arts Outside the Box

A review of the new Beatles disc, LOVE , with a short excerpt from one of the tracks.

I admit, my first reaction upon hearing about this disc was pretty cynical: There they go, repackaging the old material, yet again, to squeeze a few more bucks out of fans who already own all the original Beatles discs.
Thankfully, a friend emailed me to say that the disc is great, so I requested it as a Christmas present. And he s right: it s well worth the money.

LOVE was conceived by George Harrison and Canadian Guy Laliberté (the founder of the ) before Harrison s death. They asked George Martin to create a soundscape of around one and a half hour s length using any sound [he] needed from the original Beatles multi-track recordings (from George Martin s liner notes).
George asked his son Giles to work on the project with him. Giles came up with the breakthrough idea: he combined the drum beat and bass from Tomorrow Never Knows with the music and vocals of Within You Without You . It works brilliantly, and it opened everyone s eyes to the creative potential of the project.

Many of the tracks are fundamentally unchanged from the familiar performances we ve heard hundreds of times before. For example, Eleanor Rigby , Something and Come Together are presented in their entirety. Each track is given a new introduction, however, or an excerpt from another song is tacked on at the end to form a bridge to the next track.

The transition pieces make terrific use of Ringo s drums. Ringo doesn t get much credit for his contribution to the Beatles: it s hard to shine when you perform in the immense shadow cast by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But Ringo had to be creative.

When Lennon and McCartney were going where no songwriter had gone before — particularly on the psychedelic material — Ringo had to invent a role for the drums.
During the intro to Get Back , at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever , and throughout Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows , Ringo s drums constitute the core track around which George and Giles Martin build their experiments.
George and Giles actually managed to improve on some of the original performances by spicing them up with snippets of other songs.

Lady Madonna is a good example: the original song is given a harder edge by inserting a different, two-part solo. I decided to make an excerpt available for you to download, because the best way to understand the concept of this disc is to hear it with your own ears.
This is Lady Madonna like you ve never heard it before.

(Click on the link and wait a few seconds. If the song doesn t begin to play automatically, you re missing a plug-in and you ll have to click on the download link. N.

B. For additional amusement, look for the little esnips DJ and click on that icon. You ll hear the Beatles as channelled through the Chipmunks after several cups of espresso.

I have no explanation for it, but it s certainly amusing!)
Two songs are, in effect, brand new Beatles material. The first I ve already mentioned: Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows .

The second is While My Guitar Gently Weeps . Beatles devotees may have heard George Harrison s demo recording on acoustic guitar, which was made available on Anthology 3. For LOVE, George Martin wrote an unobtrusive string accompaniment for the demo version: just right to fill out the song.

It is a beautiful tribute to George Harrison whose song-writing talents were underappreciated until after the Beatles had disbanded.
George s songwriting is prominent on this disc. There are sixteen songs written by John Lennon (including short bridge excerpts), eleven by Paul McCartney, six by George Harrison, and one by Ringo ( Octopus s Garden ).

Thus George and John are disproportionately represented on the disc vis-à-vis Paul.
Other highlights: Get Back / Glass Onion ; Drive My Car / What You re Doing ; Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite / I Want You / Helter Skelter ; and the new ending of Strawberry Fields Forever .

In short, there s plenty of fresh material here to warrant the price of the disc.

The songs tend toward the Beatles heavier rock sound (though there are some ballads, too: e.g.

Yesterday , with a Blackbird excerpt for its introduction). No doubt the material was chosen with the Cirque du Soleil performance uppermost in mind.

Most of the material comes from the latter half of the Beatles career.

About three quarters of the material comes from Abbey Road (7 songs), the White Album (7), Sgt. Pepper (5) or Magical Mystery Tour (4).

Actually, it s misleading to count tracks based on the titles on the back of the disc.

Lots of other things make it into the mix: Penny Lane , Hello Goodbye , Hey Bulldog , the drum solo from The End , etc.

Several songs were shortened by editing out one of the middle verses. Hey Jude certainly benefits by truncating the na na na na, na na na na portion of the song, and rearranging a section of it for variety s sake.

The sound quality is superb, much better than on any previous Beatles disc. Particularly on I Am the Walrus and Revolution , the sound quality is sufficiently improved to make the songs fresh for that reason alone.

Love is presently the number 1 selling CD in Canada.

Not sure what it is doing elsewhere in the world, but I would assume it would be similarly successful. It has been 38 years since they have recorded together and they have a CD out with revamped material and it goes to number 1.
Only the Beatles could pull that off.

Babel (the movie, reviewed in my previous post) illustrates a social issue that interests me: the sexualization of teenaged girls who have not yet mastered their sexual persona.
One of Babel s four plot lines follows a Japanese teenager dealing with a double crisis. Chieko (played by Rinko Kikuchi) is trying to come to terms with the death of her mother.

The circumstances in which her mother died are not made clear until the climax of the movie. And Chieko s emotional struggles are intensified by the fact that she is deaf. She feels like a freak at a time in her life when she is acutely interested in boys.

Chieko s age is never revealed. She might be eighteen; presumably the actor is, since she is shown in full frontal nudity. The character seems younger than that, but perhaps her social development has been delayed because of her deafness.

Physically, Chieko is an adult, I suppose. (To me, eighteen-year-olds look only half-formed.) Emotionally, she is a needy child.

She desperately wants to lose her virginity. She has something to prove, some need to fulfill — not really a need for sex.
Some of the scenes reminded me of the tarted-up schoolgirls depicted in animé.

Chieko goes out in public wearing a mini skirt — without panties, as she makes clear to a friend.
She tries to seduce various men; some are her own age, others are as old as her father. But seduce is the wrong word.

Her technique is too clumsy to be seductive; as unsubtle as the plot of a porno movie. She has the necessary body parts, but she has not yet mastered her sexual persona.
Chieko represents some of the adolescent girls I see in my part of the world: all cleavage and half-exposed behinds, with no real comprehension of what they re playing at.

At this point I must interject a couple of clarifications.
First, I m aware that there are exceptions to the sort of adolescents I m describing. I have met precocious girls, not yet twelve years old, who exude sexuality, and who appear to be in complete control of their sexual persona.

Perhaps they are sexually active; perhaps it s just a persona. Those aren t the girls I m discussing here.
Second, this isn t a rant against premarital sex.

I m not arguing that boys drive the sexual agenda and girls require our protection. In the movie, Chieko is on the prowl. I would be OK with that, if Chieko weren t so messed up in other respects — that s the pivotal consideration.

My critique, fwiw, is directed at society and the way we socialize our children. As Chieko mimicks animé, so North American girls ape Britney Spears — or the current pre-fab adolescent pop tart, whoever that is.
A couple of summers ago, I noticed a young teenager wearing a very short skirt.

She was crossing a street, downtown. It was a windy day. She was trying to hold the skirt down as she walked, and the expression on her face showed that she was very uncomfortable with her situation.

Who dressed her that way? She dressed herself, of course, but with a head full of MTV images. I remembered her as I watched Babel.

Like Chieko, she wasn t ready to wield such a potent sexuality.
Western society rushes children headlong toward sexual maturity. Animé is normative; every schoolgirl aspires to look like her name is written on a bathroom wall somewhere.

Harmful consequences will surely follow, for some of them.
I went to see Babel on the strength of its trailer. It promised to be a gut-wrenching movie about an American woman (played by Cate Blanchett) who is shot in a foreign country, somewhere in the developing world.

Her husband (Brad Pitt) is desperate to obtain medical help for her, in unfavourable circumstances.
That storyline works pretty well. Pitt delivers a moving performance, particularly in the scene where he is talking on the phone to his young son, back in the USA.

(Aging adds so much character to a face!) On the other hand, Blanchett s role is a disappointment. After the opening scenes, she doesn t have much to do except lie around, wounded.

The movie is structurally flawed. Director alternates between four different stories, each of them bordering on the tragic. It s all too much — four separate tragedies unfolding simultaneously!

Thus the movie strains credulity, to the point where I began to stand outside the story in disbelief instead of being swept up in the plot. Moreover, Iñárritu s methodology bleeds the story of its dramatic tension. Each plot receives only 25% of the screen time.

Inevitably, we lose interest in characters who are out of sight for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch.
We re invited to enter a series of alien worlds: two boys, growing up in a sparsely-inhabited part of Morocco, who haven t yet grasped the relation between cause and effect; a middle-aged illegal immigrant from Mexico, who genuinely loves the American children she cares for; and a Japanese teenager, whose struggle to cope with her mother s death is compounded by the fact that she s deaf.
Only two of the stories intersect meaningfully.

Iñárritu could have cut both the Japanese teenager and the Mexican nanny from the movie without affecting the other two stories in the slightest.
It s too bad, because each element of the plot is effective, viewed in isolation. With respect to the actors, Adriana Barraza (the nanny) was quite convincing as events spun out of control, at great personal cost to her.

Why did Iñárritu make such an odd movie? Frankly, I think it s all just a big marketing gimmick. Four stories, set in four different parts of the world — instant ticket sales in the USA, Mexico, Japan, and perhaps in parts of the Middle East (on the assumption that some Muslims can tolerate nudity).

I give Babel two stars out of five. It s too bad: this could have been a much better movie, if Iñárritu hadn t aimed to appeal to four different audiences.
(More to come … I m going to do a follow up post on the Japanese teenager.

That part of the movie illustrates an interesting social issue.)
Mary P. took me to see Cirque du Soleil last weekend.

(One of her readers sent her free tickets! She wrote up the story .)
The Cirque du Soleil is not only perfect, it s , too (to steal a line from a T-shirt).

Internationally celebrated circus/theatre company based in Montreal, Quebec, and founded in 1984.
It was formed by a group of street performers who performed 50 shows on tour in eleven cities in Quebec as part of the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier s landing. Their symbol, a tent with a blue and yellow top, is still part of the Cirque s image.

…
Its trademarks are two: no animal acts and a heightened aesthetic quality. The shows are as beautiful as they are exciting.
A circus/theatre company; shows as beautiful as they are exciting.

Precisely!
was the show we saw. The guy suspended from the balloon was the protagonist, experiencing the delirium.

Every circus must have its clown, and this fellow on stilts mdash; here holding a mallet! mdash; was the Delirium version. He was more central to the plot (such as it was) than the ostensible protagonist.

You think you re looking at a curtain. And in fact you are, but not the way you think.
A long white curtain was drawn the length of the stage.

(In fact, two — one on either side of the stage, with the performers in between them.) The curtain was transparent enough that you could see the performers through it, since they were brightly lit. But the curtain was also opaque enough that they could project images onto it.

In this case, they ve projected an image of a curtain on the curtain! No doubt the tableau expresses something profoundly philosophical about the subjective nature of reality.
But never mind philosophy!

Back to what really matters: aesthetics!
Delirium was part rock show, part rock video (because of the projected images), part dance hellip;. The woman in the white dress was onstage a lot, doing something part way between dance and Tai Chi.

Most of the time, she was off to one side of the main action.
This isn t a great photograph, since I caught the acrobats before they were fully in position, but you get the idea. Three men, supporting themselves on one hand each, holding the trunks of their bodies parallel to the stage, while also supporting the weight of a fourth man balanced on their free hands.

But the highlight of the show may have been the hula hoop woman. At one point she balanced on one foot while holding the other leg straight up, beside her face. She twirled a hula hoop above her head with that leg, while twirling two more hula hoops: one of them with her arm, perpendicular to the ground.

It was a pat your head while rubbing your tummy kind of trick, with better visuals.
I posted another photo of this performer . I love the aesthetics of these photographs.

And that s the part of the Cirque I enjoyed most. Good music, good circus acts, while the visuals continually shifted from one stunning tableau to the next.
Time for a well-deserved standing ovation!

I used a couple of the same photos as Mary P., but she used that don t appear above.