The French filmmaker and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 76, has made his valedictory statement. The ravishing documentary Legacy, now streaming, is a visual and aural love letter to our planet, the creatures that inhabit it, and the ones (us) who are destroying it. Employing languid footage shot from a hot-air balloon, as he did in his...
The poet Jennifer Battisti was a Las Vegas latchkey kid, with casino employee parents. Off Boulder Highway, her extraordinary memoir, some of it fictionalized, much of it beautifully poetic, all of it alarmingly real, makes the performative Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seem like a sanitized Disney fantasy. Sloppy sex, meth addiction, blackout drunkenness...
The latest poetry collection from prolific author Heather Tosteson, Source Notes: Seventh Decade, is one of those treasured books one finishes and begins to read again. At turns searching and assured, troubled and contented, the poems here range from the deeply personal — including terrible trauma and recovery — to the universally felt. Ostensibly a meditation...
Does righteousness have a sound? Can good intentions be heard in the language of music? Saxophonist/composer Dan Blake’s new recording, Da Fe, attempts an aural answer to those questions, and the results are convincing. A Buddhist, social justice warrior, and former member of the Esperanza Spalding band, Blake’s values are deeply humanist and compassionate; on the...
“Our Highway,” the new multi-media project from the jazz quintet (trio + two reedmen) Cowboys & Frenchmen is a monument to the boundless power of creativity. Rather than merely record an album of their brilliant modern music, the group has made a film — a purposefully trippy film, befitting the notion of travel and motion...
The righteous social justice publisher, Wising Up Press, from Decatur, Georgia, has released their latest anthology, this one simply called Goodness. Several dozen writers grapple with the concept, sharing poems, short stories, essays, and many affecting memoirs, all manifesting a sense, a feeling, of something we all recognize and yearn for but often cannot define....
If you have the stomach for in-depth reporting on corruption in Los Angeles — at City Hall, on the City Council, the police force, everywhere there’s money and power — the citizen journalist Michael Kohlhaas is a necessary read. Just like old-fashioned investigative reporters used to do before being co-opted by papers uninterested in offending...
For two consecutive weeks, we’ve been treated to compulsively listenable new albums by two excellent jazz drummers, Raphael Pannier (“Faune”) and Matt Wilson (“Hug!”). In many ways, the recordings couldn’t be more different. Pannier is a next generation virtuoso surrounded by other jazz killers — Miguel Zenon, Francois Moutin, Aaron Goldberg — whose spectacular modernist...
The cinematic thriller “Last Moment of Clarity,” written and directed by James and Colin Krisel in their major film debut, is a melange of Hitchcockian plot devices — “Vertigo,” particularly — assembled with assured artfulness and narrative control. We’re given what seems like a set of facts — a hapless fellow (Zach Avery, nicely understated)...
Alice Wu’s autobiographical romantic comedy “The Half of It” is worth watching for many reasons, including its original and modern take on the Cyrano de Bergerac theme of love letters written by a surrogate. Perhaps the movie’s biggest revelation is the performance of Leah Lewis, a singer-songwriter whose utter naturalness on screen suggests she’ll soon...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
