plays a writer on a stay at a drab and tacky version of the hotel in the 1960s, who makes the acquaintance of the proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Zero Moustafa. Moustafa relates to the writer his early history at the hotel, working as a lobby boy under the tutelage of socialite/concierge Mr. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), whose flighty mannerisms, almost moral emphasis on décor, and sexual exploits dominate the rest of the film. Gustave’s vociferous love affairs with the hotel’s elderly female patrons intertwine him – and by extension, Zero – in an intrigue involving a noble family, a disputed inheritance and an ominous hitman. The exploits that ensue are often slapstick, particularly in a rollicking prison break and chase scene that culminates in a Marx Brothers-esque gunfight. However, the film’s bright colors and adventurous spirit are framed by an inescapable sense of loss. Old Moustafa admits that he cannot even reminisce about his young love Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) without crying, while terse, tacky style of the 1960s set reminds us that the past has been lost to war, ideology and institutionalization. Zubrowka may be fictional, but the shadow of war hovers over the end of the Grand Budapest’s glory days with a familiarly foreboding tenseness of militarization, secret police and border inspections – while the sense of oppression encasing the decrepit 1960s Budapest feels familiar as well. In Grand Budapest, Anderson uses his refined sense of aesthetic design to illuminate an arc of glory, war and repression that feels both familiar and timeless.