Arguably the greatest "unknown" Jazz trumpeter who ever lived, I was deeply saddened to hear this news. Saw him play once when I was seventeen at two a.m. in Philadelphia's Ortlieb's Jazz Haus...He was obviously suffering from years of horrible addiction, but for the few people who were there, he was unforgettable.
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From L'Express
Thomas "Tangier" James, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies At 66
By Damon Gryka
Published: August 7, 2007
Thomas "Tangier" James, known as a "the trumpeter's trumpeter," passed away yesterday at his home. Mr. James, 66, had been suffering for sometime with heart trouble, his wife said.
A bridge between the be-bop tradition of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and the World Music influences that emerged in the late 1960's and 70's, Mr. James, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, recorded with Jazz luminaries such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and Hugh Masakela, as well as James Brown. He is widely regarded as one of the last great trumpeters of his era.
Said music critic Nat Hentoff in 1989, "Although little known outside of jazz circles for most of his career, his major achievement is that he opened up music to a whole new generation, he fearlessly took his influences from his travels and created an unmistakably unique sound."
Thomas Nelson James was born in Philadelphia in 1941 to Etta and Reverand Thomas James Sr. In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer he remembered, "I was a troublemaker, typical preacher's son, no direction, just another kid destined to be a dime store hustler on the streets. Then, one day after my father kicked me out of my house for Lord knows what, I saw a trumpet in a hock shop in my neighborhood. I don't know what it was, but I had to have it. I went home that afternoon, cleaned up my act and started working after school to buy it. Six months later I did, and the first time I put the horn to my lips, that was it, I was done."
In 1962, he attended and dropped out of The University of Pennsylavania after less than a year. "Nothing against them, but they try to can you up, stick you in a box and ship you out. It just wasn't for me," is all he ever said of his music education.
Mr. James travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East and Africa throughout his life picking up musical influences almost everywhere he went. His nickname "Tangier" was given to him because when asked where he had dissappeared to, it was said he almost always replied, "Tangiers." Ironically this was one of the few places James never made it to.
Mr. James, who never led a band of his own, began his career with the late pianist Bobby Timmons. The two artists' midnight shows at Philadelphia's Ortlieb's Jazz House, just before Timmons death from alcoholism, have become legend within the jazz world, the two sometimes playing for five straight hours with no break. There is no known recording of these shows, a fact which has only added to the myth of them. Said James in 2002, "I don't know if they were all they were made out to be. I was so young and Bobby, he was so free. He was just doing what he was born to do, and I followed his lead."
But nothing would effect Mr. James' music as much as his friendship with the cult sculptor and multi-media artist, Elias Myers. Mr. James once said of Mr. Myers, "When I saw his work for the first time a whole new world opened up to me musically. Maybe it was the fact we were working in two different mediums and there was that distance between us. There was no competition. He (Myers) could get more feeling in a piece of plaster than most people could get in a football field. I wanted to play music like he sculpted, every note a life and a death by any means necessary, and that's what I always tried to do."
But by 1985 James had largely disappeared from the music scene and many believed him to be dead. After battling addiction for nearly two decades, Mr. James re-emerged to live what has been called a triumphant re-birth over the last three years. His music has been sampled by many hip hop artists including Jay-Z, Wu-Tang Clan, and Kanye West. In 1995, in one of his last interviews, Tupac Shakur acclaimed the rhythms of Mr. James trumpeting as a direct influence on his vocal style.
Mr. James last concert was recorded this past Spring over three nights in Brussels at Jacques Pelzer's Jazz Club with Andre Vida, Ravi Coltrane, and J.D. Parran who said of James, "I wouldn't be the musician I am today if I hadn't heard his recordings as a young man. (James) lived to have his redemption and he cherished every minute of it. He'll be missed as much for the person he was as his mastery of the music he gave his life to."
Mr. James commented last year, "The explosion of digital music rescued me from the void and introduced me to a whole new generation. Without it, I don't know where I'd be, certainly not here. I have many, many regrets, but what's happening to me now, I wouldn't trade it for anything."
Mr. James is survived by his wife, Joan Farber, and his five year old son, Elias. A private memorial will be held at James' home in Philadelphia on Sunday.
Showing posts with label Passings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Passings. Show all posts
8/11/07
R.I.P. Thomas "Tangier" James, 1941 - 2007
8/5/07
Homage to Antonioni
I watched a lot of his films as teenager. I had no idea what I was watching, although I loved the house blowing up at the end of Zabriskie point.
Blow Up? Confusing, but the women were beautiful and David Hemmings sure seemed to be having a good time for a guy who was growing more paranoid by the minute.
La'Ventura, loved the clothes - and I'm a sucker for black and white, sunglasses and smooth hair - but how could these people be so unfeeling and narcissistic to simply not care that their "friend" had virtually disappeared without a trace?
The Passenger, what an idea. A spiritually dead international reporter fakes his own death, takes on the identity of a dead man in his hotel room, and later finds out he's become an arms dealer. Jack Nicholson is the coolest thing on two legs and he's got Maria Schneider along for the ride...But it seems to go nowhere.
Much later, I saw "The Eclipse." Fascinating images, slightly boring, Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, what a couple. But again, what the Hell was going on? A series of events that rang flat and uninteresting. This was only a few years ago when I saw The Eclipse for the first time, so I can't blame my non-response to total mental immaturity. But that was it for me. Antonioni...whatever.
And then I ran into Martin Scorcese's "Two Voyages To Italy." At some point he covered Antonioni, and in particular, the ending of Eclipse, that, because of him, has become one of my favorite endings of any work of narrative, along with Fanny and Alexander, I have ever seen or read. I'd also include Tim O'Brian's "The Things They Carried," and Hemingways's "The Sun Also Rises" in that list.
Just some context for the ending of Eclipse: throughout the film we follow the affair between Delon (a stock trader,) and Vitti (who knows what she does?) Their relationship turns the whole concept of Hollywood coupling on its head. Their's is a cold and unfeeling meeting. We long for hot steamy passion, they're so fucking beautiful, like the Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie of their time, but we never get it. There's some stuff about Vitti breaking up with her ex-fiance reminscent of Godard's apartment scene in "Contempt," the Italian stock market crashing and Vitti's mother losing a boat load of money, Vitti's ennui at the impossibility of connection (there's an unbelievable scene of her and her two girlfriends playing in her apartment, pretending to be African tribesman, and then Vitti lamenting that when she makes love with a man, most of the time, she feels nothing. The friend I was with, a woman, at hearing this monologue suddenly blurted out, "How does he ((Antonioni)) know so much about women?!)
And, finally, the affair ends, "not with a bang but a whimper." We are left for almost, what(?) ten minutes with shots of landscape, empty of life, stolid, cold and rigid. Beautifully composed yes, but somehow drained of beauty.
And that's it. Fade out. The End.
What?
Then, by pure accident, about a year later, I watched Scorcese analyze the film, and, without him, I don't think I would have understood anything nor ever gone back; this man would have made a great teacher. As he explains, in paraphrase, these shots are of all the places that Vitti and Delon visited, went to, shared together. Now these places are devoid of them and they will never return. They are simply spaces, perhaps a map of the past should they ever choose to look, but lifeless and dead without them. And they will never look. And so those spaces are simply, spaces, beautifully voided; they know no history nor will anyone else, ever.
Take Los Angeles. In spots, especially at night, it is reminiscent of Antonioni's landscapes in its sheer alien emptiness...An urban desert of its own, if you will. On top of that, with the real estate boom, rising rents, etc., over the last eighteen months I've seen so many places closed down, changed, boarded up and demolished. Places that I used to go to with some of the people I've been involved with, whether it was years or days, whether these were fulfilling affairs or not.
But you look around and you see these places, the places you used to go to, and now they are different, changed, gone for forever. For the places that do survive, have you ever tried to go back to these spaces you once loved with someone that you are involved with in the present? It's never worked. It's like trying to re-capture a magic that could only exist once, or, worse, an attempt at re-writing history. To me those places are haunted, never to be the same for the chemistry between you, that one you first shared and discovered that space with and that particular time in your life, created the specific and uncopyable energy of that space in your memory. For me that cannot ever be recreated, and the space cannot ever be resurrected into another no matter what I try.
This is a very specific human emotion we've all experienced or will experience, I think. These haunted feelings in a space of the past, the true ghosts of our lives. Antonioni identifies this quiet longing for the past in space, and, through his poetic gifts, somehow captures this emotion. Perhaps it is age and a little experience (another word for our losses great and small) but gone from his work is the unrelatable and austere landscape and emotion that was inaccessible to me. Now his images are filled with meaning: longing, loss, and passion never to be fully claimed or owned but for a moment in the kaleidoscopic tapestry that is memory. A memory that, as it inevitably grows longer and longer, seems to fade away more and more except in dreams.
And so, because of Scorcese, the door opened into Antononioni's work, and I see more and more truth in it as I get older. This quiet surrender to loneliness in so many of the people he captures; there are the ones who have fought against the loneliness, and the ones who never fought, but they all seem to end in the same psychological/emotional place. A specific type of human being, yes, but one I see all the time...sometimes in the mirror.
Find his work cold, look closely, Antonioni is one of the geatest chroniclers of what it is to be alive, try to connect and fail, we've ever had. The "coldness" in his work is is simply the denial of sentimentality in his observations of our illusions and loneliness. His poetry is the truth his denial of this sentimentality allows for.
His work is by no means pretty in the conventional sense; fashionably existential, perhaps, but pretty, no.
His work is an autopsy of being human in our age, and quietly bloody in its precision. Like the great poets, Antonioni was a surgeon of the soul on his own terms, with his own language.
Blow Up? Confusing, but the women were beautiful and David Hemmings sure seemed to be having a good time for a guy who was growing more paranoid by the minute.
La'Ventura, loved the clothes - and I'm a sucker for black and white, sunglasses and smooth hair - but how could these people be so unfeeling and narcissistic to simply not care that their "friend" had virtually disappeared without a trace?
The Passenger, what an idea. A spiritually dead international reporter fakes his own death, takes on the identity of a dead man in his hotel room, and later finds out he's become an arms dealer. Jack Nicholson is the coolest thing on two legs and he's got Maria Schneider along for the ride...But it seems to go nowhere.
Much later, I saw "The Eclipse." Fascinating images, slightly boring, Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, what a couple. But again, what the Hell was going on? A series of events that rang flat and uninteresting. This was only a few years ago when I saw The Eclipse for the first time, so I can't blame my non-response to total mental immaturity. But that was it for me. Antonioni...whatever.
And then I ran into Martin Scorcese's "Two Voyages To Italy." At some point he covered Antonioni, and in particular, the ending of Eclipse, that, because of him, has become one of my favorite endings of any work of narrative, along with Fanny and Alexander, I have ever seen or read. I'd also include Tim O'Brian's "The Things They Carried," and Hemingways's "The Sun Also Rises" in that list.
Just some context for the ending of Eclipse: throughout the film we follow the affair between Delon (a stock trader,) and Vitti (who knows what she does?) Their relationship turns the whole concept of Hollywood coupling on its head. Their's is a cold and unfeeling meeting. We long for hot steamy passion, they're so fucking beautiful, like the Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie of their time, but we never get it. There's some stuff about Vitti breaking up with her ex-fiance reminscent of Godard's apartment scene in "Contempt," the Italian stock market crashing and Vitti's mother losing a boat load of money, Vitti's ennui at the impossibility of connection (there's an unbelievable scene of her and her two girlfriends playing in her apartment, pretending to be African tribesman, and then Vitti lamenting that when she makes love with a man, most of the time, she feels nothing. The friend I was with, a woman, at hearing this monologue suddenly blurted out, "How does he ((Antonioni)) know so much about women?!)
And, finally, the affair ends, "not with a bang but a whimper." We are left for almost, what(?) ten minutes with shots of landscape, empty of life, stolid, cold and rigid. Beautifully composed yes, but somehow drained of beauty.
And that's it. Fade out. The End.
What?
Then, by pure accident, about a year later, I watched Scorcese analyze the film, and, without him, I don't think I would have understood anything nor ever gone back; this man would have made a great teacher. As he explains, in paraphrase, these shots are of all the places that Vitti and Delon visited, went to, shared together. Now these places are devoid of them and they will never return. They are simply spaces, perhaps a map of the past should they ever choose to look, but lifeless and dead without them. And they will never look. And so those spaces are simply, spaces, beautifully voided; they know no history nor will anyone else, ever.
Take Los Angeles. In spots, especially at night, it is reminiscent of Antonioni's landscapes in its sheer alien emptiness...An urban desert of its own, if you will. On top of that, with the real estate boom, rising rents, etc., over the last eighteen months I've seen so many places closed down, changed, boarded up and demolished. Places that I used to go to with some of the people I've been involved with, whether it was years or days, whether these were fulfilling affairs or not.
But you look around and you see these places, the places you used to go to, and now they are different, changed, gone for forever. For the places that do survive, have you ever tried to go back to these spaces you once loved with someone that you are involved with in the present? It's never worked. It's like trying to re-capture a magic that could only exist once, or, worse, an attempt at re-writing history. To me those places are haunted, never to be the same for the chemistry between you, that one you first shared and discovered that space with and that particular time in your life, created the specific and uncopyable energy of that space in your memory. For me that cannot ever be recreated, and the space cannot ever be resurrected into another no matter what I try.
This is a very specific human emotion we've all experienced or will experience, I think. These haunted feelings in a space of the past, the true ghosts of our lives. Antonioni identifies this quiet longing for the past in space, and, through his poetic gifts, somehow captures this emotion. Perhaps it is age and a little experience (another word for our losses great and small) but gone from his work is the unrelatable and austere landscape and emotion that was inaccessible to me. Now his images are filled with meaning: longing, loss, and passion never to be fully claimed or owned but for a moment in the kaleidoscopic tapestry that is memory. A memory that, as it inevitably grows longer and longer, seems to fade away more and more except in dreams.
And so, because of Scorcese, the door opened into Antononioni's work, and I see more and more truth in it as I get older. This quiet surrender to loneliness in so many of the people he captures; there are the ones who have fought against the loneliness, and the ones who never fought, but they all seem to end in the same psychological/emotional place. A specific type of human being, yes, but one I see all the time...sometimes in the mirror.
Find his work cold, look closely, Antonioni is one of the geatest chroniclers of what it is to be alive, try to connect and fail, we've ever had. The "coldness" in his work is is simply the denial of sentimentality in his observations of our illusions and loneliness. His poetry is the truth his denial of this sentimentality allows for.
His work is by no means pretty in the conventional sense; fashionably existential, perhaps, but pretty, no.
His work is an autopsy of being human in our age, and quietly bloody in its precision. Like the great poets, Antonioni was a surgeon of the soul on his own terms, with his own language.
8/2/07
Mr. Bergman and Mr. Antonioni
I must admit, the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have stifled me. Strange in a way considering they both lived incredibly productive and long lives, and yet, on some level, I feel as though I lost two of my grandfathers, and if not grandfathers, then favorite uncles who were very different but gave me so much. The Prince of Passion and The Prince of Cool...
I've read a lot about these two over the last couple days, a lot of recollections, synopses, surveys, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc...And, well, they've been interesting, and have said mostly nothing that I can relate to on any personal level. They use words like "trailblazer, " "personal," and "art film," but mostly, I don't know, it's all heartfelt and most of it could probably be said about any of the masters of that era. I don't want to be unduly harsh as I'm still trying to get my head around their deaths, but I can only say that for those who don't like either/or, one or the both, it took me a long, long time to fall in love with both, only in the last couple of years, but when I did I knew it was forever.
I didn't "get" Bergman until about seven years ago. I had tried to watch some of his films like Persona and could never be patient enough to sit through it...Like a lot of people who have and continue to shit on Bergman's work, I found it pretentious, boring even torturous. The only reason I kept trying is because some filmmakers I liked sang his praises. I was ready to all but write him off when back in the winter of 2000 Sherman Torgan decided to show "Fanny and Alexander" over two nights at the New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles. Fanny and Alexander, what was that? I had never even heard of it? "What the Hell?" I figured I'd give Bergman one more try and if I couldn't stand it I'd walk out and never look back at the guy again, write him off as another critical fraud.
And then I was sitting in that run down, half empty theatre with a couple of friends, the lights went dark, I heard those first notes of Schumann's mournful violin, and the film faded in on young Alexander Ekdahl as he moved through his empty house, calling for his family who were not there, and, perhaps, never really would be.
Was this a dream? Was it reality? As I continued to experience the film unfolding, instead of this question of reality vs. dreams being answered, it was only amplified and reinforced up until the last sliver of the movie, where Alexander's grandmother reads from the introduction of Strindberg's "Dream Play," for the last time calling into question all we have seen and felt, and yet making the work even more heartfelt in the questioning, for isn't this the eternal question of life?
"Merrily, merrily, merrily - Life is but a dream..."
Has there ever been a better ending to a film that wasn't "clever?"
That was it. It was over for me. I looked at my friends and I don't know...I was awe struck, even if to them it was just another film: Mostly okay, long, some of the characters, especially the reverand, too much...But me, I was so enraptured and related so fully to Alexander's imagination that I returned the next night to sit through the 3 plus hours again just to make sure I hadn't fooled myself. I was, of course, even more enthralled. After that night I crawled back over Bergman's work as best I could, slowly trying to see every one of his films I could get my hands on, and even more slowly trying to understand all that I missed. This was before DVD so a lot of the films were very poor pan and scans I was watching on a twelve inch TV, but when I turned out the lights the mystery and the magic endured the circumstances of my poverty.
Somewhere along the way I became convinced that films were art and that I wanted to be a part of it. (I'm still trying to figure out if this was the right decisions or if I really did arrive too late for the party.)
So what was the the essence of life distilled into Bergman's films? All of this has been well gone over by the critics over the years: blood, sugar, sex, magic (as the Red Hot Chili Peppars once so aptly put it,) not to mention loyalty, betrayal, adultery, death, love, intimacy and everything else a human being can experience. All of it there. All of it sculpted out and so specific in the small world he created. All of it waiting to be discovered again and again.
Memory: While their father is dying Fanny and Alexander are in the kitchen with one of the old maids. She is writing a letter to her friend in China, reciting it out loud while the other maid is not listening, caught up in her own world. Finally, the old maid finishes writing the letter, slips it into it's envelope and hands it to Fanny. Fanny proceeds to lick the ends of the envelope and hands it back to the maid who seals it. I swear I've had this same moment with my own grandmother. Just that small nothing moment so carefully observed, so real, so true...Only someone who knows can create a detail like that.
Then, in 2005 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a Begman festival. Every Friday and Saturday night for a month they showed Bergman's films from the Late 1950's to 1960's...To see films like Shame, Persona, The Magician on that beautiful screen in all their glory...The one that really did me in was The Virgin Spring. The Virgin Spring. God, The Virgin Spring. A film Bergman later renounced for it's ending, he believed it was false, the smallest redemption offering too much light. But to me a masterpiece of acting, writing...humanity. I wept at the end. Speechless. No other film, let alone work of art has ever done to me what that dark little film did to me. Smiles of a Summer Night? I laughed as hard at this film as I did at Caddy Shack it was so funny and true. Shame? One of the best war films I've ever seen? Persona...I have never, ever seen anything like it in my life, and yet, we all feel we've lived those moment, been the one who refuses to speak as well as the one who cannot stop speaking...
And, like a gift, these films came to me at a particularly poignant time of my life, a time where I was wounded and open, suffering a destruction of my own making in the sense that I felt I was living my own Bergman tragedy, all be it without the subtitles, but with just as beautiful and passionate a woman as any found in his films. Those films were terrible and comforting, I don't know how both at the same time, but that is magic.
I could dive into the culture war, modernism vs. post...But it all seems silly to me. One either believes art can be redemptive to the spirit or one doesn't. Call me a modernist, a sentimentalist, call me any ist you want, but I believe there is a spirit and the greatest art of any era simultaneously proves it and continues to redeem it, if you're open to such an experience.
Bergman was a magician. It's the only word. A magician of humanity.
I'll try to write more about Antonioni in the next couple days...But for now I'll leave it with this:
Ingmar Bergman, thank you, thank you, thank you...Forever.
I've read a lot about these two over the last couple days, a lot of recollections, synopses, surveys, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc...And, well, they've been interesting, and have said mostly nothing that I can relate to on any personal level. They use words like "trailblazer, " "personal," and "art film," but mostly, I don't know, it's all heartfelt and most of it could probably be said about any of the masters of that era. I don't want to be unduly harsh as I'm still trying to get my head around their deaths, but I can only say that for those who don't like either/or, one or the both, it took me a long, long time to fall in love with both, only in the last couple of years, but when I did I knew it was forever.
I didn't "get" Bergman until about seven years ago. I had tried to watch some of his films like Persona and could never be patient enough to sit through it...Like a lot of people who have and continue to shit on Bergman's work, I found it pretentious, boring even torturous. The only reason I kept trying is because some filmmakers I liked sang his praises. I was ready to all but write him off when back in the winter of 2000 Sherman Torgan decided to show "Fanny and Alexander" over two nights at the New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles. Fanny and Alexander, what was that? I had never even heard of it? "What the Hell?" I figured I'd give Bergman one more try and if I couldn't stand it I'd walk out and never look back at the guy again, write him off as another critical fraud.
And then I was sitting in that run down, half empty theatre with a couple of friends, the lights went dark, I heard those first notes of Schumann's mournful violin, and the film faded in on young Alexander Ekdahl as he moved through his empty house, calling for his family who were not there, and, perhaps, never really would be.
Was this a dream? Was it reality? As I continued to experience the film unfolding, instead of this question of reality vs. dreams being answered, it was only amplified and reinforced up until the last sliver of the movie, where Alexander's grandmother reads from the introduction of Strindberg's "Dream Play," for the last time calling into question all we have seen and felt, and yet making the work even more heartfelt in the questioning, for isn't this the eternal question of life?
"Merrily, merrily, merrily - Life is but a dream..."
Has there ever been a better ending to a film that wasn't "clever?"
That was it. It was over for me. I looked at my friends and I don't know...I was awe struck, even if to them it was just another film: Mostly okay, long, some of the characters, especially the reverand, too much...But me, I was so enraptured and related so fully to Alexander's imagination that I returned the next night to sit through the 3 plus hours again just to make sure I hadn't fooled myself. I was, of course, even more enthralled. After that night I crawled back over Bergman's work as best I could, slowly trying to see every one of his films I could get my hands on, and even more slowly trying to understand all that I missed. This was before DVD so a lot of the films were very poor pan and scans I was watching on a twelve inch TV, but when I turned out the lights the mystery and the magic endured the circumstances of my poverty.
Somewhere along the way I became convinced that films were art and that I wanted to be a part of it. (I'm still trying to figure out if this was the right decisions or if I really did arrive too late for the party.)
So what was the the essence of life distilled into Bergman's films? All of this has been well gone over by the critics over the years: blood, sugar, sex, magic (as the Red Hot Chili Peppars once so aptly put it,) not to mention loyalty, betrayal, adultery, death, love, intimacy and everything else a human being can experience. All of it there. All of it sculpted out and so specific in the small world he created. All of it waiting to be discovered again and again.
Memory: While their father is dying Fanny and Alexander are in the kitchen with one of the old maids. She is writing a letter to her friend in China, reciting it out loud while the other maid is not listening, caught up in her own world. Finally, the old maid finishes writing the letter, slips it into it's envelope and hands it to Fanny. Fanny proceeds to lick the ends of the envelope and hands it back to the maid who seals it. I swear I've had this same moment with my own grandmother. Just that small nothing moment so carefully observed, so real, so true...Only someone who knows can create a detail like that.
Then, in 2005 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a Begman festival. Every Friday and Saturday night for a month they showed Bergman's films from the Late 1950's to 1960's...To see films like Shame, Persona, The Magician on that beautiful screen in all their glory...The one that really did me in was The Virgin Spring. The Virgin Spring. God, The Virgin Spring. A film Bergman later renounced for it's ending, he believed it was false, the smallest redemption offering too much light. But to me a masterpiece of acting, writing...humanity. I wept at the end. Speechless. No other film, let alone work of art has ever done to me what that dark little film did to me. Smiles of a Summer Night? I laughed as hard at this film as I did at Caddy Shack it was so funny and true. Shame? One of the best war films I've ever seen? Persona...I have never, ever seen anything like it in my life, and yet, we all feel we've lived those moment, been the one who refuses to speak as well as the one who cannot stop speaking...
And, like a gift, these films came to me at a particularly poignant time of my life, a time where I was wounded and open, suffering a destruction of my own making in the sense that I felt I was living my own Bergman tragedy, all be it without the subtitles, but with just as beautiful and passionate a woman as any found in his films. Those films were terrible and comforting, I don't know how both at the same time, but that is magic.
I could dive into the culture war, modernism vs. post...But it all seems silly to me. One either believes art can be redemptive to the spirit or one doesn't. Call me a modernist, a sentimentalist, call me any ist you want, but I believe there is a spirit and the greatest art of any era simultaneously proves it and continues to redeem it, if you're open to such an experience.
Bergman was a magician. It's the only word. A magician of humanity.
I'll try to write more about Antonioni in the next couple days...But for now I'll leave it with this:
Ingmar Bergman, thank you, thank you, thank you...Forever.
7/23/07
R.I.P. Sherman Torgan, Owner and Operator of The New Beverly Cinema, The Best Movie Theatre In The World - 1944 - 2007
R.I.P. Sherman Torgan, Owner and Operator of The Best Movie Theatre In The World - 1944 -2007, originally uploaded by levari.
Thank you, Sherman, for everything. Your run down little theatre has given me an education a livelihood and sometimes even a home in this mad city.
You also let me pay in change when that was all I had.
I will never forget you.
Sherman Torgan, who turned an adult movie house in Los Angeles into the New Beverly Cinema, an arty repertory theater that screens classic, independent and foreign films, died Wednesday. He was 63.
Torgan suffered an apparent heart attack while on a bicycle ride in Santa Monica. He was pronounced dead at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said Jeff Rosen, a longtime friend.
From the time "the Beverly" opened in 1978 with a Marlon Brando double bill — "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Last Tango in Paris" — Torgan did everything from plan the programs to work the box office.
His limited budget didn't allow for flashy decor. He said he would rather keep ticket prices down than redecorate. Currently, general admission is $7, less for students and senior citizens.
When Torgan took over the theater, he and friends tore out the runway that had been used for erotic dance acts and replaced it with seats. Over time all of the theater's 300 seats became battered, and the projection room was "held together by spit and glue," said Rosen, who sometimes was the theater's projectionist. Torgan acknowledged that the place was "a little rough around the edges."
That look was part of the appeal for Torgan's clientele. Famous film directors and actors turned up unexpectedly to see the movies. Francois Truffaut once attended a screening of "Mildred Pierce," the 1940s film noir starring Joan Crawford. Eva Marie Saint was once in the audience for "North by Northwest," the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller that featured her and Cary Grant. "She said she hadn't seen the movie in years," Rosen recalled.
One patron, actor-writer-director Quentin Tarantino, organized a Grindhouse Festival at the Beverly this year. The festival title referred to the movie houses that used to "grind" away their projectors, showing three features in a row. Among the many "deliriously bad films" in the festival, Times arts writer Geoff Boucher noted, were "Autopsy," "Jailbait Babysitter" and "Chinese Hercules."
Revival, repertory and second-run movie theaters — the Vagabond near MacArthur Park, the Fox Venice near the beach — came and went, but Torgan's New Beverly Cinema remained. The rise of multiplex theaters, the increasing number of classic film programs at Los Angeles museums and the DVD industry cut into his business, but film buffs, students and people in the movie business still sprinkled the audience.
"A lot of people got their film education at the Beverly," Rosen said.
Torgan was born in Philadelphia on June 18, 1944, and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. After graduating from UCLA he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a location scout for movie production companies. He returned to Los Angeles in the mid-'70s to be nearer the studios.
He and two friends, Martin Ford and Donald Rappaport, opened the New Beverly Cinema in 1978. A year or so later Torgan took it over, Ford said in an interview with The Times this week.
Many patrons recognized Torgan on sight. He was slim and wiry with a dark beard and a full head of hair in the early days of the theater, when he was in his 30s. Later, he shaved off the beard but always kept his weight down.
In recent years his son, Michael, worked with him at the theater.
Programming has been canceled through the weekend. Further plans regarding the schedule will be announced on the theater's website, www.newbevcinema.com .
"The theater was Sherman," Rosen said.
Besides his son, Torgan is survived by his wife, Mary, and a brother, Marvin.
4/12/07
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt," or Rest In Peace, Mr. Vonnegut
You gave so much,
made so much
of the
tragic opera
that was the
20th Century.
"Poo-Tee-Weet!"
Your little bird once sang.
"Poo-Tee-Weet?"
Your little bird once asked.
You
are
fine
a
lee
free
of
your
mem
or...
"Poo-Tee-Weet!"
Kurt Vonnegut
November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007
made so much
of the
tragic opera
that was the
20th Century.
"Poo-Tee-Weet!"
Your little bird once sang.
"Poo-Tee-Weet?"
Your little bird once asked.
You
are
fine
a
lee
free
of
your
mem
or...
"Poo-Tee-Weet!"
Kurt Vonnegut
November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007
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