I’ve been reading more poetry lately (coincidentally it’s National Poetry Month) because I am distracted & juggling many things. I like the food for thought poetry brings and it doesn’t have to be such a commitment. The three sets of poems in this book by Jean Day look at life with a furious and comic twist. I think now more than ever we need to look at life in a different way and reading how others view it, can be therapy in itself. Jean Day is a published poet living in Berkeley. – OC It’s available here: https://www.theconcernnewsstand.com/shop/the-triumph-of-life-by-jean-day

I knew this film intimately, long before I saw it, because my father described it to me, scene by scene, when I was ten. Whether that is tantamount to psychological abuse depends on how you take your movies, and how you like your steak. Regardless, my father’s telling, paired with my initial watching of this film, set the tone for my entire creative career. The movie is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. It takes place in eerie, off season Venice, Italy, where Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie have retreated, after the death of their youngest child. But, instead of aiding his healing, Sutherland’s grief awakens a dormant clairvoyance in him, and Christie’s sense of loss attracts a grim force, in the form of two disturbingly kooky, old ladies, one of whom claims to be in contact […]

In high school, I was a projectionist at the local indie movie theater, and The Double Life of Veronique was one of the movies that I projected. I assembled it from six reels into one giant strip of 35mm film, on the projector’s feed platter. Then I watched it over and over and over. Each time I ran it, a layer of its construction fell away, revealing yet another. This movie educated me in a way that felt effortless. It’s about a drop dead gorgeous, young woman who is haunted by her drop dead gorgeous, doppelgänger. Or is it just her self, looped back in time? I’ll never know, but either way, it is, at once, melancholic and joyful. I want to be careful about not using these weekly suggestions to eulogize, given the current mournful void of normalcy we […]

Week Two: April 3rd SOUND Krzysztof Penderecki with Don Cherry and the New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra – Actions Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes – Paix Bill Withers – Still Bill

This low budget, Texas, Neo-Noir, is clockwork precise, even though it’s the Coen brothers’ first crack inwhat is now an incredibly varied and prolific filmography. It helped set the bar for an entirely new style of independent filmmaking, and despite its age, it holds up well, buoyed mostly by the intrepid character actor, M. Emmet Walsh, who enchants us with bizarre facial ticks and a sleazy, Texas drawl. This movie is hypnotic from the very first scene where the cadence is determined by a pair of windshield wipers that wack away viscous drops of rain. If you’re looking for an immersive movie that will take you away from the world around you, this is the one. – GJ

This week, I’ve got two albums that dance around the themes of Sacred v. Profane, reveling in collective solitude, prophetic hermeticism and meditation on the exalted minutia of the Here & Now. Like a flower from concrete, Peter Grudzien, the “first gay outsider country singer” and lifelong resident of Queens, NY, triumphs through chronic paranoia and makes the marginal magical with the righteous oddity of “The Unicorn.” Dorys and Eli, of Miami’s Dracula, reanimate the dusty green bones of American folk standards and balladry with a thread-bare but supernaturally elegant romancero lilt on “Songs of Love & Melancholy.” Squeezing blood harmony from a stone, this duo managed to quell the aural insanity of 2019’s Savage Weekend with a hushed, sublime 20-minute performance I won’t soon forget. At any rate, both albums are well worth a spin for weary window-gazing. – […]