Nowadays, Willie Nelson is the bearded, braided, grand old man of country music. He’s not only a musician and composer but also an activist and philanthropist beloved by country music fans, farmers (he established the Farm Aid movement with Neil Young and John Mellencamp in 1985), hipsters, even hip-hop artists. When he sang a pot-themed Christmas carol with Stephen Colbert on Colbert’s delightful “A Colbert Christmas” special a few years back, he was the highlight of a highly lit show. So it’s fun to see a clean-cut, clean-shaven Willie in this film clip from 1962 in which he dons a sharp suit and uses his smooth DJ voice between songs.
Willie spent several years as an actual DJ in the 1950s, first in Texas and later in the Pacific Northwest. After getting his start on the radio in Texas, he moved west to broadcast his resonant announcer’s voice from a radio station in Vancouver, Washington, just across the state line from Portland, Oregon. There he bought his first house, had his second child and wrote several songs that became big hits for other country artists. In Texas and in Washington, Willie was famous for opening his show with his signature line: “This is your ol’ cotton pickin’, snuff dippin’, tobacco chewin’, coffee pot dodgin’, dumplin’ eatin’, frog giggin’ hillbilly from Hill County!” (I’m so glad he moved beyond frog gigging.)
Once Willie started having real success in selling his songs, he moved back to Texas to resume his DJ duties while looking for recording opportunities of his own. He DJ’ed on Texas radio stations while teaching guitar classes and writing songs on the side. He moved to Nashville in 1960 hoping to get a recording contract of his own, but all his demos were rejected. He finally got his first contract in 1961 and released his first album, …And Then I Wrote, in 1962.
Well before Willie was a household name, he was writing hit songs for other country artists. His best-known composition, “Crazy,” became Patsy Cline’s biggest hit and is the most frequently played juke box song of all time. He was paid just $50 for the rights to it, but, happily, he said in one of his very enjoyable interviews with Terry Gross on her Fresh Air National Public Radio show that he did receive royalties on it later. (For more on the story behind the song, check out this piece by NPR’s Linda Wertheimer was featured on All Things Considered in 2000.)
Though Willie is a country legend, listen closely to his phrasing and you’ll recognize the huge influence that jazz has had on his performing style. Willie is always singing and swinging just a little off the beat to add interest to every measure. Despite his strong twang and the trademark nasal quality of his voice when he sings in his upper register, a warm mellowness takes over in his lower tones. There is a spare quality to his singing and beautiful guitar playing that reminds one jazz musicianship; his takes on pop standards like “Stardust” often have a dreamy quality.
Willie has recorded with many artists, and his distinctive voice blends well with all sorts of pop, rock, folk, jazz and country voices, smooth and rough, high and low. Willie has taken on a sort of everyman persona over the years, but behind the easygoing, scraggly looking fellow in jeans and bandannas is a major philanthropist, humanitarian and advocate for animal welfare; a sophisticated musical storyteller; a legendary composer; a gifted and subtle guitarist; and, at times, a mellow crooner with a voice and a vision like no one else’s.
If you think Lyle Lovett is just a country musician, you’re missing out on so much. He’s a dryly witty lyricist and composer; a talented guitarist and singer; his songs have been featured in movie scores from “Toy Story” to “The Crying Game”; and he leads a fantastic big band, which Lyle calls his Large Band. Together their music combines country, big band/swing, jazz, blues, gospel and bluegrass. Lyle is a generous bandleader, giving ample time to his musicians to show their prodigious singing and playing skills on instruments from slide guitar to trombone to fiddle to cello. (Yes, cello—his longtime cellist John Hagen brings a beautiful richness to the Large Band’s sound and his solos are elegant and warm—and squeaky and wild when necessary.) Lyle’s backup singer Francine Reed has a big, bold, sexy alto voice and a devoted following of her own; she returns to Seattle for another stint as Teatro Zinzanni‘s resident chanteuse this winter.
I first saw Lyle and his Large Band in concert in 1987, and most recently saw them last weekend. Their professionalism, evident pleasure in performing, and ability to produce a tight and exciting 2-1/2-hour show after all these years together made them just as thrilling to watch this week as they were when I first enjoyed them all those years ago. The video above shows Lyle and his band displaying all the amazing influences they draw from in one terrific showstopping song. Don’t stop there—check out his albums (especially “Joshua Judges Ruth,” “The Road to Ensenada,” “Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” and “Pontiac“) and you’ll see what I mean.
Lovers of literature celebrate today as Bloomsday in honor of the life and writings of Irish writer James Joyce. The events of his monumental novel Ulysses occur on June 16, 1904, a date made dear to Joyce’s heart because it was the day upon which he and his eventual wife and long-time love, Nora Barnacle, had their first outing together. The day’s name honors Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.
In the late 1980s, eclectic and influential British singer/songwriter Kate Bush wanted to write a song based on Molly Bloom’s sexy, often censored soliloquy, which ends the novel. However, Joyce’s grandson Stephen Joyce, who has long held decision-making power over his grandfather’s estate, forbade it. He has been famously resistant to granting permission to other artists and writers who have sought to quote or incorporate elements of Joyce’s work into their own. Undaunted, Bush reworked the lyrics and created a beautiful work of art, her song “The Sensual World,” and released it as part of the album of the same name in 1989. The song is about Joyce’s character Molly Bloom stepping down off the pages of the novel into the real world of the senses, and it lifts phrases and ideas from Ulysses without quoting from the novel at great length or too directly.
In 2011, the Joyce estate at last granted Bush license to use her original material, and she rerecorded the song as “Flower of the Mountain,” and released it on the album Director’s Cut. Lovely as it is with Kate’s voice grown earthier with time, I prefer the lighter sound and lyrical flow of The Sensual World.
One of the best character introductions in the history of film has to be the title sequence in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Though we meet young Peter Quill in a scene just before the title, when we first meet grown-up Peter (alias Star-Lord) he’s walking through a forbidding, bombed-out landscape conjuring holographic ghosts of the past before entering an enormous, dank ruin. Then he presses play on his Walkman, his hips start to sway, the title pops up and he joyfully spins, dances and splashes his way past skeletons, uses a hissing lizard-rat as a microphone and hops up a stone stairway to the strains of Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love.” In two minutes you learn so much about his character: he’s a goofy badass, a joyous loner, a playful rebel. I’ll say one thing about Chris Pratt’s characterization of Star-Lord: it’s perfect.
To celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, let me share this delightful bit of his work (if he was indeed the author of the plays attributed to him). This performance is by Mark Rylance, who is considered by many to be the world’s greatest living Shakespearean actor—Stephen Fry believes him the best stage actor alive today.
Rylance, who has won Olivier, Tony and BAFTA awards for his acting, became the first director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London in 1995. It could have become a kitschy tourist attraction but he turned it into a true powerhouse of a theatrical company in the decade he spent at its helm. He is now the star of “Wolf Hall,” the BBC’s excellent production of the story of Tudor political genius Thomas Cromwell‘s tussles with King Henry VIII. The series is currently showing in installments on PBS in the U.S. (If you’ve missed the first few episodes you can still stream them online for a short while.) Rylance is famed for his simplicity and naturalism; he’s not showy, and this performance isn’t the rousing, bold performance you might expect if you’ve seen Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier deliver this speech. I thought I’d give you a more subtle taste of the Bard of Avon. (Interestingly, Rylance and fellow Shakespearean great Derek Jacobidon’t believe Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare’s plays.”)
In the 1960s popular music went in a number of different directions. One cheerful subgenre of pop that originated in the U.S. was known as “sunshine pop” (or sometimes “flower pop” or “twee pop”) and was characterized by intricate vocal harmonies, sophisticated production (think of the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” album) and upbeat warmth. In addition to the Beach Boys, some of the most popular sunshine pop bands were The Turtles (“Happy Together“), The Mamas and the Papas (“Monday, Monday“), The Fifth Dimension (“Up, Up and Away“), Harpers Bizarre (“Feelin’ Groovy“), Spanky and our Gang (“Lazy Day“), The Seekers (“Georgy Girl“) and the Association (“Windy“). A New York-based sunshine pop group of brothers and sisters called The Free Design was never as prominent as most of these bands, but they were among my favorite groups as a child, and I spent hundreds of hours listening to their albums. They were popular with professional musicians like my mother and her friends because The Free Design‘s musicianship was so strong and their compositions were often rigorous and showed evidence of classical training and technique.
Over the past decade, the music of The Free Design has seen a renaissance. One of their songs, “Love You,” appears regularly in a wonderful current ad for Delta Airlines, and has appeared in international ads for Toyota, in the charming Will Ferrell fantasy Stranger Than Fiction and as part of Showtime’s series Weeds. The syrupy sweet, lighter-than-air lyrics of “Love You” are as insubstantial as down and just as soft and appealing—here’s a sample:
Dandelion, milkweed, silky in a sunny sky Reach out and hitch a ride and float on by Balloons down below catching colors of the rainbow Red, blue and yellow green, I love you
Weeds also featured the group’s song “I Found Love,” which was played on The Gilmore Girls as well. Nearly a half century after they first began recording, the group is delighting a whole new generation as part of a sunshine pop revival.
Some classify The Free Design as a “baroque pop” group since they incorporated intricate vocal harmonies and classical elements in their compositions, and they sang some melancholic ballads along with their uptempo hits such as “Kites Are Fun.” Some of their most beautiful songs, such as the heartbreakingly pretty “Don’t Turn Away” and the elegant but cynical song “The Proper Ornaments,” have a darker quality to them, and they expand into surprisingly complex vocal harmonies that certainly take them out of the sunshine pop mainstream and put them into the baroque camp. A terrific example of both their upbeat major-key sunshine pop sound and the baroque complexity of their interlacing close vocal harmonies is their song “Umbrellas.”
Their lovely but strange song “Daniel Dolphin” is an odd mixture of styles, upbeat seeming at first yet in a minor key, and while it begins as a song about a playful dolphin, it grows serious as Daniel carries away a dying old man. When Daniel returns, he is killed by those who misunderstand the reason for his journey, which turns out to have been to facilitate the old man’s reincarnation—a surprisingly arcane and dark twist from a group often mistakenly characterized as nothing but sunny.
The Free Design began as a trio of members of the Dedrick family: Chris, who wrote most of their songs, his brother Bruce and their sister Sandra. Their younger sisters Ellen and Stefanie joined the group later, but it is Sandy’s warm lead vocals that were at the heart of the group. Sandra Dedrick now lives in Ontario, Canada, where she writes poetry, songs and children’s books.
Every large city has parks or plazas where people in difficulty congregate. Some go there to commiserate with others who feel down and out; others go there looking for escapes from their pain. Drug deals clearly take place in these parks; it’s not unusual to find drug paraphernalia scattered around in some of them. Of course, not everyone who frequents such parks goes to them to break the law; people who gather there are looking for different ways to feel connected with others, to pass the time, to lessen their boredom or frustration or pain.
I rarely see women in these parks. It is easy to imagine that the men who spend their time there often feel disenfranchised and powerless, so when they gather in parks or plazas they often posture in front of others, commenting on the women who pass through their midst, calling out to females in the cars that drive past and generally making us feel, if not unsafe, then at the very least uncomfortable. There is a noticeably macho atmosphere in such places, so showing respect to women is less common there than are displays of sexual attention and bravado.
In Seattle, there are several downtown parks like this where a woman walking alone during daylight hours might feel uncomfortable. When I walk past them I don’t feel endangered, just conspicuous. When women walk by, all eyes turn to us. The men there make comments when I walk by, just as they do to most women who pass within a half block.
Last weekend I was in the part of the city that gave the world the term “skid row”—what is now Yesler Way in the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle was originally a “skid road,” a path along which timber workers skidded logs in the 19th century. This part of town boasts many attractive Victorian buildings converted into art galleries; it also has many bars and missions that serve the large numbers of homeless and poor people in the area. While I was in a Pioneer Square building, I became flooded with difficult memories. I was so overcome that I needed to walk outside to avoid drawing attention as my face crumpled and tears began to well up in my eyes. There was no nearby alley to duck into, no public restroom, no bench to sit on or doorway to enter that wouldn’t expose me to strangers who would notice my distress. But there was a park a half-block away, and I walked toward it in hopes of finding an open bench where I could sit for a few minutes until I regained my composure.
This park is an open plaza without much in the way of benches since public seating tends to encourage homeless people to look for a place to sleep, and city governments tend to discourage such behavior. The only place I could find to rest that wasn’t taken was a large flowerpot with a rim big enough to lean against. I saw that there were clusters of men in the plaza but I assumed that if they saw me with my head down they wouldn’t bother to speak to me. I was wrong. One tried to make conversation with me from a distance but I didn’t look up from my handkerchief. He sounded slightly offended when I didn’t respond, as if he thought I’d entered his territory and then hadn’t had the courtesy to acknowledge him. He came closer and made another comment, this one about my looks. It was not unkind but not what I wanted. I realized that I’d entered his turf and I was the odd one out in that situation, and that if I didn’t respond in some way I might attract more attention or hear negative comments about what might be seen as my arrogance or contempt. So I wiped my eyes and looked up.
I said, “Sorry, I’m having trouble today.” With that, he and another young man walked up to me and immediately said how sorry they were, and how they hated to see me crying. One walked close to me, and as he spoke I saw that he was missing his two front teeth. He couldn’t have been more than 25 years old; the other, taller man was about the same age. The toothless man said to me that he wished he could cry, but that he couldn’t anymore; he had clearly seen so much pain that he felt all cried out. I wiped my eyes and told him I was so sorry that he was hurting. He thanked me and nodded. I said, “There must be a lot of pain in this park, huh?” And he and his friend nodded and said, “Oh yeah, a lot of pain.” Then he said that I needed to know that things were going to be getting better, and that there were people who were going to be there for me, and he spread his arms wide, swooped in and gave me a big hug. I told him I wished things would get better for him soon and that I hoped he’d find comfort. Then he smiled and walked away, and his tall friend came closer. He said that he could see that I just needed to have faith, and that he could tell that things would be better for me soon, and he blessed me. I said “Thank you, sir, for your help. Bless you, too.” He said he was glad he could be there for me, and he wished me well as I walked away.
I keep thinking about those exchanges, and how for those moments in time, our ages, our races, our genders, our economic circumstances made no difference to us. These young men saw me hurting and came to comfort me. I acknowledged that their attention was kind, and they gave me respect and courtesy. They treated me not like an outsider who didn’t belong but as a human being who deserved dignity and help. In many places in this country they would be reviled and assumed to be thugs or criminals because of their appearance, but the men I spoke with were gracious and gentle. They’d seen trouble and understood sadness, and they didn’t judge me or assume that my difference in personal circumstances made me undeserving of sympathy. Our exchange was all about honoring the humanity and dignity in each other, recognizing that we have no right to judge what causes others pain, and that we can all do something to help others to bear their burdens. I felt a little embarrassed showing pain in their presence because it’s not hard to imagine that the circumstances of their lives have brought them more suffering and frustrations than I am ever likely to know. But not for one moment did I feel that they judged me unworthy of their compassion, nor did they ever show the slightest bit of disdain or outwardly assume that my troubles were less pressing than theirs.
These young men showed empathy in its purest form. They didn’t ask why I was sad; the reason didn’t matter. They didn’t need to figure out whether I was worthy based on my situation. To them I was worthy of help simply because I was a human being. They gave me, a total stranger, the most beautiful gifts they could: honor and compassion. Merely acknowledging the people around me in a public park elicited such kindness from them. I’m grateful that they were there for me and that they reminded me that my troubles were temporary, and that there are good people all around us.
At the end of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois descends into madness, and as she is being led away to the insane asylum, she famously, pitifully says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Don’t we all?
Even those of us in penthouse suites or gated communities, ivory towers or walnut-paneled boardrooms depend on the social compact to keep strangers from breaking down our doors or threatening us on the street. To stay safe, warm, well-fed and employed and to get around and go where we must we depend on strangers not only to avoid harming us but to go out of their ways to help us do what we need to do. We worry about violence and tut over stories of criminal behavior that we hear on the news, but for most of us, being a victim of crime is an uncommon occurrence. We are sheltered, we are lucky, we are, most of us, trying hard not to hurt others or be hurt ourselves. We all depend upon the kindness of strangers. We just don’t realize how much effort is made by others every day to make room for us in a world that is more theirs than ours. We are each only one of seven billion, after all, and nearly all the others in this world have less invested in our health and happiness than we do. Yet, we we live alongside each other and make way for the needs of strangers every day.
This weekend two kind strangers proved how much invisible goodwill surrounds me. I was humbled by their kindness, but also elevated—by looking up into their faces I became part of something greater than myself. I felt disconnected and hollow when I walked into their park; they reminded me that even on Skid Row, one can find connection, beauty and mercy.
You may have heard Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009 and was Derulo’s first big hit, but the song was built around vocoded vocal samples from the song “Hide and Seek” by English singer, composer and producer Imogen Heap. The popularity of Derulo’s song was much greater than that of the song upon which its based, and to my mind that is a great shame, since Heap is one of the most inventive and appealing artists recording today.
Imogen Heap (or Immi, as she is often called by fans) is surprisingly little known in the U.S. despite having received four Grammy nominations and won one Grammy. As half of the musical duo Frou Frou she also had a song on the award-winning soundtrack to the popular indie movie Garden State.
Before becoming known as a solo artist, Heap and then musical partner Guy Sigsworth recorded as Frou Frou. Their song “Let Go” was one of the best things to come out of the 2004 Garden State soundtrack. It’s Imogen’s warm and breathy vocal you hear over the rich layers of electronica. With her lush washes of intricate sound, she gives the lie to those who think electronic pop must be cold and soulless. She often incorporates unusual effects and ambient sounds into her mixes, and since leaving Frou Frou she has composed, produced and performed on four solo albums.
As a teen Heap taught herself sequencing, music engineering, sampling and production as well as guitar and percussion instruments such as the Array Mbira (an expanded version of the small African original mbira with a more bell-like sound) and the Hang, a hollow steel percussion instrument. With these tools, her compelling, intimate voice and gift for beautiful melodies and rich harmonies, she has built an interesting repertoire of songs and a passionate fan base.
In return for her fans’ devotion, Immi gives exciting concerts featuring not only her hits but also on-the-spot improvised compositions created with looped sounds that she records of her own singing and playing as well as with sounds generated by the audience in concert. I saw her perform in Seattle during her 2010 tour and was moved by her decision to invite local musicians from every stop on her tour to audition with her. Heap then chose a few musicians from each location and had them open her concerts for her and perform a song alongside her. She also created a song with the audience at each venue and made every song available to help raise funds for local charities. She’s quite philanthropically minded and often raises funds for favorite charities around the world by holding benefit concerts featuring her music and that of others musicians.
Among her influences Heap lists Annie Lennox and Kate Bush, two other powerful singers from the UK with huge charisma, distinctive voices and strong associations with inventive electronic pop. Like them, Immi has created electronic music with great passion and soul. Her 2005 album Speak for Yourself is her most accessible album, full of lyrical, catchy tunes, and 2009’s Ellipse, which features the lovely song “First Train Home,” comes in two versions, the standard and a deluxe version which includes instrumental versions of all the tracks.
Of her work, Immi says, “I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments — guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums… I would record live drums, and then I would spend a day editing them to take the life out of them. I like to breathe my own life into these sounds, and I do try to keep the ‘air’ in the music. Some people think electronic music is cold, but I think that has more to do with the people listening than the actual music itself.”
I just watched the last 15 minutes of Midnight Cowboy, a movie I have admired for decades and seen a half-dozen times, but which brings me pain each time I watch it. It’s one of those films that I cannot turn away from if I happen to run across it while changing channels, so powerful are the performances and so unflinching is the focus on captivating yet repellent characters.
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight are natural, believable and awkwardly honest in their roles (which are among the finest performances of their careers); John Schlesinger‘s direction is unflinching and powerful. Schlesinger was unwilling to turn away from the sorts of intimate, painful moments that other directors tend to cut away from in order to soothe audiences and tie up loose ends. He avoided palliative measures, trusting his audiences to handle the pain and unfairness at the heart of his characters’ worlds and sit with their devastation and disappointment even as the final credits rolled by.
The film begins with what sounds superficially like an upbeat tune with an ambling gait, the song “Everybody’s Talkin‘” sung by Harry Nilsson. The song, which won a Grammy and was a million-selling single in 1969, is deceptive; listen to the lyrics and you’ll see it’s about an overwhelmed man who can’t handle or comprehend the needs and conversations of the people around him and longs to move far away to a place without cares, “somewhere where the weather suits my clothes.” He sings:
Everybody’s talking at me I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’ Only the echoes of my mind
People stopping, staring I can’t see their faces Only the shadows of their eyes
It’s easy for the casual listener to notice only the upbeat qualities of the song and the positive fantasies of the young man as he imagines himself moving lightly through the better life that awaits him:
Banking off of the northeast winds Sailing on a summer breeze And skipping over the ocean like a stone
The song suits the story of handsome but none-too-bright young Texan Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight) who leaves Texas in a hurry and moves to New York convinced that he’ll be a big success as a gigolo wearing his cowboy hat, boots and pretty-boy grin, and as he walks around Times Square in his fringed leather jacket he seems to be just a sweet, overgrown, oversexed kid. And he is, at first. Full of hope and confidence but leaving a disturbing and misunderstood past, he soon becomes overwhelmed like the man in the song. He longs to escape his life, first running to New York, then to Florida with his friend Rico (played by Dustin Hoffman). But in this story, there is no easy, rambling way through life or around trouble, and there’s no way for Joe to stop the cascade of horrible lessons that come with being too trusting, hopeful and needy while living among broken, wary people.
Midnight Cowboy is an exceptional film which captures the disturbing power of the fine novel by Leo James Herlihy upon which it’s based. Indeed, the movie, the only X-rated Best Picture Oscar winner ever, was a huge critical success despite its reputation for grim, mature subject matter, and it won Oscars for best picture and best direction. While the story is gritty, it isn’t by any means pornographic; the X rating was misleading. But the story is adult in nature, ultimately cynical, tragic and hopeless. The main characters are hustlers, professional liars at the bottom of society who are not very bright and are willing to take advantage of people in pain. Yet the story is told in such a way that, although we cringe when the principal characters harm themselves and others, we cannot help but feel our own hearts break as we watch their hopes go down in flames.
So why do I come back to this film, and why do I love other devastating Schlesinger films about unrequited love and loss (like his beautiful, faithful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and the 1971 drama Sunday Bloody Sunday with its exquisite performances by Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson) and of moral decay (like Marathon Man) so much? I suppose it’s because Schlesinger was a masterful storyteller who managed to focus on difficult, broken and fearful people, people on the edges of society, people who are willing to live in shadows. He let us watch them lash out at others in desperation, flail and grasp for meaningful connection with other people, and then have to live with their losses and failures. There are few redemptions in Schlesinger’s stories, but there is great humanity. Schlesinger helped viewers get under the skin of his characters and understand their pain without whitewashing their behaviors or putting them on pedestals. He loved flawed people and stories full of heartache, and he made a career of getting the intelligentsia to peer more closely at and care for stories about the very people those same people might cross the street to avoid in their daily lives.
Schlesinger, who was gay, incorporated homosexual themes into several of his films and teleplays, sometimes portraying gay men as self-loathing (as he did in a disturbing scene in Midnight Cowboy) but also including one of the first depictions of a successful, honorable, well-adjusted professional homosexual man in modern cinema (in Sunday Bloody Sunday). He treated his characters’ sexuality with the same straightforwardness he showed toward their other characteristics; it was simply another facet of their lives. This matter-of-factness, which made Sunday Bloody Sunday particularly advanced for its time, was part of a wave of naturalism in film also seen in the work of other important directors of the sixties and seventies such as Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Tony Richardson, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet and Peter Bogdanovich.
It may seem odd that some human beings (like me) seek out stories of loss, failure and emotional pain like this one both as forms of entertainment and as cathartic experiences. Such films shine a light on the human condition and help viewers like me to understand and empathize with the misbegotten and seemingly cursed people of the world in a way that feels especially visceral and real. Films like Schlesinger’s are, however, at enough of a remove that film lovers who appreciate a good dose of angst with their drama can feel safe sidling up to the misfits, losers and dangerous people who inhabit the underworld that Schlesinger created. There’s a voyeuristic thrill at getting so close to the people and emotions that scare or excite us, followed by a shock when we realize how close they are to ourselves.
If you watch Saturday Night Live, you may have seen Emma Stone in a skit called “Les Jeunes de Paris” (“The Youth of Paris”). In it, Stone and other young Parisians dance in a Left Bank café and speak only French while listening to “Ta Douleur,” a song by the French pop singer Camille. The song, the title of which means “Your Pain,” was inspired by French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders). Camille’s song is so arresting and appealing, one can see why Emma was inspired to dance.
“Ta Douleur” was a hit in Europe when it was released in 2005 on Camille’s album titled Le Fil (The Thread). One thread that binds all the album’s songs together is a low-level drone in the background; another is the album’s emphasis on the human voice above all. The album’s constant droning note, a B, is barely detectable in “Ta Douleur,” but the song is quirky and surprising even without that gimmick. The entire album is an exploration of the versatility of the human voice with very little actual traditional instrumentation, just a bit of percussion and some bass to back up the beat boxing, raspberry blowing, humming, scat singing and other vocal pyrotechnics. Odd though it may be, “Ta Douleur” has a very catchy melody and intriguing rhythms.
Camille’s original video for the song features the singer in an ever-escalating battle with a ball of yarn. It becomes a self-knitting hat that creates itself around an unwilling naked woman. It then forms itself into a raveling dress, a womb, perhaps even a shroud for the woman caught within it. The yarn behaves like an invasive, inescapable, parasitic entity. The lyrics, when translated from the original French into English, are a bit cryptic but they definitely relate to pregnancy. While some listeners have expressed a belief that the singer of the song is talking about the pain of her upcoming labor, it seems more likely that she is considering an abortion.
The official video portrays the yarn as a menacing force that seems intent on taking over Camille’s body and the lyrics show hostility toward the fetus growing in her womb. Videos of Camille’s live performances of the song are captivating, too, despite not involving her being naked or fighting a losing battle with a willful ball of blue yarn. The song takes on a surprisingly bitter and poetically serious message for such an upbeat tune. Consider this translated excerpt:
Now who’s this gatecrasher This storm before the summer This little bitch of a sister
I’m going to take everything away from her Her darts and her whistle I’m going to give her a proper licking Send her away during break I’m going to take your pain But who’s this heiress Who’s bathing, who is hiding In the lukewarm water of your loins
I’m going to take the desert away from her Make her eat dust Of those who are not hungry anymore I’m going to take your pain
