William Kennedy

Music and arts writer based in Oregon. Covering Portland, Eugene and beyond.

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The Beginning of the End In Charlie Kaufman’s new film, boy meets girl, girl meets parents, shit gets weird.

At a time when many are seeking ways to bridge seemingly insurmountable social, political, and ideological divides in America and much of the rest of the world, Charlie Kaufman’s new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is here to say, good luck with that.

Good luck, that is, so long as language is involved, when two young lovers, Jake (Jesse Plemons) and Lucy (Jessie Buckley) take a drive through a blizzard, across a prairie, to Jake’s childhood home, where Lucy will meet Jake’s  parents for the very first time. And what do you do on a long drive? You talk.

The movie is based on Iain Reed’s 2016 novel of the same name, and it’s out now on Netflix.

Adapting the script from Reed’s already strange, play-like novel and making it stranger by degrees of Kaufman, the writer-director asks what will happen when language becomes bereft of all meaning, floating between us ephemerally? And what strain, then, does this put on the very nature of reality?

“The problem with other people is that they are other people,” Jake says at some point. Or perhaps this disconnect could simply be a metaphor for depression. It’s enough to make Schopenhauer shout, “Shut up.”

From there, the story can be summed up as boy meets girl, girl meets parents — played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis — and then, shit gets weird.  It’s also about words, in Lucy’s own internal monologue, where she reveals her ambivalence about her nascent relationship — the thing she is considering ending.

But also, where that internal monologue bleeds into dialogue with Jake, and then, with Jake’s parents, who time-slip to different eras of their own life before Lucy’s bewildered eyes.  

When the young couple arrive at Jake’s childhood home, Collette recalls an anecdote of Jake’s proficiency with what she calls the genius edition of the game Trivial Pursuit. “Genus edition,” Jake corrects.

A small thing, to be sure, but it’s about the frayed nerves produced when your own mother can’t correctly identify the very thing at which she means to say you were successful. In this film, aging is not a graceful process to behold, but instead something piteous. We are different creatures, the young and the old.

The moment is fraught with tension between Plemons and Collette, and the skin crawls. Words malfunction. Needless to say, the meet-up goes poorly, like so bad it seems to tear a hole in reality itself. I can’t wait for the wedding.

That reality, which in a Charlie Kaufman universe (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) is already difficult to pluck apart from narrative structure, and it is constantly toyed with and subverted. In Ending, this is meta-signaled by a book of Pauline Kael film criticism in Jake’s childhood bedroom and in one of the movie’s most surreal moments, when Buckley launches into a dead-on Kael impression on the barreling home through the snow.

Buckley takes on a character in Lucy that must constantly be wiped clean before it can be redrawn over and over again with fierce intelligence and dark tenacity. As the audience begins to realize Lucy may or not even be real, so too does Lucy seem to come to the very same conclusion.

It’s funny then — not funny ha-ha, but Kaufman funny — that a film neurotically preoccupied by the futility of language as a means of human connection, will conclude with a wordless dance sequence, lifted in part from the Broadway musical Oklahoma, after Lucy and Jake stop off at Jake’s old high school.

It’s then that the last vestiges of reality, and the films ultimate time-jump, get buried in a snowdrift.

Throughout, Ending Things is propelled along by the narrative beats of a thriller and the logic of a dream, the suspense rooted primarily in the mundane. Cinematographer Łukasz Żal adding the feel of noir blanc with an American accent. I haven’t even mentioned the animated pig and the singing.

But the most anxious moment comes when Lucy and Jake stop-off for an ice cream treat, a much-needed serotonin burst in the dead of night. After both Jake and Lucy decide that the ice cream is too sweet, it sits in the car’s drink holder, slowly melting.

As Jake watches, his anxiety over the ensuing stickiness mounts. I didn’t sleep a wink.

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A Long, Kooky Road: How Golden Shoals Found Bluegrass - Split Tooth Media

North Carolina blugrass duo Mark Kilianski and Amy Alvey reflect contemporary life through old-time music, and the road that led to bluegrass

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"This is the dawning of the day without end," sings Joe Casey of Detroit post-punk quartet Protomartyr on the opening track of his band's brand-new release, Ultimate Success Today, "When fear steps into light," he continues, adding, "I've been planning for this day all my life, or have I not?" somehow journaling our plague year before it even happened. Rendered in splattering and explosive, convulsing post-punk with some surprise extras (clarinet, anyone?) this album is a horse pill we must choke down, as Casey sings in his empty-bottle croon of faces in scanners, of being processed by the boys, of hoping beyond hope it will be somehow different this time (he knows it won’t). It's the sound of federal troops on American streets, of detention centers on the border. It’s tempting, though lazy, to compare the album a funhouse mirror of this American moment. But what is a funhouse mirror? We’re entertained by it looking back at us. Loaded with munition, Ultimate Success Today looks only one way with a cruel, jaundiced, and necessary gaze.

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Minnesota Twins

Remo Drive announce their rockist intentions with “Two Bux,” the opening track off the Minnesota band’s brand new full-length Natural, Everyday Degradation, out now on Epitaph. The song kicks off w…

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Guerillas in the Mist

Guerilla Toss play music that could only come from the urban environs of New York City — over-stimulated and arty, crowded with ideas, and existing somewhere between electronic music, punk rock and…

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The Joke’s on Us

The broken mirror director Todd Phillips’ controversial new film Joker holds up to society casts  reflections in many different directions, each one suggesting an alternate reading or basis of critique: psychological, Marxist, racial, or feminist. It’s all right there, and each one an indictment of where we find ourselves in 2019, 40 years or so after Reagan’s “Morning in America,” when neo-Liberalism first began to slowly eclipse everything that makes us human. But no matter which reflection you choose to follow, they all lead pretty much to the same conclusion: we are failing our most vulnerable, and we’re starved for human relationship.

Joker isn’t really a super hero story, it’s more of a no-hero story. The angel billionaire benefactor of Batman lore, Thomas Wayne, is this time a bit of a self-serving, Trumpian asshole. The rich won’t save us after all, screenwriters Todd Phillips and Scott Silver seem to tell us. It’s just that the movie had to be called Joker because in today’s Hollywood a film like this couldn’t reach a mass audience without attaching itself to a franchise like Batman, itself an indictment of art under capitalism. The iconography and references made to the Batman mythos do, however, pay tribute to the richness of the Batman universe, acting also as a sign of how absurd things have become.

Much of the controversies surrounding the film tell us what the film is at heart: the story of how a young man became radicalized. What makes us most uncomfortable is the film points the finger of blame for this radicalization squarely on us. With mass shootings and Incels in its margins, it’s a collective and squeamish, “too soon.” Critics call the movie unpleasant. And it certainly is. Unpleasant because we don’t like to hear what it has to say: “No shit extremism is on the rise all over the world. Have you looked around lately?”

Many also dislike that we’re made to feel a little bit of sympathy for Arthur Fleck as he spirals out of control. But this seems to me a bit like criticizing Shakespeare’s Richard III just because King Rick gets all the best lines. The Richard parallels deepen with Joaquin Phoenix’s deformed physique, his shoulder length hair, and the joy he finds in chaos creation. Much has been written about Phoenix’s performance, all of it earned. It’s a humdinger to be sure, Phoenix inhabiting every inch of Arthur Fleck in his slow decline (or is it ascension?) to the clown prince of crime.

Set in  Gotham, standing in as a thinly-veiled New York of the `70s and `80s rendered in Scorsese’s washed-out greens and slate grey, Fleck is a party-clown-for-hire, suffering from a Tourettes-like condition that causes involuntary laughter, a choking-cough-cackle as Phoenix manifests it that can be caused by a neurological disorder, or, perhaps, head trauma, foreshadowing one of the film’s biggest reveals. Fleck lives with his mother and dreams of making it big in stand-up comedy, idolizing a Johnny Carson-like late night talk show host played by Robert De Niro. For Fleck the warm laughter of an audience is the human connection he fails to find anywhere else, and, in the film’s view, interrelation is the ultimate purpose of human existence, thwarted at every turn by an increasing isolation.

As the walls of Gotham’s failing society close in on Fleck — there’s a garbage strike, society can’t even get its shit together well enough to take the garbage out — Fleck loses his job, his mental health declines, and he learns of a deep trauma from his past. This is a trauma-informed story but then again Batman has always been the ultimate trauma-informed super hero. Fleck seeks help in social services, but that too is pulled out from under him due to “budget cuts.” A particularly moving bit of the movie is Phoenix’s portrayal of both mental illness and depression. “All I have are negative thoughts,” he tells his caseworker. When everything is rotten to the core the pursuit of an illusory and transient happiness is in itself a form of madness. “Put on a happy face,” the film tells us. But what for? What does that even mean?

Eventually, Fleck turns not to comedy, but to violence, itself a form of human connection. He revels in the chaos, an avenue of self-expression, transforming Fleck into a king of sorts, lord of the wasteland that is his creation. Joker is not a perfect movie: there’s a racial undertone that at best deserves unpacking, and at worst may well be problematic, and there’s a speech near the end about who gets to and who gets to not decide what’s funny, taking the story from human tragedy to a dubious and reductive ideological lecture. Poor Todd Phillips (director of films like The Hangover triptych) just can’t tell jokes anymore.

The film takes us right up to the point when the Joker’s clown army coalesces. The film doesn’t seem to care if this is Antifa, or Proud Boys, Trump’s deplorables, or Occupy Wall Street. Instead, its concern is that humans are driven to connect and with connection thwarted at every turn, humans will still find a way to do just that, even if it leads to violence, destruction, and pathology. Near the end of the film we see a young Bruce Wayne, his parents shot dead in an alley as Gotham goes up in flames, the young boy’s figure in silhouette, as if to say, “When we need a hero most, who will fill the role? What will that hero look like?” I’m not sure if Phillips has a true Batman story to tell in this vision, but I’m excited to find out.

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#pancho+thefactory #eugeneoregon #portlandoregon

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Pancho + The Factory, Eugene Weekly, 6.23.16

Stephen Buettler is the principal provocateur behind rising Eugene band Pancho + The Factory. He’s also the primary songwriter and vocalist. Sitting next to me at the bar in Eugene’s Wayward Lamb, Buettler vibes like an off-duty, dock-working Pagliacci with a rock ‘n’ roll edge — due in no small part to his blue-collar handlebar moustache and black fingernail polish. He has a malleable, expressive face, a gentle, kindhearted sadness in his eyes and a soft, teddy bear-like physique that some might call cuddly.

This makes sense, because when Buettler adopts his larger-than-life on-stage persona as Pancho, he draws inspiration from clowning — both literal clowns as well as performers who fit a broader definition of foolery.

Whether you’re talking about rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest front-people, Kabuki performers or vaudevillians, Buettler says a willingness to be vulnerable is central to any performer engaging an audience. The best performers expose themselves to ridicule while heightening the inner drama to an absurd level.

Buettler is a native Philadelphian, and he recalls one of the city’s oldest traditions, the Mummers Parade, affecting his aesthetic.

“It’s on New Year’s Day. It’s basically these groups of guys called the Mummers,” Buettler explains. “They’re union guys, blue-collar chubby dudes. For one day out of the year they get lavishly dressed — feathers, sequins — and parade down Broad Street, which is our main street.”

He says his love for the theater of baseball also inspires him, particularly the Philadelphia Phillies and especially the lonely, rigid yet emotive role the pitcher plays in the game. Buettler sees links between baseball pitchers, rock stars and even mariachi singers.

On a basic level, what Buettler says he brings to the persona of Pancho, and what really turns him on as a performer, is a love for all sorts of populist-leaning folk traditions that nonetheless have strict stylizations and a focus on elevated personal experience, whether it’s a drag queen, a grizzled old bluesman or a hellfire-breathing gospel preacher.

“It’s about being so over the top,” Buettler explains. “You really make this imprint on people. For me, being a frontman is about having a mask to dance behind. And I very much enjoy that role of being that jester, that clown, to be who I am in my room in front of an audience.”

Classically trained, Buettler relocated to Eugene four years ago, simply because it intrigued him and it seemed like a good place to be an artist. He calls his seven-piece band’s sound “rock” but also “working-class music,” or “Midwest Opera.”

He runs the show, but doesn’t consider himself a dictator, allowing for collaboration. He laughs: “I have funny rules. I don’t let anyone wear hats on stage. Hats are too cultural,” he says.

“I’m proud of the fact we’ll get punk kids at our show,” Buettler says. “We’ll get older dudes at the end of the bar. It’s rock, it has a certain spirit and feel to it, but I want to create the expectation that if I want to do a TLC-inspired song, I’m going to write that song.”

Much of Pancho + The Factory’s music is built around familiar formulas: ’50s-era rock, 12-bar blues or Django Reinhardt-style gyspy jazz. All of it is viewed through the same subversive lens that saw the ’60s meet early punk in New York bands like The Fugs or The Holy Modal Rounders.

Three backup singers provide a gospel edge and a frequent girl-group vibe, while Buettler often sounds like Nick Cave, particularly on “Girls on Horses.” It all combines into a Cramps-esque carnival atmosphere with Buettler as undisputed ringleader — Andy Kaufman meeting Jim Morrison, or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins mixed with Iggy Pop.

Despite claiming so much inspiration from the East Coast, the Midwest and even Berlin, watching Pancho + The Factory gives you a sense that Eugene music — a scene Buettler contends is hitting its stride — might have finally found a distinctive sound, not in a limiting kind of “local band” way, but instead in terms of finding a balance between Eugene’s punk rock and hipster sensibilities, its working-class atmosphere and Oregon Country Fair-style theatricality, while at the same time transcending it all.

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The Thermals, Eugene Weekly, 5.12.16

Portland power-trio The Thermals are obsessed with death.

“It’s a subject Hutch [Harris] and I think about a lot,” Thermals bassist Kathy Foster tells EW. Harris plays guitar, sings and is primary songwriter. “It’s always present,” she says of the specter of death. “Sometimes it can be scarier than other times. Sometimes I get obsessed with it, think about it a lot and have this doomed feeling: It’s inevitable.”

This may sound like The Thermals are all gloomy, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The Thermals come to Eugene behind their new release, We Disappear, out now on Saddle Creek label. Tracks like “My Heart Went Cold” and “The Great Dying” blend dark subject matter with the band’s signature upbeat and peppy, pop-punk sound.

“It feels cathartic to play loud and fast and heavy,” Foster explains. “It helps deal with those heavy feelings. It’s like an outlet for them.”

She adds: “That’s also just been our style, to write songs that are fun to play with a little bit of a heavier lyrical theme.”

The Thermals are known for playing tight and fuzzy power chords backed up by a sharp rhythm section underpinned by Foster’s aggressive bass playing. On top of it all, Harris doesn’t so much sing as melodically nerd-rant in declarative sentences, dropping impeccable, well-timed guitar hooks like the outro from Disappear’s “Into the Code,” which opens the album.

Throughout Disappear, The Thermals ratchet up the intensity: The tempos are driving, the performances more fevered and the feedback more blistering. Prior to The Thermals, Foster had never played bass in a band. She calls the Ramones an influence on her style and says Nirvana is one of her favorite trios.

Together since 2002 and with seven critically acclaimed studio records, The Thermals are now veterans of Portland’s indie-rock scene. Having been in Portland since the ’90s, Harris and Foster have seen the city’s music scene change significantly.

“It’s a lot different,” she says. “It’s not just the changes in Portland but the changes everywhere that have affected music. I still feel like there’s a lot of music going on.”  But, Foster points out, “it feels more spread out, not as tight-knit of a community.”

Foster says the band always enjoys their tour stops in Eugene. “We appreciate all the Eugene weirdos that come,” she jokes. “I feel like every time we come to Eugene it’s just very ‘Eugene.’”

Up to this point, The Thermals have recorded and toured as a three-piece. This time out, Jessica Boudreaux of rising Portland punk band Summer Cannibals joins on lead guitar. Summer Cannibals will also open for The Thermals on this leg of the tour, supporting the band’s own fantastic new release, Full of It, out now on the Kill Rock Stars label.

“We already knew we wanted Summer Cannibals to tour with us,” Foster recalls, “so we asked Jessica to play guitar with us. She’s such a great guitar player. She plays heavy and plays a lot of solos.”

Foster says the addition of a lead guitarist has finally allowed many Thermals songs to be performed as they were recorded.

“The record we just made was the three of us,” she explains. “There’s a few places where there’s solos. It makes it a lot more dynamic. And it feels really good to play older songs that we haven’t been able to hear the way they’re intended for a really long time.”

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Pokey LaFarge, Eugene Weekly, 4.28.16

Muddy Waters changed Pokey LaFarge’s life. “I was, like, 13,” LaFarge tells EW, recalling the time some “older cats” played him Waters’ classic 1963 album Folk Singer at a pizza joint. “I thought, ‘Wow, the blues are acoustic?’” LaFarge recalls. “It changed my life.”

Pokey LaFarge has built a career exploring and reviving musical styles that, while occasionally veering toward jazz or country, remain resolutely pop-centric, though not the kind of music commonly thought of as pop these days. More like the old-timey pop of your grandma and grandpa’s time, a simpler time when everything was less fragmented and compartmentalized — when a singer could sing a country weeper and a hot jazz scorcher and a bluesy swinger and no one batted an eyelash. Instead, they just drank up and kept dancing.

No, it probably wasn’t really like that back then, but listening to LaFarge you almost believe it could’ve been.

“I love a good song,” LaFarge says. “I have my own style and my own personality,” he continues, adding “that personality and identity will enhance any song and make it identifiable to me. I have a pretty original voice at this point.”

LaFarge says that for him, as a teen, older pop music styles — from dirty blues to jazz — felt almost avant garde.

“It’s the acoustic-it-y,” LaFarge explains. “At a young age you don’t really listen to a lot of acoustic music. You’re hearing electronic dance music, or rap, or metal or whatever,” he says, explaining the influence older pop music had on him. “It’s the style itself, the ensemble playing, melody, the stories that they’re telling.”

Along with commonly expected vintage influences, LaFarge lists artists like Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Tom Waits and Hoagy Carmichael as favorites. For LaFarge, however, classic country singer Jimmie Rodgers is particularly important.

“He’s kind of like the musician version of Steinbeck or Kerouac,” LaFarge says. “He’s kind of like the Mark Twain of country music. He laid the foundation of what country music is today.”

LaFarge won’t go so far as to say modern pop is missing something, but he does urge listeners to look to the underground for the good stuff. “There’s so much amazing music these days,” LaFarge says. “There’s just as much good music today, if not more, than there ever was. I would encourage people to keep digging.”

Last year, LaFarge released Something in the Water. He says he’s coming to Eugene prepping a new record, but feels it’s a little too fresh to talk about, and he likely won’t be playing any new songs this time through town.

With his unreleased material, LaFarge finds his songwriting approach subtly changing. “It was almost always melody first,” he explains, “and then it’s kind of become more lyrically driven, going into this next album-making process.”

Overall, LaFarge says he feels deeply rooted in tradition and yet he’s established a sound all his own, calling his current band a “family.”

“I’ve been around for awhile but I’m just as hungry as ever,” LaFarge says. “I’m just as passionate about making music as I ever was.”

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Mount Moriah, Portland Mercury, 4.13.16

MOUNT MORIAH singer Heather McEntire has a voice like an ember, shielded from the cold, harsh breeze by the cupped hands of her band.

Bassist Casey Toll's loose-limbed but broad-shouldered grooves ignite McEntire like a gentle breath. Jenks Miller's guitar licks, true and honest, offer just enough whiskey swerve for a twangy spark. Mount Moriah is touring in support of its latest release, How to Dance, out now on Merge Records. "What I think of Mount Moriah is probably pretty different than what other people think," McEntire says in a soft southern drawl. "And that's fine with me."

McEntire and Miller met working at a record store in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, bonding over a shared love of punk and DIY music. "We realized we had similar musical tastes," McEntire recalls. Soon Toll joined on bass, and the trio became a quartet with a "round robin" of drummers. "I think we all really respect and trust each other," McEntire says. "The guys trust me to write the lyrics; it's a nice balance, it's harmonious. We're all best friends too."

McEntire calls herself a musical late-bloomer. "I didn't really sing or find any musical bone in my body until I was about 18 and discovered punk music," she explains. "I played punk music for about 10 years. I guess you can call it singing—a lot of screaming and yelling—after that the dust settled for me to be myself as a singer."

What the dust has revealed is one of 2016's most enchanting new voices in alt-country—a label McEntire says is "sincere and right," but is quick to add, "With this record we hope to be seen as more than an alt-country band... When we set out to make this record I think we had an understanding: Mount Moriah can be anything we want it to be. It doesn't have to be alt-country. It can be whatever genuine place we're at. My parents say we're country," she says.

Central to Mount Moriah's music, from the band name to song titles like "Chiron (God in the Brier)" and "Cardinal Cross," is an interest in religious and biblical imagery. "[Mount Moriah] is a pretty fascinating, important piece of land in the bible," McEntire says, explaining that when Miller named the band he was drawn to that power. "A piece of land, what it can mean, what power it has. Individually we've been very interested in religion and spirituality. We come at it from different angles. We're curious about different religions and how that influences different cultures and subcultures, particularly in the South. It's all around us."

On the gospel-tinged track "Baby Blue," McEntire sings, "Meet your master on a hill/Goldenrod from the hand of God/And the asp is back again."

"One of the reasons that I love being in this band," says McEntire, "is being able to write the lyrics. I come from a creative writing background. This is a cool way for me to explore my writing—creating narratives.

"I appreciate that we can be country and we can be punk and everything in between," she continues. "For me personally, being in this band saved my life. It's got its finger on me for sure."

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Morrissey, Autobiography Review, Eugene Weekly, 1.2.14

There’s a lot of B.S. in Morrissey’s Autobiography (Penguin/Putnam, $30): It’s self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, self-mythologizing, full of melodramatic humor and humorous melodrama. If The Queen is “the royal we,” then Morrissey is “the royal me.” If this surprises you, I respond: “I see you’re unfamiliar with Morrissey.”  

Autobiography is also remarkably well-written in passages, laugh-out-loud funny and tender; Morrissey writes beautifully of depression, untimely death (of friends and family) as well as the plight of the weak and underprivileged — from the poor of Britain and Mexico to an injured baby bird he nurses to health in his California backyard.

The book is strongest when recounting Morrissey’s childhood. His schools are grim and martial punishment (read: child abuse) is the norm. Morrissey’s Manchester of the ’60s and ’70s is Dickensian and dour, his upbringing beyond working-class; his only outlets are TV, film and pop music (particularly the gender-bending glam rock of the ’70s).

Some are disappointed that Autobiography doesn’t reveal more of the singer’s creative process — I assert in the long, affectionate passages describing actors and singers meaningful to him as a boy, he’s doing just that, by saying, “Look over there! Don’t look at me!” Morrissey is both opening up while obscuring, for these influences are his process, and he is these influences.

The Smiths career breezes by. Morrissey clearly is stating, “I am more than The Smiths.” He speaks lovingly of his bandmates and is generous to their talent, but you feel the betrayal of the court case that put the final nail in the coffin of the seminal ’80s rock group. Love relationships are mentioned, but blink and you’ll miss them. He speaks sweetly of those who’ve touched his life and viciously of those he feels wronged by.

His solo career gets more attention. Morrissey is both a self-made man and an eternal victim — perpetually a day late, never getting his due, always on the short end of life. To be fair, he frequently states all of this is no fault but his own. Ultimately Autobiography is about triumph: A young boy, beyond hypersensitive (more an open wound), goes on to be one of the most beloved, unique and successful individuals in the history of pop music, almost entirely on his own terms. He’s cantankerous, contrary and divisive. Many love him, and many hate him. Meanwhile, the real Steven Patrick Morrissey slips out the stage door alone, off to the next concert.

Don’t miss the delightful and affectionate mention of his one-and-only show at Eugene’s McDonald Theatre in August 2002.

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