Playtime

There are moments in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep where a man swim-flies through an underwater sky, where a city builds itself out of paper scraps into a Babel-like infinity, where time stutters and flips backwards and space expands like some mad scientist’s thought balloon. And sure, it doesn’t all work, this funny story that becomes an increasingly sad study of the artist-romantic as a perpetual infant who can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality, whatever that is, but there’s no denying that Gondry’s film starts from a place that half the movies made never even get to, which is a realm of unfettered imagination where to dream really is to live.

I found myself slipping into memories of Sleep’s images again and again over three consecutive nights of listening to live music this past week, amidst lyrical flights of fancy brought on by the piercing trumpet of Tomasz Stanko, the sibilance of Simone White’s voice, the soaring of the string quartet that accompanied the group Lambchop – three performances that perforated the membrane between here and now and some other realm we humans can experience within inspired musicmaking, and I found myself thinking, why not, why not, why is it we so rarely get to go there, when we’re fashioning the screenplay blueprints commonly held to be viable entertainment modules supposedly best fit for mainstream consumption?

It’s always bemused me how rock music critics invariably spend three-quarters of their reviews talking about the lyrics, the poor chumps, taking safe and easy refuge in the words, words, words, because after all it’s so exceedingly difficult to write about sound, about non-verbal aural emotionalizing, about what it actually is, this beautiful noise we thrive on, how it’s expressed and what it’s expressing (not that the task is easy; take a moment to imagine how you might explain “what rock’n’roll sounds like” to someone who’s never heard it). The few that have managed it on occasion (Richard Meltzer comes to mind, Lester Bangs at his best) end up riffing their own ways into poetic abstraction, and I can't do any better but it’s a shame, this chasm, I wish there was an easier and more specific way to get across to you what I heard and what it meant to me. Because I was reminded of how film can do what music can do, and I wondered where it went, in American filmmaking, what had happened to the playing.

What I heard played, first of all:

Lambchop at the Troubadour, October 2nd: How to convey the wholly idiosyncratic, haunting yet comforting strains of Nashville-based singer-songwriter Kurt Wagner and 11 other superb musicans, including the all-girl Tosca String Quartet from Austin, Texas? Instant reverie is the phrase that comes to mind; basking in the peculiar mix of intoxicating warmth and existential sobriety that filled the club from the band’s first notes was what I’d imagine floating in a 3 a.m. cloud-blanket shot through with moonshine might feel like. Here’s what one recent reviewer had to say:

Piano and heavily treated guitars danced between the notes like ghosts, shimmering and reverberating as each song faded into pin-drop silence before anyone felt comfortable enough to applaud. It was more recital than rock concert.

This is on some level a kind of high class makeout music (Wagner is nothing if not romantic in tonal pallet, from pedal steel-like guitar swells to keening violins), but I went stag to the show with my oldest friend, Matthew Boxt, a man I was listening to music with in elementary school. At one point he muttered, quite happily, “I don’t understand a word of what he’s singing,” and I responded, “Not that it matters.” Wagner’s voice, a wood-grained instrument that sounds soaked in pain, wisdom and wonder is actually rather precise in its pronouncements, but given the oddball bent of his lyrics and the lower range he sings in what mostly came across was mood. The one phrase that rang clearest ended the song Lambchop closed the night with, Wagner growling and then shouting, “Don’t follow me!” with increasing urgency – not the message one expects to hear from rock singers, but one apt to this very private-seeming performer. The counter message was in the rolling, hypnotic chordal shifts, lonesome as a distant train’s horn across a darkened Texas plain; I felt the shared, chilled beauty of distant starlight in the brushing of the drummer’s cymbals, and dreamed.

Simone White at the Temple Bar, October 3rd: From an abundance of musicians to the purest minimalism: one woman with an acoustic guitar. But when the woman possesses an exceptional songwriting talent, and a voice that’s at once quintessentially feminine and simultaneously as metal-edged as a blues-playing tenor saxophone, there’s really not much more you need.

Again, not so much the words as the sound of words; Simone excels at drawing out the emotional underpinnings of a phrase, digging into each syllable and sibilance with a horn player’s eloquence, so that the long ‘o’ in soldier and broad ‘a’ in sailor say much more than the deceptively simple lyric would suggest on a page.
What’s conjured is the abstraction of soldier, sailor, so that some projection of the essence of these professions seems to hover in the ether for an extended, timeless beat. There’s a calm stillness, a bracingly centered quality to Simone’s performing that allows a listener to fill in the blanks. You feel like you’re hearing two eras at once through this slender, willow reed-like vessel -- her fingers strum chords as old as a song could be, but her sensibility situates her clearly in a fresh and present moment.

Simone White is presently a well-kept secret in this town (while her myspace fans are legion) but all of that will change in the new year with the release of her forthcoming CD I am the Man on Honest Jon's/EMI/Astralwerks, and in the meantime you can hear her on this site.

Tomasz Stanko Quartet at the Jazz Bakery, October 4th: There’s an odd, amusing disparity between the appearance of Stanko, a celebrated Polish trumpeter whose delicate tone and dark melodic predilections at times recall the mid-‘60s Miles Davis, and the music he plays. Nattily attired in a grey suit, bald and spectacled, he looks professorial, standing by in between solos like a physicist who’s thinking about some corrections that need to be made on a paper he’s left backstage. Then he abruptly lifts his horn to his lips and plays the kind of searingly hip, kick-butt blasting cascade of notes that can make your hair stand on end.

He’s backed by arguably one of the best trios extant in contemporary jazz: an incandescent firebrand of a piano player, Marcin Wasilewski, and a lethal rhythm section comprised of supple upright bassist Slawomir Kurkiewcz and canny drummer Michel Miskiewicz. For all their combined virtuosity, Stanko seems foremost a composer; he’s not a take-no-prisoners showman like James Carter, and at times the soundscapes painted by the quartet feel more moodily cinematic than traditional verse-chorus-like in form; his compositions often demonstrate the spiky turn-on-a-dime specificity of a late 20th Century Eastern European classical music score.

Jimi Hawes, a bassist friend, was talking to me about Stanko’s miraculous ability to seemingly suspend time and play above and beyond the bar, but all I can tell you is that when these guys went out, they went out – there was a truly palpable sense of rising, flying, leaving this dimension when they hit their stride. I found myself (or rather, lost myself) drifting into some hypnogenic between-sleep-and-waking state deep in the heart of their first set, skipping through images like a stone shot across water. Because my friends and I stayed for the second set, I solved a number of plot and characterization problems in the new project I’m working on; nothing greases my creative gears better than music that catapults me from the strictures of time and space into the land of hope and dreams.

Which brings me back to the horse I rode in on: yes, we’ve got plenty of ‘players’ in Hollywood, but where is the play?

I’ve come to believe that what’s valued in our more adventurous filmmaker/screenwriters is just this: a willful tendency to bust out of the restrictive conventions of mainstream story and protagonists in the name of playing, playing out like a good band, singer-songwriter or jazz combo does.

It’s what beloved weirdos like David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman do – take that leap into the pre-verbal, profoundly illogical arena of the unconscious. I once likened the film Run Lola Run
to the music of the Clash for similar reasons; it has the ragged, churning energy of a great rock band riding the line of run amuck, and its sudden lurches into the fantastical (e.g. its sudden shifts into crazed animation) have the feel of wild guitar solos.

I think this is the quality that fans prize in Tarantino. What is the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs if not a kind of jazz ensemble jamming on a theme of American Culture, with an inspired riff, playing off Madonna, its out-there solo centerpiece? Kill Bill isn’t so much about story as it is about color, camera movement, about blocking as ballet; it’s opera, ludicrously blood-soaked though it may be.

What's underneath, above and beyond the rational and verbal? Not surprising that music goes front-and-center in the works of dreamer-cineastes like Lynch (e.g. the amazing acappella Roy Orbison tune wailed in Mulholland Drive) and Pedro Almodovar; at a certain point words fail, logic and contained structure won't work, to express the near-inexpressible -- it makes perfect sense that Talk to Me paused to let the great Caetano Veloso sing a song, and that his new Volver features a beautiful on-camera (and ably lip-synched) rendition of the flamenco-esque title song by Penelope Cruz.

What I came out of my musical mini-tour with was a renewed appreciation for, and interest in (re: my own work), the joys of playing. Love it or hate it, Gondry’s Science plays, admittedly with the whacked-out exuberance of an at-times obnoxious idiot savant, but it's a kind of playfulness that’s been often lacking in our native screenwriting and filmmaking of late. I think it’s the spirit of play that captured the hearts and minds of POTC: Dead Man’s Chest’s audience (you can feel the glee Rossio & Elliot must have felt when they came up with that three-way swordfight and its runaway rolling wheel lift-off), for it certainly wasn’t that movie’s often labored attempts to tie together its unwieldy story-lines.

I want to find the music in my next draft – consciously seek out the ramps I can use to skate off the edges of convention and into the wild blue. That’s where the good stuff lies, it’s where the moments we love most in movies comes from. I’m determined, in this new piece, to honor playing out.

Comments

[E.C. Henry]

I think the playfull "music" in a good script comes from the writer playing with the material in the re-writing stage. Writing is SO hard. You have to have a good concept, you have to have a good plot, then you "tweek" it to make is something special.

Loved "Reservoir Dogs." Dark movie, yes, but creative and edgy the first time you see it.

One caution concerning "playfullness" -- you still have to have a COHERENT story. Storys that meander and don't come back to have a meaningfull ending that ties things up SUCK! A sure sign that the writer didn't do his job.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[mernitman]

EC, I agree: coherency is a primary necessity in good stories.

But I also advocate letting go, going "out," abandoning all cautions in a FIRST draft -- you can always rewrite after you've made the discoveries that are often born of taking risks and flying blind.

[Mystery Man]

I'm all about jazz.

I actually have Tomasz Stanko Quartet's "Matka Joanna" and I just bought "Lontano," which love deeply, and I also have "Litania" from the Tomasz Stanko Septet. I'm still getting acquainted with "Lontano." I love the last song, "Tale," which just slices into your heart with its beautiful simplicity, doesn't it? It makes me think of movies like "Leaving Las Vegas" or perhaps "Glengarry Glen Ross."

It's funny to me. Two movie guys I love dearly, you and Girish Shambu, write about music more beautifully than the MUSIC GUYS.

One walks away from reading a post like this with the feeling, "it is well with my soul."

-MM

[mike]

I'm pissed Tosca String Quartet was in town and I had no idea.

Very good posting, Billy. I couldn't have said it better myself. (And probably could never say it better myself)

[christina]

I always make a mixed tape (now CD) of the music I imagine playing over the screenplay I'm writing. Then I loop it until I'm done with the screenplay. Music sets the tone for what I'm writing. When I get sick of the music, I'm usually also getting sick of the story :-)

I try to decipher my love affair with Almodovar (my 2nd favorite director), and I think you hit upon it here -- he's always having fun. Even in a movie like Bad Education that's inherently dark, he's still having fun.

My favorite director of all time is Kieslowski. His movies don't have a sense of fun to them per se, but a certain knowing. Are they fun and I just can't see it?

My 3rd favorite director would be David Lynch...

[mernitman]

Thanks, MM -- clearly you have good taste in music ;-)

Hey Mike: So evidently you know them Toscas... so what kind of stuff do they do when they play out on their own?

Christina: I'm a mix-tape/CD-to-write-to guy as well... in fact, this sounds like it's a Next Post-worthy subject...

Kieslsowki definitely not Mr. Fun, but he does take risky leaps with the time/space stuff, on occasion...

[Janet]

My love for music has bore on me as a writer. I can't describe it the way I hear it... there are rarely phrases that can capture a melody and give it to the reader. The analogy between the nostalgic genius of The Science of Sleep and rock and roll painted it well for the cynics. And maybe, at last, gave popular studios a new direction and formula.

[jess]

I hear music in everything. I hear it all over my writing...it's the only way I can create a script.

I espescially hear music on the radio.

[jess]

i think i spelled especially wrong.

...twice.

[mernitman]

Janet, here's hoping.

Oh Jess I'm with you, and let's do especiajlly three times (but remind me to talk to you about "its")...