Category: Music

Posted on

The 2010 Grammys

I watched the Grammy Awards for a while. It was striking how much of the presentation consisted of spectacular lights and explosions and special effects. This is an acknowledgement of what the music industry really is about– making everything bigger and louder– rather than any kind of nod to actual musical qualities. If you want to impress the audience even more than the previous performer, God forbid you would do something more artistic. Hell no– just turn up the volume, get bigger amps, bigger lasers, bigger breasts, use a trapeze, strip.

The problem, of course, is diminishing returns. Like the previews at the Cineplex– eventually the amp is at 10 and then what do you do to impress? Tell a story? Develop a character? Couldn’t we just go to 11?

In the middle of all this— an award for Leonard Cohen– “lifetime achievement”. They couldn’t even spare a moment to actually perform one of the legend’s songs. Besides– how do you do a laser show to:

Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river
you can hear the boats go by
you can spend the night beside her

At what point in the song do you set up the fireworks?

Well… you could. Why not?

Who was lip-synching? And does anyone care? Apparently Pink was not, even while drenched, hanging upside down from her silks. Beyonce looked to me like she synched. It’s pretty safe to assume that most pop/rock artists do. But I wish they would tell you before and during the performance. If you’re not ashamed of it, why hide it?

The Who did not appear to lip-synch their Superbowl appearance. They sounded awful all by their lonesome selves. Did Pete Townsend, 40 years ago, ever dream he would be doing a medley of his hits in front of 100 million people? A medley! I’m guessing that this appearance isn’t going to do much for their careers.

No longer hoping to die before he gets old.

 

Posted on

Precious Paul Simon

The problem, always, with Paul Simon is that lurking behind every clever turn of phrase and every strong image is the college sophomore desperately trying to call your attention to one line or another written specifically to have attention called to it. Simon’s a good writer– sometimes an excellent writer. The pitch-perfect tone of “Homeward Bound” cannot be denied. But for every “on a tour of one-night stands/my suitcase and guitar in hand” there’s a “like a rat in a maze” (“Patterns”) or a “you read your Emily Dickenson/ and I my Robert Frost” (“Dangling Conversation”). And you cringe a little.

A critic once referred to “The Boxer” as “one of Paul Simon’s few unpretentious songs”. I thought that was right twenty years ago and it seems more right now. That means I can throw on a CD of 20 or 25 Paul Simon songs and thoroughly enjoy them… about once every two years. Try not to think about whether “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” proves his sophistication, or “El Condor Pasa” his world-weary sensitivity.

One of his better songs– though I barely noticed it for years– is “A Poem on the Underground Wall”. Typically, it’s not a novel concept or a highly original insight: graffiti as some kind of authentic urban poetry. In this case, I liked the last verse, as the hyperventilating bum slashes onto an advertising poster “a poem/comprised of four letters”.

The author of the poem is one of those vaguely ghostly, invisible personages that inhabit the landscape of urban decay and disillusionment, a ragged man, a shadow, who races away, his heart beating madly, after making his “statement”. Simon has the sense to stop the poem before it becomes too weighty, though he needlessly conjures an image of the vagrant being suckled by the “breast of darkness”. Yes, there’s the preciousness. You could never imagine Dylan doing that line.

Simon has occasionally slyly complained about being taken less seriously, or monumentally, than Dylan. That’s why. That and the fact that Simon’s best five songs wouldn’t crack Dylan’s best 25. But it’s a good song. The urban world back in 1965 seemed madly in love with regimentation, conformity, mindless consumption, and the endless pursuit of trivial gratifications even as it rotted from within. It seems even more so today and the pathos and futility of the four-letter poem seems even more poignant. A casualty talks back. Ten years later, maybe he occupied a Harry Chapin song: Sniper.

In an earlier song:

And the sign flashed out it’s warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And echoed in the Sounds of Silence.

Okay. Bit cheesy. But most clichés exist for a good reason. Somewhere in the faint, dark echo of their original inspirations lies something true and interesting.

 

Posted on

A Saint in Every Dream

And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
(“Time”, Tom Waits)

A great phrase in a great lyric comes to mind as readily as a lovely image you remember from a distant place of important events in your life. In this case: “history puts a saint in every dream”. I’ve wondered for years what exactly that means.

It’s not the kind of line you sing while hanging upside down, wet, on a trapeze dripping over those awestruck young women who all seemed, in their faces, to be screaming “I want to be her!” It’s something you overhear in a bar, over the smell of urine and stale beer, and the rumble of streetcars or trains, and the dismal cuckold of useless tears.

I think it means that what we don’t remember–that we are not conscious of– constantly intrudes on our interpretation of past events, especially when our memory of those events is suspect.

History is written by the victors, of course, including the emotional victors, and we typically interpret events in light of the prejudices adopted afterwards. Most of us probably remember that the Americans entered the war against Germany to stop them from killing Jews. They did not– they entered because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany happened to be allied with Japan. Most of us probably remember a kind thing or two about someone who later treated us shabbily.

Only a few years before Pearl Harbor, Great Britain had negotiated a great peace with Hitler and Nazi rallies were held in Madison Square Gardens. A few years later, Stalin became our best friend, our comrade, until he too had to be reanimated. America supported Bin Laden when he took on the Soviets– we know how that ended.

But “history puts a saint in every dream”.

Posted on

Olympic Fakes

From steroids to music to politics, the Olympics are all about phoniness and this recent story merely confirms the truth. Nobody at any level of organization really cares about sport or competition or human achievements or international goodwill or anything like that. What they care about is selling the advertiser’s products and getting great seats for themselves and their relatives and their friends in high office for the gold medal hockey game.

What were they thinking? They were thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we could run the sound of the orchestra through a digital link to the PA system instead of through those darn microphones and mixers that just don’t seem to ever make it sound…. you know… just kind of nice. And what if an orchestra member makes a mistake? And hell, Obama did it. And — better yet– we can use a more photo-genic orchestra, which could simply mime the performance. Fabulous!

It’s despicable. But what’s really despicable is the way they act after they are caught: well, what’s wrong with it?

Well, if there isn’t anything wrong with it, why not tell everyone that you are broadcasting a recording instead of a performance? That the performers you see on the screen didn’t even perform on the recording. Why don’t you just can the orchestra all together?

Why ban steroids? If audiences get a bigger thrill from seeing records broken than from seeing a mere race, why not cheat?

Don’t forget — you and I are paying for these people to conduct these obscene rituals of mass manipulation and self aggrandizement. We are paying for it.

And hurray for Bramwell Tovey, the conductor of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, for refusing to give in on the issue.

Posted on

Ian and Sylvia

I was reading about the folk scene in New York City in the early 1960’s once and came across what I thought was an extraordinary comment. This was time of incredible intellectual and cultural ferment, and Greenwich Village was rich with young talents like Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, the Roches, and so on.

The comment was something like this: many aspiring folk singers envied the talents of any number of song-writers and performers, but if you asked anyone who they would most like to be– if they could be someone else– the answer was usually Ian Tyson or Sylvia Fricker.

Ian & Sylvia were not among the most successful of those performers– though, for a time, they were quite successful– nor among the most prolific or talented. But they were very talented, moderately successful, and, perhaps more than anything else, beautiful. They were beautiful in that magical, transcendent mode that radiates class and intelligence and sophistication. Even this album cover conveyed this: they are not posing. They exist in a sort of conscious state of distinguished self-contemplation, with neither ego nor false humility. They have momentarily paused for the image, not caring if we are impressed or not, because they know what they look like and they know what they are.

One of my brothers owned the album “Lovin’ Sound”, pictured above, which was released in 1967. As an adolescent, the cover picture of Sylvia with the low-cut top– that elegant cleavage– stirred me for obvious reasons. I wasn’t yet a huge fan of their music — now I realize it was probably too authentic and complex for my tastes at the time. When I listen to the song “Lovin’ Sound” today, I am far more impressed with it. Restraint and taste are the last things an adolescent learns to appreciate. But the album cover stayed in my mind for decades. A few years ago, I started searching the internet for it and, surprisingly, had great difficulty locating a copy. Just recently, I finally succeeded.

Listen to “The Lovin’ Sound”. It’s trendy– songs about universal love and peace were hot for a while there in the late 1960’s — but a little richer than something like, say, “Come on people now/smile on your brother/ everybody get together/ start to love one another right now”.

Your world is crying now my friend
But give it Love
And it will mend
And, teach you All
The music to the Lovin Sound
Oh, the Lovin Sound

Well, okay. So maybe it isn’t that much more sophisticated. But it’s a fine song, a bit marred by a somewhat jarring attempt to meld folk and rock styles that reminds me of “The Sound of Silence”.

They had a tv show. They struggled through a few more albums that never seemed to go anywhere.

Then they split. Ian went out west to become a cowboy and sing cowboy songs and run his ranch in Alberta, and Sylvia worked for the CBC. Maybe he cheated on her. Maybe she cheated on him. We don’t know– that’s part of what gave them class: no public drama. Peter Gzowski of the CBC, in narration over some documentary on ’60’s folk groups, says they had “artistic and personal differences”.

But they remain iconic to me, the definition of grace and class, the essence of intelligent, cultured expression, and I can’t think of a single other ensemble that comes close to them in their prime in that regard.

Posted on

At Seventeen

Janis Ian wrote “At Seventeen” in 1973, at the age of 22. She was already somewhat well-known for an earlier protest song, “Society’s Child”. “At Seventeen” — it seems astonishing to me now– became a huge hit, on the pops singles charts, eventually reaching #1.

Here’s a bit of interesting trivia: Janis Ian appeared on the very first episode of “Saturday Night Live” and performed this song.

I don’t know of any other song like it. How many singer-songwriters would write and perform these lines:

And murmur vague obscenities
To ugly girls like me, at seventeen.

About the same number as those who would write a song like “Donald and Lydia”.

The song, if you’re not familiar with it, is about the judgments teenagers make about each other, about “those of us with ravaged faces/lacking in the social graces”, about excluding those who fall short– those who are too short or clumsy for basketball, who never receive valentines, and never get to hear those “vague obscenities”– the most rich and allusive line in the song. It is suggested that the beauty queens will get their comeuppance:

So remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality
and dubious integrity

The small town eyes will gape at you
In dull surprise when pain in due
Exceeds accounts received
At seventeen.

I’m not sure what that means. That the love you get for being beautiful is of “dubious integrity”? Temporary? Transient? I thought the song would have worked better if the “small town eyes” were “gaping” at the wrecks of the lives of those who were excluded because of their “ravaged faces” and who found solace in other places, like drugs, self-abasement, whatever. And I’m not sure that just because you’re beautiful you can’t have true love.

Either way– “exceeds accounts received”– is a clever line. Either way, your punishment, your suffering will never be the amount you deserve. Oh how badly we want to cling to the idea that you do deserve what you get. In almost all the movies about people with disabilities who overcome monumental obstacles to “succeed”, the person with the disability is glamorized. They are disabled, but beautiful, or charming, or peaceful and quietly stoic, like Michael Oher in “Blind Side”. They make you feel good because you tell yourself that you would have behaved decently to this poor, unfortunate soul.

Would we behave as decently to unfortunate souls who don’t have anything lovable about them? Who don’t agree to be the “canvas” upon which we paint our own virtue?

John Prine, an indispensable artist, wrote the song “Donald and Lydia” in 1971, and it appeared on his brilliant first album “John Prine” (which also included “Sam Stone”, “Flag Decal”, and “Hello in There”–three other great songs).

Here’s a taste:

Lydia hid her thoughts like a cat
Behind her small eyes sunk deep in her fat
She read romance magazines up in her room
And felt just like Sunday on Saturday afternoon.

Lydia and Donald are both ill-equipped to have any kind of success in society. They are unattractive, socially inept, and they know it. They’re like Janis Ian’s seventeen-year-old girl– desperate for a shot at love.

They are as real as your right hand, but they are very, very rarely the subject of music or song or film, in our society. We’re too busy selling phony stories that worship women like Leigh-Ann Touhy (Blind Side) while short-changing the very people she wants to help by reducing them, as they say, to “canvases upon which we paint the image of our own virtue”.

Lydia is just plain fat. Donald is just one of “too many”, a private first class in the army.

There were spaces between Donald
And whatever he said
Strangers had taught him to live in his head
He envisioned the details of romantic scenes
After midnight in the stillness of the barracks latrine

Donald and Lydia find each other– in their dreams. In a flight of fancy, Prine imagines them reaching out from their homely little enclaves of self-doubt, across the ether and flotsam of human insensitivity, to find each other and connect in some mystical, orgasmic union of lost souls.

They made love in the mountains
they made love in the streams
they made love in the valleys
they made love in their dreams
and when it was over
there was nothing to say
’cause mostly they made love from 10 miles away.

There are very, very few movies that deal honestly with the harsh facts of life for people like Donald and Lydia and girls with “ravaged faces”. Since most of North America believes that the function of entertainment is to allow you to escape from your dreary little life into fantasies…

Perhaps the best, still, is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” (1955), about a likeable Italian American butcher with no illusions about himself or his prospects.

Great Dialogue (from “Roger Dodger” 2002)

Roger: You can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that they’re missing something from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants.

Posted on

Take a Trip to New York

Hi Marg,

We had a great trip to New York. “Hair” was fantastic, and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was also fabulous. We hung around Times Square for a while– it looks like a very interesting place– lots of glitter and lots of people around– but not much to actually do except grab a coffee at Starbucks and hang out. However, if you don’t have tickets in advance, you can buy heavily discounted tickets for Broadway shows there by lining up in front of a TKTS booth and seeing what is available. These tickets are typically 40% off, available for shows that night, most of which are in easy walking distance of the stand. You can’t miss the booth– it’s right in Times Square. We didn’t use it because we already had our tickets, and you wouldn’t have been able to get tickets for “Hair” there anyway.

We loved MOMA. It’s on 53rd St. near 7th Avenue– it’s closed on Tuesdays! Especially the 5th and 4th floors, which had a lot of Picasso and other modern artists. Beautiful building, and we really enjoyed lunch in the café on the 2nd floor. You can take pictures (no flash) and most paintings are unprotected (no glass barriers). Right now they are also showing this “installation” that consists of the possessions of a Chinese woman who “kept everything”. It’s actually quite intriguing.

If you want a great view, there is Empire State Building of course, but you will probably have a better experience at the Rockefeller Centre on 50th St. also around 7th Avenue (near MOMA!).

Everything, by the way, is expensive. I find you just have to kind of ignore prices and do what you want to do– you came all this way and went though all the trouble of getting there, so why not?

The Museum of Natural History is pretty good– a bit like our ROM but bigger. It’s on the West side of Central Park (I assume you’ll have a touristy map). Oh– there is a “Titanic” display on 44th Street, near Times Square. I thought it would be kind of cheesy, but it is actually very interesting. It features a lot of exhibits of items retrieved from the wreck, beautifully presented, with lots of basic information. There is even a recreation of a couple of state rooms and the grand stairway. Expensive again ($25) but we thought it was worthwhile. Took about two hours to go through.

We weren’t high on Ellis Island– they haven’t done very much with the building– just placards, text, and pictures, really, though it was interesting to see the island. You won’t get into the Statue of Liberty– it’s all reservations now, and they are convinced that Al Qaeda is determined to attack it (!) so you’ll have to wait in line so they can scan your lunch bag. You do wonder if they shouldn’t be investing the huge cost of it into protecting something that really matters. It would probably be cheaper to buy a spare Statue of Liberty and keep it in a warehouse in Brooklyn in case it’s needed.

Bill

To use the toll roads on the way to New York City, you take a slip of paper from a man in a booth and then, when you exit the toll road, hand it to another man in a booth who calculates your fee and collects the money.

This is pretty whacky, especially if you have used the 407 in Canada, which has an automated system. You don’t even pay when you exit– you get a bill in the mail.

But then, we paid 5 or 6 dollars for each stretch of the toll road in the U.S. Ontario’s 407 seems to charge a lot more. Your bill is not going to be less than $15 for even a short stretch, from the middle of Toronto to Brampton.

Audio Books: We listened to the entire audio recording of “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt on the way down and back– about 14 hours, altogether, with time out to hear “Hair”, which we saw in New York at the John Hirschbeck Theatre.

“Angela’s Ashes” is a remarkable memoir, of Frank McCourt’s upbringing in dire poverty in Limerick, Ireland, in the 1930’s and 40’s.

The saddest song I’ve ever heard is “Kilkelly Ireland” by Peter Jones, based on letters found in his grandparent’s attic. It might well be the perfect soundtrack for “Angela’s Ashes”. “Kilkelly Ireland” is simply a series of letters, one to a verse, each verse a decade, to a son who has moved away to America, updating him on family events, expressing how wonderful it would be to see him again.

Posted on

The JK Wedding Video

Can’t someone post a fun video of a church wedding without generating a storm of controversy?

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

I like it. But I was surprised to find that some people apparently believe the moves were spontaneous, and that the wedding party just decided out of nowhere that they would all dance down the aisle. The entire wedding party worked with a choreographer for quite some time, of course, to develop the sequences, the moves, and positions. The somersault by the bridegroom, for example, required a fair bit of precise timing and practiced coordination.

That, to me, does not diminish the pleasure of watching it one whit. It looks to me as if there was an effort to find out what each person could do and then work with him or her to develop the entire “dance” from start to finish. There are tricks and flourishes that could only have come from training and experience. The moves are too clever and sophisticated to have come from the members of a randomly assembled group like a wedding party– unless that group included a choreographer.

Nobody is trying to fool anybody.

I’ve seen a few comments about the dance moves being clumsy or lacking in gracefulness. Did these viewers forget that this was a real wedding party, not a dance troupe? Or did they just confuse some modern Bob Fosse type moves (especially the slow-motion effect near the end) with obtuseness? Considering the fact that the people in the wedding party were probably chosen because they were friends or relatives of the couple getting married, I thought they did very well. You could tell some were more comfortable with basic movements, and others– like the short guy with the beard– had some real skills. There are also moments that seem linked to the lyrics in a subtle, suggestive way– as when Chris Brown promises he’ll never let her fall and the dancers go into that slow motion tableau, or when the two girls pull each other like slingshots down the aisle.

Yet others have found fault with the idea of doing a celebratory dance during what– they allege– should be a “solemn” occasion. For heaven’s sake, they are celebrating a wedding in a church. They are happy: two individuals found lifetime partners. Their friends are joyfully celebrating with them. Someone else smartly quoted Mencken (I paraphrase): puritans are people who suspect that someone somewhere is having fun. If Jesus had attended this wedding, I think he would have gladly boogied down the aisle along with the wedding party. The Pharisees would have stared solemnly from the side, frowning.

By the late 1970’s, the tradition of the father walking his daughter down the aisle to “give her away” almost seemed to be going extinct. Well, it’s back with a vengeance. Why? Why on earth is a young woman not offended by the very idea? I don’t buy the idea that it’s a meaningless vestige of age-old traditions. I does mean something.

Posted on

Tarnished “Shine”

Did you see the movie “Shine”? I know– you loved it. What an inspirational story, about how a promising young piano prodigy, destroyed by a psychotic, over-bearing father, eventually recovers to become one of the most brilliant classical pianists in the world.

He even masters that fantastically difficult piece by Rach… Rachminoff? Something… Anyway, it’s so hard, that hardly anyone in the world ever attempts. When he attempted it, he had a nervous breakdown– right on stage! Because it brought up the passions he felt about his over-bearing father, who was that way because he lost his family in the holocaust. Yeah, you heard that it was not 100% accurate– but who cares!

Just to start us out, let’s first cover the inaccuracies of the film, before we get to the salient issues.

First of all, Helfgott’s parents did not “survive” the Holocaust– they never lived the Holocaust. They moved to Australia before Hitler came to power. So that explanation of Helfgott’s father’s brutality is out the window. But that doesn’t matter because, secondly, Helfgott’s father, Peter, according to Helfgott’s sister Margaret, was never the domineering brute depicted in the movie anyway. Who’s right? Well, it’s no contest: director Scott Hicks never bothered to interview Helfgott’s family or friends about his real upbringing. He took all his information from Gillian Murray, the older woman who married Helfgott later in life, and who is portrayed as utterly angelic in the movie, and who happened to be the one to “authorize” this biography in the first place (through her control of David).

Thirdly, most critics agree that regardless of the thrill of the narrative, David Helfgott is a mediocre performer at best, and they are deeply saddened by the fact that after the movie was released, he was able to command up to $250 a ticket when many very, very good musicians could barely make a cent at their trade.

I am interested, at this moment, in the fact that many people seem to feel that these untruths don’t affect the “inspirational” character of the story. Of course they do. How can it be inspirational to believe that it is possible for a person to overcome huge psychological barriers to pursue a successful career as a brilliant classical musician when it didn’t happen? What’s inspiring about a film-maker using a pack of lies presented as “truth” to make a lot of money? What’s inspiring about the fact that Peter Helfgott has been utterly slandered? What is inspiring about the fact that David Helfgott himself may have been exploited and manipulated by Gillian Murray?

“Shine” is a bit of a throwback to those old films from the 1950’s and early 60’s in which an attractive patient like Elizabeth Taylor was suffering from severe emotional problems and an attractive psychiatrist like Montgomery Cliff would patiently uncover more and more “truth” until a single traumatic event would be uncovered. Simply uncovering the event usually went a long way towards curing the patient. The glibness of those films, by today’s standards, is astonishing, but then, maybe they were more like parables presenting a truth that has been held to religiously ever since by large segments of the population. The more acute professionals now recognize that it’s simply not that simple.

It’s most pernicious current expression is the idea that any woman with emotional problems must have been abused at some point because only a traumatic event can cause mental disorders.

David Helfgott simply had problems. Another school of thought would have held that he had a chemical imbalance in the brain that could have been treated with drugs. But it’s a more exciting film if you can pin the cause on something, some event, or some evil person.

Do people honestly sigh with approval when the movie shows Helfgott proposing to Murray, and Murray beneficently smiling and indulging him, and guiding him to new heights of confidence and artistic achievement, without giving the slightest thought to the fact this part of the movie consists of Gillian Murray enlightening us as to just how wonderful a person she is? I found it nauseating and disturbing. We are given to understand that Helfgott has serious mental illnesses, yet we see Murray accept his marriage proposal and marry him and begin to manage his career.

You just hope– …. well, maybe not. Maybe you don’t even bother to hope anymore than anyone cares about the truth, that the director would research his subject, that the writer would talk to all the involved parties, like Helfgott’s sister and mother and first doctor, and — shocker!– his first wife!– who has completely vanished from this account. What’s the matter, Gillian? Didn’t have time to include that chapter in the screen play?

Why does no one care? Why do otherwise sensible people seem to prefer fantasy, even when it’s as insidious as this one?

On Bad Acting: Mr. Waltz had nothing but praise for Mr. Tarantino’s way with actors. “I’ve tried to analyze why actors are often better in Quentin’s films than in other films, and I think it’s because he doesn’t expose them to the necessity of bad acting,” he said. Austrian Actor Christoph Walz, NY Times, August 15, 2009

Why on earth would any sane artist or record company demand that Youtube REMOVE their copyrighted music from a video?  Read this.

At the same time as Chris Brown is reaping fabulous rewards for allowing his music to stay on the wedding video that has helped make it a hit, the music industry is prosecuting a student for sharing music on his computer.

Biopics and Other Lies

 

Posted on

West Side Imposters

Although the singing voices are, for the most part, dubbed by unspecified vocal performers, the device is not noticeable and detracts not one whit from the beauty and eloquence of the songs.

Bosley Crowther, New York Times, Review of “West Side Story”, October 1961

Has the man lost his mind? Natalie Wood leans into Richard Beymer with all the earnest, perky, passion she can muster… and Marni Nixon’s voice comes out, operatic, soaring, obviously dubbed. Richard Beymer sings back to her, in the voice of Jimmy Bryant– less absurdly unconnected, but still silly– and all the passion drains away like runny soup. Am I the only crazy person out there who tries to imagine how that scene was actually shot– the actors actually bellowing out something– their lips are moving in sync to the voices– and sounding hilariously horrible? Do they make no sound at all or do they just sing badly?

I don’t know. It’s too stupid to contemplate, and I don’t care how many movies did it, or if any of them won Oscars (as “West Side Story” did.) It’s the steroids of the popular arts: fake everything. It’s dishonest, tacky, and stupid.

It’s like those scenes in a car with the fake background through the rear window, and the two people struggling over control of the wheel: you’re supposed to feel tension? Over what? The possibility that the projector might fall over exposing the studio wall behind it? Or those scenes in a boat, where you can almost picture the crew with buckets tossing water at them from the wings.

Why on earth would they not just learn to film these scenes in real cars on real roads? European directors, who couldn’t afford huge studio sets, did it all the time. Independent film-makers do it. Martin Scorcese usually does it.

It’s not as if I’m against technique– what they do now is a vast improvement. They either put the entire car on a trailer and tow it down the street while filming, or mount a camera on the door, or both. They even have a rear-engined “car” with a built in camera mount on the front where the engine would normally be. It’s actually driven by a stuntman in the back– the steering wheel is fake.

You know why they did the awful back-projection method back then? Because the producers of these movies are completely convinced that you and I don’t give a damn about authenticity. We are easily led. We don’t want look at the relatively imperfect face of a real singer, or hear the imperfect voice of the real actor. We want to be deceived.

I know I’m wrong. I know that the movie studios make a lot of money doing it their way and nobody seems to care how fake or phony the whole thing is.

I note a irony: audiences apparently were thrilled that some scenes from “West Side Story” were filmed on the real streets of Manhattan. They’re right– those scenes almost look fabulous (except that the vacant lots and streets were tidied up and lit perfectly for the shoot).

So why on earth would they care about that, if they don’t care about the voices?

There is a movie called “The New Land” about Swedish immigrants struggling to establish themselves in the 19th century west. It seems silly to even contemplate, but I feel a load of gratitude to the director for filming the outdoor scenes outdoors, the snowy scenes in real snow, and the indoor scenes inside a real cabin. It’s beautiful. It’s marvelous. It’s wondrous. It’s how films should be made.