Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

It’s been a lively weekend so far. It started with my first ever visit to Buddy Guy’s Legends downtown on Friday evening. I saw a remarkable set by Michigan guitarist/singer Larry McCray. Too often nowadays, a blues show tries to get by on showboating and on the charisma of the front man. It was refreshing to see McCray’s sharp band bring down the house relying instead on sheer talent and creativity. He’s got a terrific style that contains elements of B.B. King and the Allman Brothers (both of whom McCray has worked with in the past), and he tosses off these little atomic guitar fills between vocal lines that leave you flabbergasted, the way John Lee Hooker used to do (though McCray sounds nothing like Hooker).

McCray also possesses a wonderful voice full of gravel (again, B.B. King comes to mind). In other words, he brings the full package. I have seen the future of the blues, and I’ve just ordered my copy of his 1993 album, Delta Hurricane.

Then, yesterday afternoon, we took Sonia to see the Joffrey Ballet’s Nutcracker at the Auditorium Theater. It’s a nice holiday spectacle with amazing sets and costumes. The stage gets a little crowded during the first half, when narrative dominates. The second half, when the real dancing happens, was lovely (and the handful of crying children in matinee audience actually added to the atmosphere, I thought), though Sonia found it a bit boring. I always think the Arabian dance should be shorter and the Russian dance longer, but that’s probably a sign of my bad taste.

Now it’s back to grading for me. I hope you’re having a fine weekend, wherever you may be.

It was a weekend spent watching new adaptations of canonical works. On Saturday afternoon, Satoko and I headed down to the Auditorium Theater to see the Joffrey Ballet’s production of Lar Lubovitch’s “Othello,” a piece that debuted in 1997. It’s a powerful rethinking of the ballet, one in which the techniques of classical dance are transformed from evocations of beauty into expressions of dark, dangerous emotions. In particular, Lubovitch stresses the ways Iago’s jealousy (and passion) for Othello mirrors that of Othello for Desdemona. The sets and costumes are quite effective, and Elliot Goldenthal’s score works well, too. The performances were top notch, especially Matthew Adamczyk as Iago. The audience gave the cast a well-deserved standing ovation, but didn’t forget to boo Adamcyzk for his villainous performance.

Then Sunday night we headed down to the Chicago International Film Festival to see Kanikosen, SABU’s new postmodern take on Kobayashi Takiji’s 1929 proletarian literature classic about workers on a brutal crab canning ship awakening to an awareness of their oppression and organizing a strike. SABU is best known for directing loosely organized black comedies that revolve around sight gags and a kind of dream logic, making him an odd choice for this adaptation.

It works pretty well in the first half, as the director appropriates the visual and slapstick mode of Chaplin’s Modern Times, but founders somewhat in the second half, when he has to carry the narrative forward to its resolution. I was hoping he would figure out a way to convey revolution via the surrealism of his best films, but instead he switches over to straightforward Hollywood mode: speeches about individuals needing to live their lives to the fullest, sentimental soundtrack music, and camerawork that stresses close ups on the stars’ faces. He almost redeems the film in the closing minutes, when the style again suddenly shifts: we go into slow motion, blurred camerawork and metal machine music on the soundtrack precisely at the point when the workers realize that the point is not individual heroism but rather mass action, whereupon they launch their second, presumably more effective strike. It’s as if SABU is deconstructing the preceding hour or so of his own film and vowing that, whatever the revolution might be, it won’t be successfully carried out according to mass culture forms of melodrama and bourgeois ideologies of self-reliance.

I’ll keep the reworking-the-classics theme going later this morning as I walk to work. I’ll be listening to the Raveonettes’ fine new CD, In and Out of Control, a creative updating of Phil Specter and other classic pop sounds from the early 1960s. They combine the sweetest melodies with the darkest lyrics: “Boys who rape should be destroyed,” for example, or “Last Dance” in which the language of teenage heartbreak at the sock hop is used to depict the final days of a junkie. Just as with Lubovitch and SABU, they demonstrate that there’s life yet to be found in the tired bones of the canon.

(UPDATE: As Roger Pulvers reports at Japan Focus, a musical by Inoue Hisashi based on the life of Kobayashi Takiji is now on stage in Tokyo.)