Pages tagged “issue 43”

Indies 1, Nashville 0

In the nightmare version of Caroline Herring’s story, she moves to Nashville, signs a big publishing deal and is stuck dumbing down her razor-sharp songwriting for Music Row pod people like Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. Fortunately, Nashville hasn’t yet sunk its claws into Herring’s immensely empathetic charm. Exhibit A: “Paper Gown” (about convicted child-murderer Susan Smith) has to be the best example of a songwriter getting inside the head of an unsympathetic real-life protagonist since Steve Earle’s “John Walker’s Blues.” And rather than an immaculately auto-tuned robo-singer, Herring effortlessly plumbs the emotional depths of her songs with her evocative alto. Her delivery, along with Rich Brotherton’s pitch-perfect production, makes this song cycle resonant in more ways than a simple, rootsy singer/songwriter album ought to. Lantana comes on the heels of a five-year break Herring took to get married and start a family; her music is all the richer for it.

Race, family and voodoo in North Carolina

This is the first novel in nine years from Shiner, who has penned two of the best popular-music novels I’ve read (Glimpses and Say Goodbye). Black & White is a page-turner about a thirtysomething comics artist who returns to North Carolina in 2004 and hears a deathbed confession from his father that plunges him into the past—of a vital, successful black community outside of Durham that’s razed for a freeway—and an unexpected present.

It’s a masterful portrayal of a post-racial South fighting to be born, and a thoughtful meditation on how personal change affects social change, and vice-versa.

When the dynamite comes out and the race riot starts—you will be turning those pages.

Canin and the promised land

"How did this person’s life turn out the way it did?"

This is the question that interests Ethan Canin as a writer. In fact, he once said in an interview that it was the only question that interested him, which is why he stopped writing short fiction—there simply wasn’t enough space in which to give a full answer.

Texas troubadour creates glam-punk-country opus

Alejandro Escovedo isn’t just a musician’s musician, a label that typically signifies high critical esteem and low sales. Rather, he’s a troubadour’s troubadour, plugging away for 30 years with a smattering of admiring fans, the respect of his colleagues, and a handful of critics wondering why he hasn’t received the Kennedy Center Honors. Born into a musical family that includes brothers Pete and Coke as well as niece Sheila E., Alejandro cut his teeth in San Francisco’s punk forerunners the Nuns during the late 1970s, before forming two semi-legendary proto-alt.country acts in the 1980s: first Rank and File and then the True Believers (with his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham). His glam side project, Buick McKane (named after a T. Rex song), released a single, well-regarded album in the mid 1990s, compiling nearly five years of recordings. However, with seven albums under his own name, he is perhaps most revered as a solo artist, so much so that in the 1990s, alt.country bible No Depression named him artist of the decade two years before the decade was even over.

A deceptively simple fish tale

Peter Markus is obsessed with a few words: brother, river, mud, lighthouse, fish, moon and star. From this sacred vocabulary springs a body of work—three books of stories and now a novel—that is sometimes confounding, often beautiful, starkly spare and totally unique. Bob, or Man on Boat is an authentically avant-garde work, refreshingly absent of any trace of pretension or irony. It is pure incantation and fable: prayer by any other name.

The story: A man named Bob sits on a boat, fishing. Another man, Bob’s son Bob, watches him and fishes, too. That’s about all that happens.

Like Gertrude Stein, Markus uses an elementary lexicon and recursive prose to make the mundane strange. “Look at Bob’s hands. His knuckles are rivers. The skin on Bob’s hands, fish scale covered, they look like they’ve been dipped in stars.”

Markus’ work is not for everyone, and Bob is a book to truly love or hate. Count me among the lovers.

Lookout punks, lookout beerlight

Though chief semite David Berman sounds less electrified—and more gentrified—than usual on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, he’s the rare songwriter who’s better for it. Relying on elliptical truisms (“What is Not But Could Be If”), pleasingly surreal non-rhymes (“peppermint bars” and ”marshmallow walls” on “Candy Jail”), and sad phrases twisted gently (“she went her way, and I went his,” on “San Francisco B.C.”), Berman serves hooks with the vague ghosts of country twang. Delivering in a droll drawl, he plays the wryly omniscient narrator, building small stories. “True love doesn’t come around any more than fate allows on a Monday in Fort Lauderdale,” he declares on “Candy Jail”—probably a fair assessment. The album brims with shaggy-dog tales (“Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer”), highly ponderable phrases, and the occasional glorious bridge (“Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”). As a vehicle for Berman’s words, just as much as a follow-up to his 1999 poetry collection Actual Air would be, Lookout Mountain is a volume to be consumed in one’s own time, filed on the shelf, and eventually taught in seminars as an example of form and poise.

On sophomore record, Wainwright sings her heart out—almost literally

Daughter of Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle and sister to Rufus, Martha Wainwright possesses a spiky voice that can whisper one note and wail the next, moving from recriminating to comforting in the space of a measure. On “You Cheated Me,” a standout track from her new album, she vaults into her upper range for a chorus that’s catchy but accusatory, joyful but self-mocking. On “Tower Song,” she sings conspiratorially, over-enunciating even her oohs and aahs. These vocal swoops and swoons might seem melodramatic if the words behind them weren’t so frank, personable and bite-your-tongue funny, as Wainwright sings about being the other woman, posing spiritual questions and dealing with songwriting family members. If her tough-minded 2005 debut presented her as a scion to her family’s legacy, then I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too portrays Wainwright as a distinctive artist with a caustic sense of humor and a complicated family situation.

According to the lore, My Morning Jacket took its name from a coat emblazoned with the initials “MMJ” that frontman Jim James found in the burned-out husk of his favorite bar. This reminds me of an anecdote from Ira B. Nadel’s Leonard Cohen biography, Various Positions, in which a young Cohen—after reading a book on hypnotism—successfully mesmerizes and undresses the family maid. Both stories, as perfect metaphors for their subjects’ music, seem too good to be true. Just as the hypnotism anecdote ties up Cohen’s libido and mysticism in a neat bow, the coat anecdote neatly illustrates the animating force behind My Morning Jacket’s music. The band wanders the gutted scaffolding of musical memory, judiciously plucking genre scraps from the wreckage to augment its heterogeneous rock music.

No one ever had more carry-on baggage than Bennie Ford, the narrator of Jonathan Miles’ sparkling debut novel, Dear American Airlines.

Enough, it turns out, to fill a book. Immured in Chicago’s O’Hare airport en route to his long-estranged daughter’s wedding, Bennie vents page after page, creating an epistolary novel with a narrator who takes after the Biblical sufferer Job. Miles, 37, a student and friend of the late Larry Brown, perfectly captured the excruciating physical space of the book’s setting through firsthand research—“At least 36 hours” at O’Hare, he says, “though it seemed much longer.”

A metal band in Iraq? The notion was so incomprehensible that, in characteristic bemused fashion, Vice magazine co-founder Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, executive producer of Vice’s VBS.tv, journeyed to Baghdad in 2006 to meet the members of Acrassicauda, who bill themselves as the only metal band in Iraq. Intending to film a travel segment for VBS.tv, the pair instead wound up making a feature-length documentary that presents an unvarnished look at life during Operation Iraqi Freedom through the prism of four earnest headbangers.

On a warm February day in South Carolina, Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg embarks on a bird-spotting stroll through the Audubon Swamp Garden at Magnolia Plantation—the same swamp John James Audubon visited 150 years ago on his quest to document every species of bird in America, and the same swamp where Wes Craven filmed his 1982 cult classic Swamp Thing.

Tangled up in boooo

Most people aren’t familiar with the three albums of new material Alanis Morissette has released since 1995’s Jagged Little Pill. Her latest, Flavors of Entanglement seems like an ardent attempt to be as strong, raw and relevant as she was on the album everybody knows. The recruitment of producer Guy Sigsworth somewhat accomplishes this by incorporating glitch-pop beats that are edgier than his former collaborations with Imogen Heap, but unfortunately this progressive sound doesn’t dominate the album. On some tracks, Morissette’s voice channels Björk (with whom Sigsworth has also worked), but the mood ultimately switches to watered-down Evanescence. “Underneath” is marred by its bubblegum chorus, and “Torch” is the token emotive long-lost-love narrative. Morissette was much more convincing when she was screaming about how the guy in “You Oughta Know” broke her heart.

After five albums and 18 years fronting The Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan has built the confidence to “go acoustic” on his first solo album, the Rick Rubin-produced Seeing Things. Historically speaking, this is a very big deal, because the 38-year-old Dylan has fashioned a batch of topical songs out of the bedrock of traditional music, just as Dad did during his initial burst of brilliance.

Pray for this book

Me of Little Faith falls somewhere between satire and memoir into a deeply unfunny place usually called the remainder shelf.

European electroclash foursome creates soundtrack for S&M club

One of the first groups to bring the electroclash movement into the public eye, Ladytron evolved through its first three albums, substantially developing its sound from the cold detachment of 604 to the smoother, more accessible synth-pop of Witching Hour. Its latest, Velocifero (which shares its name with a brand of Italian scooters) furthers the band’s synth-pop formula, although tracks like “Ghosts” and “I’m Not Scared” easily could’ve appeared on Witching Hour. For Velocifero, the band brought in producer Alessandro Cortini, former touring keyboardist for Nine Inch Nails, along with Vicarious Bliss of electronica label Ed Banger. Cortini’s industrial-rock experience clearly influenced several of Velocifero’s tracks, including its strongest, “Black Cat,” which opens the album with synthetic drum beats that verge into industrial/electro territory and would be right at home playing in the background of a dark, gritty S&M club. Never before has Ladytron sounded so sinister, been so danceable and connected so well with its audience.

Too many banal truths, not enough beauty on Harcourt’s latest

Ed Harcourt’s fifth album begins with grandiosely titled opener “Whirlwind In D Minor.” It might as well be Harcourt’s thesis: marrying the histrionic truths of the deeply aggrieved with the formal mastery of great pop. More often, Harcourt’s failed attempts at mimicking Jeff Buckley throw whatever genre he tries off balance. Prime offenders include “Scatterbraine,” a deliberately mistuned excursion into the annoyingly carnivalesque. Lyrical missteps also abound, as in the presumably profound announcement of “The Pristine Claw”: “I’m a vampire of the 21st century”; or the laughable juxtaposition of a condemned man, a cancer patient and a lovesick teenager’s collective renunciation of nicotine in “The Last Cigarette.” Even with a sweepingly dramatic string arrangement, “Rain On The Pretty Ones” can’t get past Harcourt’s tremulous drama. Gone is the pure pop sense of early songs like “She Fell Into My Arms,” replaced by endless swooning and pseudo-insight.

Release Date: June 6
Director: Anand Tucker
Writer: David Nicholls (book by Blake Morrison)
Cinematographer: Howard Atherton
Starring: Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 89 mins.

British writer chronicles his father’s passing in thoughtful film

Based on the British poet Blake Morrison’s episodic memoir of his father’s death, When Did You Last See Your Father? is a quiet, thoughtful exploration of the indignities suffered at both ends of the parent/child relationship. Blake and Arthur Morrison (Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent) have a strained but deeply loving bond; Blake, a writer, is alternately enraged, humiliated and delighted by his physician father’s nonstop wheedling. This tension provides the film’s central narrative; as Arthur sinks deeper and deeper into his sickbed, Blake learns to reconcile his complex feelings for his dad, acknowledging that it’s possible to love and hate in equal measure. Like any film based on a memoir, When Did You Last See Your Father? can occasionally seem too self-focused, but Broadbent and Firth deliver stunning performances—their dynamic father/son relationship is one of the most realistic ever committed to film.

Van Morrison got the name right for his new album. He isn’t sailing into the mystic, or listening to the lion, or seeking hymns to the silence. He’s looking to spend three-to-six minutes throwing some rhymes around, nailing a couple of clichés, sprinkling them with organ-based blues and a few nods toward Hank Williams and calling it a day. When he does decide to stretch to the seven-minute mark for the album’s closer, “Behind the Ritual,” his mantra consists of slurring variations on “drinking wine” and “blah, blah, blah.” But, while the album falls short of transcendence, it still has its appeal. He’s not referencing Iggy Pop, just keeping it simple—and plenty weird.

From just about any other singer, you’d call it a phone-in. But Morrison is such a master of inflection and timing that even his rote exercises pack extra buzz. And, of course, there’s his wonderfully twisted sense of humor. (That’s by-the-numbers nightclub blues deliberately perking up behind “Don’t Go To Nightclubs Anymore.”) “People come and people go, one monkey don’t stop no show” popped into his head and became the first line for “No Thing.” He once sold us a non-existent “Veedon Fleece” along with viaducts in dreams that had cracks in their mobile steel rims, so really, why argue lyrics? In the end, it’s about sound. “Lover Come Back” feels forlorn like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Song of Home” lopes along like a Celtic-country version of “Green, Green Grass of Home” and through it all, the voice never disappoints.

Old-School hip hop was characterized by the nursery-rhyme-like lyrical magic of Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper,” the education entertainment of Stetsasonic’s “A.F.R.I.C.A.” and the wild, technicolor tales of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. Somewhere along the way, though, hip-hop got lost. West Coast crews started glamorizing the pimp life, rapping about shootin’ guns and killin’ cops. De La Soul became jaded, and on De La Soul is Dead, mocked hip hop’s violent turn. Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay got caught in the crossfire. Today, some feel a mainstream rapper ain’t legit ‘til he’s been shot—nine times.

No matter how eloquently the defenders of Fiddy and his followers present their cases, the art form once seen as giddily creative has become oppressively lackluster—that is, if all you listen to are the thugmeisters. But the real fearless rappers are in the underground—artists like Prince Paul, the 3 Feet High producer and former member of Stetsasonic who recently worked with experimental wiz-kid Dan “the Automator” Nakamura; Chali Zna, founding member of Jurassic 5 and the Latin hip-hop band Ozomatli: Ladybug Mecca, diva poet of jazz-hop trio Digable Planets; freestyler Wordsworth, who has shared grooves with Black Star and A Tribe Called Quest; and human beatbox Scratch, formerly of The Roots.

These are the artists responsible for Baby Loves Hip-Hop Presents: The Dino-5, a rap album ostensibly for children, but one whose music, rhymes and concept are mch more ambitious than the Schoolhouse Rock series of the 70’s. This is hip-hop without a warning label, hip-hop you’ll respect even as you listen to it with your kids.

It’s a simple concept: each artist plays a dinosaur character in a modern day children’s story set in a pre-historic schoolyard. Chali Zna is MC T-Rex, whose large size and gruff voice make him seem scary to the other children dinosaurs. Wordsworth plays Billy Brontosaurus, the diplomat of the schoolyard gang, who reaches out to Rex and learns he’s really a gentle giant. The group eventually welcomes Rex into its new hip -hop group, which consists of leader Tracy Triceratops (Ladybug), dino-beatbox Teo Pterodactyl (Scratch) and DJ Stegosaurus (Prince Paul).

Like much of old-school hip-hop, the Dino-5 instills hope and pride, using the power of language and the appeal of popular culture to teach as well as entertain. Go ahead Mom and Dad, enjoy it. We won’t tell Fiddy you’re soft.

Release Date: May 30
Director: Tom Kalin
Writer: Howard A. Rodman (screenplay), Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson (book)
Cinematographer: Juan Miguel Azpiroz
Starring: Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne
Studio/Run Time: IFC Films, 97 mins.

Good parenting proves a luxury in exploitive family drama

In a decade when the dysfunctional family has become its own film genre, Savage Grace presents the disturbing true story of an aristocratic clan torn between expectation, decadence and wealth.

Old hand gets to the heart of the matter, zeroing in on love in the long run

On his 19th studio album, John Hiatt has rediscovered his muse—more wrinkled and greyer than before, but central to a musically unvarnished song cycle tracing the ups and downs of a long-term relationship. The model appears to be his greatest ballad, 1987’s “Have a Little Faith in Me,” its tug of war between devotion and self-doubt offering further hard-earned insight with the passage of time. Two of these songs rank with Hiatt’s best work. “Our Time” presents a series of aural snapshots. It’s a measure of the artist’s focus that he can sing about Chinese takeout and pu-pu platters without going for a cheap laugh. Even more gripping is the title song, an unflinching self-examination set in terms of his worthiness in the eyes of his beloved. The final verse is the clincher: “You start out tryin’ to change everything / You wind up dancin’ with who you bring / I loved you then and my love still stands / Honey I’m still the same old man.”

New York Times editor picks at country music

Last June, as a guest of Marty Stuart, I got to sing a couple of my songs on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Being an old Welsh punk rocker with anarcho-syndicalist leanings and no hits on the country charts, I was flattered to be on the bill.

Porter Wagoner was there, all seven feet of him dazzling and bejeweled in sparkly white pajamas. So were Charley Pride, Neko Case, Connie Smith, Paul Burch—even that evil-looking little dude from hip-hop hat act Big & Rich.

That guy nearly ruined my night. There I was waiting in the wings for my big moment when he launched into the tale of his poor old daddy at home in his La-Z-boy all day watching terrible things on TV and wondering why if these people don’t love this country they just don’t leave it! The Ryman crowd roared in deafening approval—causing a gaggle of fluffy pink baby rabbits to attempt a breakout through my stomach lining. What the fuck am I doing here?

But it’s OK; Dana Jennings explains everything in this personal, hi-octane trek through country music’s golden age, from 1950 to 1970. Born and raised in rural New Hampshire, far from the gleaming towers of Nashvegas, he rejects the saccharin chauvinism, naked pandering and Republican fantasies of today’s country-music industry and lays claim to its classic vintage as a vital oral history that defines America’s white rural poor. Talking class to the myth of a classless society, he describes a world where the ’60s never really happened and the Great Depression dragged on forever. Framing hit songs about drinking, cheating, working and dying into the lives of his own dirt-poor family and run-down hometown, he reveals this music as more than just escapist entertainment: “a divine spark in your starved soul, a healing presence.”

Jennings takes a particular song, and then takes a little leap of his own. I love the way he hears Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line” as a cheating song, an alibi, a bare-faced lie. He creates a scenario around Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” in which Webb’s just back from fighting fascism, with wounds still red and raw, but his baby’s done gone and left him ’cause the only job he can get is in a stupid shoe shop.

He puts Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” in the context of Watts and Vietnam, and turns the spotlight on Loretta Lynn’s redneck feminism (“Don’t Come Home A-Drinking [With Loving On Your Mind]”) and Johnny Cash’s advocacy of Native Americans (“Ballad Of Ira Hayes”) and the incarcerated (“Folsom Prison Blues”) as a righteous antidote to country music’s burst of arch-conservatism.

Never shy to wax lyrical and poetic about the tunes that really matter to him, Jennings always brings it back home to the cheatin’ hearts, born-to-losers and hopped-up rounders he grew up with in Kingston, N.H. His own family’s dirt is dished in spades; Grammy Jennings was a trucker’s wife who at time got a little restless and, “like Will Rogers, never met a man she didn’t like,” while Uncle Lloyd managed to piss his whole fortune away. Jennings doesn’t even shy from the repulsive racism “of the Northern Variety” that led his Aunt Helen to vote for Southern segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election, and the less-than-charming way she described her sister keeping the cast-iron stove “shinier than a nigger’s eyeball.”

There is even an extended passage on the subject of outhouses, the sort of men who clean them out and the mortifying terror they can hold for the young and weak of heart. It forced me to remember the waist-high chickens that guarded the outside lav at my grandparents’ house in Croesyceiliog, South Wales, and the insane look in the birds’ eyes when I tried to bust through their cordon and reach the pot. My favorite song at the time was Tom Jones’ “Green Green Grass of Home,” and I would stand on a chair and sing that or “Delilah” at Christmas. Maybe I’m countrier than I thought!

Just before I got to do my bit at the Ryman that night, Charley Pride, the flip side of Elvis—a poor black boy who sounded kinda white—strode out onto the stage looking like he’d just spent the afternoon fishing leaves out of his pool.

The crowd gave up an even bigger roar, and suddenly I wasn’t scared anymore.

Jon Langford was a pioneer of punk music in The Mekons. He’s a painter, writer, producer and member of The Waco Brothers, an influential alt.country band from Chicago.

Al Green is Trying Something New

I was sitting on the bed in my pajamas, on the phone with the publicity president at Blue Note, and we were talking about doing a duet album. But there was just so many people wanting to duet that there was too many to duet with.

Dear Beloved Fan,

As one of the 768 people who watched my son, Axl, play “Baby Beluga” on a toy guitar on YouTube (youtube.com/axlsdad), you are clearly a listener of discerning taste. I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s not like all those other two year olds mugging for the camcorder. The kid’s a future star. And I know that when he finishes his first album, you’ll be first in the line to buy it.

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
I’m not sure all these people understand…

It occurs to me as I stand here, looking dazed into a sea of semi-familiar faces: I haven’t been in this building since I graduated from high school—20 years ago.

Melanoma tagged my father almost a year ago to the day (at least, that’s when he called to let me know the prognosis); it moved swiftly, making his last months hell. So tonight we’re gathered in the gym of the school where he taught for more than two decades—the same sweaty hardwood where he coached basketball each winter, prowling up and down the sideline, baiting referees with unanswerable questions like “when are we gonna get a gift like that?”—swapping memories, melancholy and occasional snippets of nervous mirth.

Like all places distantly familiar from childhood, the gym looks smaller to me now. I read from the script I’ve written, feel my throat getting tight. To distract myself, I try to focus on the people I know: There’s my former basketball coach, now the school’s athletic director. And there’s the younger brother of the guy who sang in my band: He’s supposedly a desperate drug addict now. But, like everyone else here tonight, he just looks vaguely sad, and nods at me when we catch each other’s eye.

You, I thought I knew you
You, I cannot judge
You, I thought you knew me, this one laughing quietly…

Each person in the family had a job for this event—I’d done the occasional DJ stint, so my role was to go through Dad’s discs to pick out the soundtrack for the evening, locating songs that represented who he was, who he’d been.

For a guy who couldn’t find perfect pitch with a metal detector, and whose singing resembled the death throes of a mortally wounded dog, Dad had great taste in music. His record collection introduced me to artists whose work would captivate me for life: Dylan, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Steely Dan. Picking out a set list from fodder this great felt like shooting fish in a barrel—“Two of Us,” “Girl from the North Country,” (for my stepmother, whose web-footed Pacific Northwest ways offered a stark contrast to dad’s Hawaiian-shirted, Cali-surfer-for-life persona), “God Only Knows,” “Unchained Melody,” R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” made more poignant by my dad’s proclivity to poke mock-fun at my love of the band by imitating Michael Stipe’s elongated Southern vowels.

The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago,
Turned around backwards so the windshield shows
Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse
Still, it’s so much clearer…

At the end of the service, the audience was asked if anyone had anything else to say, and a guy I knew growing up as “Uncle Duane” (one of my dad’s many fraternity brothers) stood up and told a mildly profane story about one particular spring break during which my perpetually broke dad bet him that he could hitchhike his way to Bermuda from Long Beach, Calif.

“Mike, I’m sure you’ve already figured this out, but Bermuda is an island chain. You don’t hitchhike there.”

As it turns out—with the kind of “I’ll show you, bastards” aplomb that came to characterize his attitude about life—dad did hitchhike to Bermuda, sending Duane a breadcrumb trail of photographs and postcards along the way, thumbing rides and whatever else to the tune of then-favorites such as Jan & Dean, The Turtles, The Byrds, and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

Sometimes I’ll see a picture of my dad now and imagine the young dude he must’ve been then: wind in his hair, “Surf City” ringing in his ears, Bermuda dead ahead.

Paste contributing editor Corey duBrowa has written for The Rocket, Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, The Oregonian and Rolling Stone.

Release Date: May 21 (limited)
Director/Writer: Fatih Akin
Cinematographer: Rainer Klausmann
Starring: Baki Davrak, Nursel Köse, Hanna Schygulla, Tunçel Kurtiz, Nurgül Yesilçay, Patrycia Ziolkowska
Studio/Run Time: Strand Releasing, 116 mins.

A nuanced and sobering study of exile, escape and familial responsibility

In The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin draws from his own experiences as a German born to Turkish parents. Ali, a widower living in a Turkish enclave in Germany, pays a Turkish prostitute named Yeter to live with him. When Ali accidentally kills her, his estranged son, Nejat, a professor of German literature, goes to Istanbul to search for Yeter’s daughter, Ayten, whose radical politics have necessitated an escape to Germany. Ayten falls in with Lotte, a young German who wants to help her return to Turkey unscathed. As the characters search for themselves by searching for each other, their desperate orbits never quite synch up, causing ruptures and tragedies. The exile mentality is one of constant flight, and Akin poignantly surveys its fallout with a pair of arresting images: One coffin boards a plane heading from Germany to Turkey; another boards a plane heading the opposite way. While the film ends on a hopeful note, the characters never quite manage to cross the edge of heaven. Instead, they endlessly tread its rim.

Band Members (L-R): Austin Skiles, Mike Overfield, Carrie Butler, Eli Mardock, J.J. Idt, Britt Hayes
Hometown: Lincoln, Neb.
Upcoming album: The Year of the How-To Book
For Fans Of: Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire, The Cure’s peppier side

Hometown: Utica, New York
Game: The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai
For Fans Of: Quentin Tarantino, The Matrix, graphic novels

Hometown: Miami
Film: Forgetting Sarah Marshall
For Fans Of: Superbad, Knocked Up

Hometown: Manchester, England
Album: We Started Nothing
Band Members: Katie White, Jules De Martino
For Fans Of: Blondie, The Sounds, The Pipettes

Vocalist Katie White’s musical skills—like her hipster music and fashion tastes—are recent acquisitions. Upon forming The Ting Tings, she picked up drummer Jules De Martino’s old guitar for the first time, repeatedly hammered a D chord, and within a few hours had written the bouncy pop-punk anthem “Great DJ,” which opens the DIY duo’s eponymous Columbia debut.

When their last group, Dear Eskiimo, was unceremoniously dropped by its U.K. label, White and De Martino were depressed until they repaired to a local artists’ haven called the Islington Mill, where, White explains, “We were so sick of the business, we were just writing songs to make us feel good—we didn’t think anybody would wanna hear what we were doing.” Hanging out with the Mill’s 50-odd painters, potters and photographers introduced White to vintage rock eccentrics like Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, and pushed her into designing her own quirky stagewear. “Now I make all my own dresses,” the 23-year-old says. “And my favorite is one I made entirely out of doilies, the kind you put teapots on.”

So where was this kid before she started penning snarky singalongs like “That’s Not My Name” (a kiss-off to her ex imprint)? Living on a farm in the English countryside, listening to ho-hum Top 40 radio, and—believe it or not—ballroom dancing. “There was literally nothing else to do there,” she sighs. “So I used to sneak off after school and go dance all night. And it wasn’t a glamorous, show-bizzy dance school—it was at the local workingmen’s club, where you’d pay two pounds and get a lesson.”

She eventually got good enough to enter amateur competitions. But don’t ask White to hoof it through a Ting Tings gig. “Because I haven’t done any ballroom in years,” she confesses. “And it’s weird—even though I could dance as a kid, whenever you put me on a nightclub dancefloor I never know what to do with myself.”