Christmas in Bob Dylan’s Heart

October 11th, 2009 § 0

on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart (2009) by Paul Snyder

Countless blurbs have been published in recent weeks about Bob Dylan and the October 13th release of his 34th studio album, 47th official album–and first Christmas album–Christmas in the Heart. The instant meme was that the record, comprised of traditional songs in a traditional setting, was a bridge too far, that Dylan had lost his mind, or worse, succumbed to the same pitiful commercialism that Christmas had. Plus, Robert Zimmerman, raised Jewish.

The sixties are dead and buried, and Bob has appeared in Cadillac and Victoria Secret ads, but he has always rejected the mantle of antiestablishmentarianism. And those of us in Dylan’s audience–which remains sizable, including many who consider his present output amongst the most interesting of his career–may actually find this record in tack with the direction of his recent work. Writing off his Christmas record in premise speaks as much to the withering state of holiday music, as the media’s fickle treatment of its own “legend.”

Role-playing has always been a part of the Dylan mystique. He’s written countless first-person story songs. Half a dozen actors played him in 2007′s I’m Not There. He invented an alternate voice for himself, to sing his 1969 country record Nashville Skyline, which is considered a classic today. His recent writing has even more fidelity to character and song form. Although he’s lived in Malibu for years, the state of Texas and its musical tradition figure into several songs on his last album, Together Through Life. Christmas in the Heart just suggests Bob believes in the Christmas tradition likewise. It might not be as serious as his recent records, but that doesn’t make it fundamentally different. There’s no shortage of humor, even in his most serious work.

Christmas songs are some of the best-loved, most enduring songs in popular music. But in spite of the ‘Christmas creep’ of November airtime, few people are still writing Christmas songs. Today, releasing a Christmas album is often at record company behest, an attempt to cash-in on holiday airtime, or as a gift idea for the child whose parent had been a genuine fan of, say, The Moody Blues, in their heyday. (I did buy my mother their album, December, but it was seemingly their last act as a band.) On the upside, if your Christmas album is deemed a modern classic, it gets played endlessly (ala Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas).

Even if it were exclusively a commercial venture, Bob Dylan’s Christmas album would still be cashing in on the part of hungry Americans. During a recession winter when U.S. unemployment is hovering near 10%, US royalties from Christmas in the Heart are going to the charity organization Feeding America. International royalties are going to charities in the UK and the developing world. Prior to the album release it has already guaranteed more than four million meals to people in need. Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” it ain’t, but it’s not as over-the-top either, so it might actually be better.

Consider that Johnny Cash hosted annual Christmas specials on CBS throughout the seventies. The Beatles made seven Christmas singles for their fan club, with original songs and sketches thanking them for their support. To imagine Bob Dylan is out of touch with the symbolic value of making a Christmas album–as hilarious a sign as it is–is just underestimating him.

Dylan’s approach is decidedly Christmas–not “holiday”–oriented; about half are hymns about angels and drummers, and half are about Santa or sleigh bells. No original songs here, and the arrangements are impeccably, absolutely traditional. Horns and strings aplenty. The backup vocals are angelic, like they weren’t recorded on the same planet as Bob’s lead. True, without his singing, some of this could be anybody’s Christmas record. The album is so unironic, fans are already fighting over whether it’s meant ironically. At times you will laugh.

Believability. That’s what Sam Cooke cited as the reason people endured Bob Dylan’s singing voice, which today is more world-worn than ever. If this were an elaborate prank, the way he sings this album, there’s no telling. As with Nashville Skyline, the difference between Dylan prank and a serious choice isn’t a meaningful difference in credibility. Besides “The Christmas Blues,” which is truly contemporaneous with his recent work, “Must Be Santa” is probably his first polka, and with “Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles),” I believe we have the first instance of Dylan singing in Latin.

Whether or not it’s a genuine album in Dylan’s discography–and Bob has admitted to making deliberately unserious albums–it’s at least a genuine Christmas album, a fun and funny listen, which was probably fun to make. And it exonerates The Moody Blues, and other credible artists who might like Christmas music. Even if Dylan’s just tipping his hat here, Christmas in the Heart is an acknowledgment of an underappreciated musical tradition from one of the most important innovators and interpreters of American popular song.

Full Article and Comments on the Huffington Post

Update: Proud to have been quoted in the Official News Release for this album.

Public Enemies and the Invention of Video

September 28th, 2009 § 0

on Public Enemies (2009) by Paul Snyder

It’s 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last few months in the life of bank robber John Dillinger, as Public Enemies does, has been done at least four times before. Michael Mann’s version isn’t historically definitive, nor narratively the most cohesive, but it looks and feels different than any predecessor — or any of this summer’s other blockbusters. Its raw aesthetic evokes a violence not of John Dillinger’s time, but of ours: the movie looks, arguably, cheap.

There are many economic and production-related reasons that filmmakers choose to shoot digital, but its flat, uncorrected look, muddy, half-visible blacks in low-light and clipped overexposures in the sun, are considered its flaws and carefully avoided. These days the technology can so closely approximate the look of film, telling the difference has become a matter of trivia (did you know that Benjamin Button and Superbad were shot digitally?). Public Enemies, shot with a mixture of non-film cameras from to the cinema-resolution Sony F23 to the $6K prosumer EX1, brings digital production’s unique — some would say, ugly — qualities to the fore. The elaborate nightclub is nearly invisible. Cotillard’s bathtub is eaten up by glare. Aside from the cast, you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t cost $80 million. Production value be damned, this is the Great Depression — er, Recession.

But there are advantages to shooting this way, too, and these are the audience’s surprises. With multiple simultaneous cameras, the editors often find unflattering, unusual and sublime angles. In a car chase the cameras nearly scrape the dirt road, as likely to fall out of the car as the gangsters. Distant pursuers appear in a deep focus impossible with a film camera. Pretty Boy Floyd is gunned down at such a static angle, it looks like Purvis set up the tripod himself. That’s the conceit: a renegade production for a renegade’s biopic. Hushed dialogue strains the ear, and sudden, unsweetened gunshots blare. These might be flaws, but it’s hard to argue that the volume, in the life of a gangster on the lam, ought to be normalized, or that gunfights ought to be prettier.

The raw video aesthetic would be less jarring were Public Enemies not set in 1934. The documentary style makes the action seem more real; the impossibility of video cameras during the Depression makes it all the more unreal. At its best, the movie uses this tension to great effect: paparazzi invade crime scenes, conflating Dillinger’s celebrity and Depp’s. When a police interrogator abuses Cotillard, the anachronism emphasizes his barbarity, while the verisimilitude makes it painfully familiar.

Anachronism enters Dillinger’s life within the film, too. The outlaw was famously gunned down on his way out of the film Manhattan Melodrama, and the final aria in Public Enemies is a montage of Dillinger reflecting on his jailed lover in the smiles of Myrna Loy. One has to imagine that as dated as it seems in the middle of a 21st Century crime picture, for a man who’d lived so hard for so long as Dillinger had, the fighting between Gable and Powell was impossibly cute.

For all its aesthetic sophistication, the film’s spontaneity runs roughshod over a lot of true history. There’s the false premise that John Dillinger was made a priority after Purvis killed Floyd; in reality Floyd and Baby Face Nelson were shot after Dillinger. It’s glossed over, but the women were prostitutes whom he took to the movies that night, and Dillinger never sauntered into the Dillinger squad, pining for his lost love. Michael Mann sides with Dillinger on the standing question, at the heart of the film’s title — whether he was a friend or an “enemy” of the public good — and transforms him into a sentimental hero whose death was sort of a careless martyrdom. Guess there’s nary an American who wouldn’t like to rob a bank, these days.

Public Enemies doesn’t confront Dillinger with questions or historical nuance; it doesn’t make his heists nor his love life seem very sexy. It tells the story, true or not, of a man who tries and fails to escape a construct he’d made of himself. The history and melodrama are a lot of pretense — independently unsatisfying — but the spirit of the film, taking aesthetic risks and chasing what elsewhere would be considered flaws, manages to produce something nearer the spectacle — or that construct, however unspectacular — of John Dillinger.

Full Article and Comments on the Huffington Post

Edited: Temperley Zoetrope

September 25th, 2009 § 0

Zoetrope touring Fashion Weeks in NY, London for Spring 2010. Dirs. LEGS

Edited: Shipley & Halmos Installation

September 16th, 2009 § 0



For designers Shipley and Halmos, Fashion week 9/2009, these frames were projected on four walls in the Milk Gallery, each around 12′ tall; the panorama 40′ wide.
Dirs. LEGS

“Far From the Norm” Trailer

September 6th, 2009 § 0

Documentary following inimitable character and accidental philosopher, the surly N. Gregory Snyder, investigating his double life as nasty coworker Norm and loving husband Greg, as he takes his first adventure out of the Northeastern American territory, at 54 years old. As accompanied and agitated by me, his son.

Edited: Ou Est le Swimming Pool, “Dance the Way I Feel”

June 6th, 2009 § 0


Young and Lost Club Records, Dirs. LEGS

Pixar Throws Down, with Up

June 2nd, 2009 § 0

on Up (2009) by Paul Snyder

Fifteen years since the release of Toy Story, Pixar has made it very clear that they would like to be considered a movie studio in the classic sense: their films all seem to illustrate a singular creative perspective. As their individuals films do incredible things with franchising and merchandise (Cars and Toy Story especially, notably the two with sequels in-progress), with industry-defining productions and unparalleled quality control, every Pixar film promotes the big brand name, the studio. So it was, once upon a time, with studios-cum-corporations Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM and yes, Disney.

Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 after a long distribution partnership, but the agreement doesn’t conflate Disney’s and Pixar’s product (Disney has their own CG studio, which recently released Bolt). Where the Animation Studio at Disney has trademarked princesses and fairytales with happy endings, Pixar–aptly, given the nature of 3-D computer animation–makes worlds. Most Pixar films open a portal to a fantasy where toys or cars or fish can talk and have adventures. They explore their exotic world, meet loads of funny characters, and in the end demonstrate they’re all just like us. Usually there’s a coming-of-age message in there, whether it’s learning to share (Toy Story), let go (Finding Nemo), or grow the hell up already, entire human race (WALL-E).

Up is Pixar to the core, but framed a little differently. We start familiar, with human characters in suburbia, but they find two adventures: getting to their exotic world, and the adventure that world presents when they get there. Carl Fredricksen is a grumpy old man who’d really like to simply deposit his suburban house on top of the waterfall his dead wife always imagined. That’s adventure number one, already a little more grave than most childrens’ fare, and it’s all the trailer might lead you to expect the movie is. And the story of the old man and his wife–practically a silent movie, complete with newsreel film, further nods to a cinematic era gone by–is heartrending. By the time Carl’s quest begins, the audience is completely invested in seeing that floating house get plopped on that cliff.

Then again, we know Pixar. Carl accidentally acquires a fat-faced cub scout named Russell and we’re off to the races. The trip is shown in ellipsis: beautiful shots punctuated by mayhem. The physical comedy is tightly directed, nearer the style of network television animation than Disney’s. The dialogue–written in the smart, contemporary voice of The Incredibles–jeers the old man and the dopey kid equally, making Up more like a buddy picture than the age gap might suggest. When they arrive in Venezuela, characters (I won’t ruin with explanation) pile on until the adventure is more their story than Carl’s. Facing that fact–and reinventing himself accordingly–is the old man’s Nietzschean coming-of-age, and the real adventure.

Framing the story in reality briefly touches just how deeply our lives today are segregated by ageism; the elderly disappear to retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, and children are instructed never to speak to adults. Extending that to the critical reception of Up, it’s typical that the debate centers around the appropriate subjects for a children’s movie, whether we’ve exhausted 1930′s adventure tropes, or whether Ed Asner just makes a boring toy. In Up, Carl’s quest begins with his displacement from his lifelong home, but he proves he doesn’t need to be taken care of, and it may contradict everything we tell kids, but it’s only through talking to strangers that Russell can attain his last merit badge, and most importantly for him, make friends.

There’s never been a neat division between Pixar’s children and adult audiences, as evinced by Disney’s campaign to get WALL-E one of last year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations. Up‘s cast personifies that. It persuades its curmudgeon to feel young again, just as Pixar’s inclusive approach grows its audience with every film. It’s exciting to see a cutting edge animation studio debut their first feature in a new format* with a nod to the past. It’s very telling about who they are as a company, but also, who they’re setting out to be. Like classic Disney or the Termite Terrace (Warner Bros. Cartoons), today’s Pixar is not just a children’s entertainment franchise, they’re the best animation studio in the world.

*Note on 3-D: The recent rebirth of 3-D in cinemas has–so far–had some success in the extra dimension with scale (Monsters vs. Aliens) and texture (Coraline); Up does crazy things with depth, which is to say, vertical depth. I’ve never felt so afraid of heights. Recommended, if it’s available.

Full Article and Comments on the Huffington Post

Edited: Diet Coke, “Eleanor”

May 26th, 2009 § 0


Mother London, Dirs. LEGS

Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Star Trek

May 11th, 2009 § 0

on Star Trek (2009) by Paul Snyder

In some ways the tart title Star Trek seems ridiculous for the eleventh movie in a series plus six television series, almost ignoring the episodic nature of the franchise. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are obviously and admittedly no Trekkies, and they bring back a young Kirk and Spock without exactly making it an origin story, in the alternate-dimensions/Marvel multiverse mode (ala Batman Begins), which the series has never exactly done before. But despite the action-movie makeover Star Trek appears on its surface, the title suits because the movie is about the franchise.

Anyone who’s ever seen a Star Trek before knows its aesthetic feels weirdly dated for a series set in the distant future. Continuity with Gene Roddenberry’s original creation has always trumped cool spacegear; even the small advances have been justified by setting subsequent series further ahead in spacetime. But the series has always been contemporary as an allegory, making analogy to current events, ethics and philosophy. The integrity of that analogy has always been more important than kinky duds, and its effect on ratings may be one reason the latest series “Enterprise” was canceled.

This Star Trek doesn’t take enormous liberties with costume, starship or even Spock’s hair, but it does action and storytelling in a dramatically different way. The way it’s lensed and color-corrected instantly shout “this ain’t your daddy’s Star Trek“. Kirk and Spock do a lot of punching, for Kirk and Spock. This is Star Trek with the Beastie Boys in it. People get naked.

Like Captain Kirk, the series is reborn young, sexy and a lot less sensible. The story centers around a tiny blob that creates black holes called ‘red matter’, which, having falling into the wrong hands, has led to the creation of… black holes. It’s so silly a plot device they had to have Leonard Nimoy explain it to the audience. A far cry from the meditative Star Trek: The Motion Picture, this Star Trek‘s moralizing doesn’t hold a lot of red matter, so to speak. It gives an obligatory gloss over what it means to be Vulcan — whether intellect and emotion are mutually exclusive — but it’s not a really important struggle in the world today, a superabundance of logic, whatever Maureen Dowd says.

Despite its departure from the rest of the series, in some ways Star Trek is a paean to nerdom. Ironic as it is to be sentimental about a Vulcan, the film is most deeply felt in its reverence for Nimoy as Spock — plus he’s given the best jokes at the end. There’s an inexplicable scene where Scotty accidentally beams into the plumbing (because nerds love schematics, right?) and after a cheap laugh about fencing, Sulu saves the day with his incredible swordsmanship. Those little episodes are done with unabashed style, giddy with invention, and they reinforce the fact that Star Trek has its nerdy cult for a reason: it’s great entertainment.

But the biggest shift is that Star Trek, as a prequel, reworks characters and events in the Star Trek universe, even to the prohibition of events from previous movies. Entire planets don’t exist anymore. We can infer that Spock gets laid. More importantly, if Shatner isn’t Kirk, what is Kirk? Apparently being raised by a single mother has made him flamboyantly angsty. And the rest of the crew: is eastern European really an archetype? Is that why Chekov is suddenly a child prodigy? Just mention a wormhole and the audience forgives these leaps, but it makes very clear that they’re not continuity problems they’re reinventions, that the franchise has nowhere to go but everywhere, and that this isn’t meant to be the series’ origin story so much as a re-origin story.

Star Trek actually does go where the series has gone before… but it boldly goes. If there is a cohesive philosophy underwriting Star Trek, it’s discovering a way to win whatever the odds, and that sometimes the best logic is to behave erratically. And as the new Kirk fights harder and thinks less, so does Star Trek, and it certainly finds its way to win: beating expectations, the box office, and inaugurating a new era for the franchise. While it isn’t the series’ most nuanced message, its masterstroke is that the new crew’s brash ethos is completely endemic of the film itself, which makes it a hugely satisfying package.

Full Article and Comments on the Huffington Post

Edited: KOOL: Dancing in My Mind

April 8th, 2009 § 0

Cut and composited the projections for Robert Wilson‘s tribute to dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi, KOOL: Dancing in My Mind for the Guggenheim’s Works and Process.

Photo by Pavel Antonov, NY Times
Review by Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
Review by Claudia LaRocco, NY Times

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