In Your Ear - White Stripes, Bright Eyes, Ryan Adams
Kevin Wood /Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
WHITE STRIPES
Icky Thump
Wea Japan, 2,580 yen
Listening to the opening title track of Icky Thump, it is clear that Jack and Meg White have a firm grounding in the classics--classic rock, that is.

Backed by ex-wife Meg White's entirely adequate drumming, Jack White works his way through the classic rock guitar riff book, moving from Led Zeppelin to the Rolling Stones, with stylistic nods to progressive rock bands such as Genesis and Yes. There's even a synthesizer solo. And that's just the first song on the album. Later, the listener is treated to blues in a variety of styles on "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues" and even a sort of retro-lounge on the duo's melodramatic cover of Patti Page's "Conquest."

"Effect and Cause" and "Rag and Bone" are light-hearted romps played for laughs. The latter, a shopping list of junk and where to find it, sounds more like a script for the inevitable video than an actual song, with Jack White even managing to rhyme "catacombs" with "microphones."

Musically, there is nothing groundbreaking here, nor are the lyrics especially deep. It may not be music for the ages, but the White Stripes are never short on weird energy and Jack White's classic rock homage reminds the listener of what made the classics great to begin with. This is a fun album that a lesser, poppier band would have reduced to a froth of jangly guitars light enough to float away. The heavy garage rock aesthetic of the White Stripes keeps it firmly grounded and encourages abuse of the volume dial.


BRIGHT EYES
Cassadaga Universal,
2,200 yen

Would somebody buy Conor Oberst a puppy or take him to see the White Stripes or something?

Somebody needs to cheer him up, because his doom-struck angst nearly spoils an otherwise great album of catchy Americana. Bright Eyes' Cassadaga, named for a tiny Florida town populated largely by psychics and spiritualists, is a pleasant rootsy ride through Middle America, with the best tracks, especially the lead-off single "Four Winds" and "Classic Cars" somewhat reminiscent of the best work of the Waterboys, despite Oberst's apocalyptic pronouncements.

Just as Oberst turns some of the album's hootenanny moments into "American Gothic--The Musical!", the opening track "Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)" is a decent song rendered almost unlistenable by the addition of what sounds like a medium babbling away over a Sturm-und-Drang orchestral overlay of the kind that came and went with Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.

Luckily, the album's other dozen tracks are eminently listenable, even with Oberst's buzzkill overseriousness.





from an earlier effort:



RYAN ADAMS
Easy Tiger
Universal, 2,500 yen

The prolific Ryan Adams follows up his three 2006 releases with another dose of introspective ballads, folk-rock and lo-fi soul. Writing here with his band the Cardinals, Adams' songs continue to sound like the work of some alternate-universe better-voiced Neil Young that never met Crazy Horse. Adams and the band work their rock chops with "Halloweenhead," get all slinky and sinister on "Nobody Listens to Silence Like a Girl" and offer up an alt-country gem, "Pearls on a String," that is a sunny, all-too-brief, mandolin-driven slice of concrete-canyon cowboy heaven.

(The Daily Yomiuri, Jul. 21, 2007)

Ice cold assassin a cool read
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Requiem for an Assassin
By Barry Eisler
Putnam, 368 pp, 24.95 dollars
The professional criminal planning one last job before retirement is a pop culture staple, as is the retired or reformed gunman being forced back into action to save a friend. Former Tokyo and Osaka resident and former CIA spook Barry Eisler uses these archetypal premises as the jumping-off point in his latest and possibly last novel featuring Japanese-American assassin-for-hire John Rain.
Like all genre fiction, the espionage thriller has its conventions, certain things the author is expected to provide. High-tech gadgets? Check. Cool, ruthless hero? Check. Exotic international settings? Check. Wisecracking sidekick? Check. Double-crossing villain? Check.
In lesser hands, Requiem for an Assassin could have been a standard-issue, cookie-cutter spy thriller of the sort that clog the shelves of airport bookshops around the world. But John Rain is not a standard-issue protagonist and Eisler, for all his respect for the convention of the genre, does not write cookie-cutter novels.
Rain is a thinking man's James Bond. While Bond's penchant for high living, beautiful women, gourmet food and flashy cars make him the most conspicuous secret agent ever, Eisler's Rain strives to keep a low profile, presenting the face of an anonymous salaryman or Japanese tourist to the world. He specializes in murders that look like accidents and is a study in emotional detachment, tradecraft and paranoia. He is constantly scanning the room for possible tails, wary of cameras, never sitting with his back to a door or going anywhere without an escape route and cover story. But is it paranoia when they really are out to get you?
In this case the "they" is Jim Hilger, a rogue Central Intelligence Agency contractor who, while still bearing a grudge against Rain for foiling one of his operations in the previous book in the series, nonetheless finds himself in need of the Japanese-American hit man's particular expertise. In order to persuade Rain, now living in semiretirement in Paris, to cooperate, Hilger and his henchmen abduct Dox, Rain's partner and one of his only friends. In order to free his comrade-in-arms, Rain must commit three murders for Hilger. Needless to say, tables get turned, plots get twisted and the body count mounts before the good guys save the world.
The Tokyo setting that figured so prominently in the earliest books of series has been replaced here with Saigon, Amsterdam, Singapore, Silicon Valley and New York, though Rain does make a brief stopover in his old hometown to recommend a few local eateries.
In addition to the emphasis on professional spycraft, Eisler has done his technical homework on all the hardware, but in the main avoids the common action novel trap of turning his books into catalogues of weapons and gear from Spies-R-Us.
What sets Rain apart is Eisler's ability as a writer to get inside the psychology of the character's almost split personality. Rain is surprisingly human and self-aware for an action hero.
In action, Rain is a cold-blooded, remorseless machine that kills without warning or emotion. But when the job is done, he hurts. Rain is a killer with a conscience and he worries about the emotional and spiritual price he has paid for all the deaths he's caused, while at the same time realizing that if his conscience causes him to hesitate at the wrong time, it could cost him his own life.
Rain recognizes the sociopath inside himself and worries that with each job, he is coming closer to turning into "the iceman" for good. It is this depth that makes the character, and by extension the book, believable and what sets Eisler head and shoulders above the pack of run-of-the-mill thriller writers.
(Jun. 16, 2007)

Plenty of surprises up its sleeves

By Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The Prestige

5 stars out of five

Dir: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson

Watch carefully, for things are not as they seem in The Prestige. Writer and director Christopher Nolan's hand is quicker than the audience's collective eye, and while he provides plenty of clues along the way, surprising plot twists abound on the way to a stunning finale.

The structure of the entire film is set up in the opening scene, in which Mr. Cutter, a designer and builder of stage illusions played by Michael Caine, explains to a young girl the three stages of any magic trick: the pledge, the turn and the prestige.

Showing her a caged canary, Cutter explains how the magician shows you something ordinary. The second step is to make the ordinary object do something extraordinary, he tells her, collapsing the small cage and making the bird disappear.

"Now if you're looking for the secret, you won't find it. That's why there's a third act called the prestige. This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before," Cutter tells the girl, producing the canary from thin air.

The girl turns out to be the daughter of Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), a famous magician facing the hangman for the murder of his archrival and former friend, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman).

Set in late Victorian era London, The Prestige follows Borden and Angier from their early days as friends learning the tricks of their trade. When an escape goes wrong, killing Angier's wife, he seeks revenge on Borden. As the years pass, the two become famous rivals and the competition becomes obsessive with each seeking to sabotage the other. When Borden comes up with an inexplicable, showstopping illusion, Angier goes to exceptional lengths to duplicate and finally, with the help of mysterious genius inventor Nikola Tesla (an understated but magnetic David Bowie), to outshine Borden. Who will take the final bow, however remains a mystery until the last moments of the film.

As he did in Memento, Nolan very deftly manipulates the audience much like a magician, misdirecting our attention to spring surprise after surprise.

While a lesser film might have relied completely on a clever script with a surprise ending (see the works of M. Night Shyamalan), The Prestige provides the total package: a subtle, multilayered script (cowritten with his brother, Jonathan Nolan), smart dialogue, terrific performances by all the principal cast, smooth pacing, beautiful atmospheric cinematography and a jaw-dropping, mind-blowing final act worthy of the film's name.

(From the Jun. 9 edition of The Daily Yomiuri)

In yer ear

By Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

WILCO

Sky Blue Sky

Warner Music, 2,680 yen

After soaring high with the more experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, Wilco return to Earth with Sky Blue Sky.

The album harkens back to their earlier alt-country roots. Despite major personnel changes, the Wilco of Sky Blue Sky sounds a lot more like the band that recorded the Woody Guthrie tribute Mermaid Avenue than the group responsible for the abstract excesses of Ghost.

At times, Sky Blue Sky sounds like the best '70s country-folk-rock album never made, with twangy hints of the Grateful Dead ("What Light"), the Flying Burrito Brothers, and God forgive them, even the Eagles. Mix that with a stiff dose of introspective, moody melodicism by songwriter and frontman Jeff Tweedy, punctuate with some guitar heroics by new member Nels Cline and the result is a largely understated song cycle about the uncertainties of love.

The gentle, tentative nature of the opening song "Either Way" with its pretty, breezy guitar solo sets the thematic tone: "Maybe the sun will shine today/The clouds will blow away/Maybe I won't feel so afraid."

Several songs, notably "I Hate It Here," and "Shake It Off" seem rooted in a fear of, or a reaction to losing love, while others such as "Walken" and "On and On and On" are more straightforward love songs, although they tend to dwell more on reassuring a lover than seduction or celebration. Others, like the title track and "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)" seem to be about surviving emotional chaos.

Musically, Tweedy's neurotic energy and famously jangled nerves come through in the arrangements. "You Are My Face" starts off quiet until a sudden burst of dissonant roaring guitar sends the song off in a much more intense, melodramatic direction. "Side With The Seeds" is a sonic standout, with the band showing off their chops. The acoustic-guitar folkiness and sunny harmonies of aforementioned "What Light" are balanced by the plaintive, lonesome plea "Please don't cry/We're designed to die" of "On and On and On."

While Sky Blue Sky may lack the alternative edginess of Yankee and Ghost, it also has a warmth the former lacks and the latter only hints at. Wilco has come full circle back to the classic rock elements Tweedy's early work with Uncle Tupelo was both a reaction to and a reflection of--and a welcome homecoming it is.

ALO

Roses and Clover

Universal/Brushfire 2,381 yen

The former Animal Liberation Orchestra returns with a follow-up to 2006's Fly Between Walls. The California-based quartet have tightened up their jam band-based sound, while still leaving lots of room in their songs for extended keyboard and guitar interplay.

The band's sound also seems to have coalesced into a more cohesive style. While their broad range of influences--funk, '70s rock, soul, jazz, blues and folk--is still evident, they no longer seem to change genres from song to song. Where ALO once went from Motown Funksters on one track to Nashville Country Rockers on the next, the group seems to be on a more even musical keel on Roses and Clover, opting to blend styles within songs rather than jumping from one genre to the next.

One thing that hasn't changed is the infectious, sunny, groove-oriented nature of their sound. Roses and Clover is a danceable romp with a rootsy feel and solid musicianship.

(From the June 9 edition of The Daily Yomiuri)

Master of creepiness pens dark tale of damaged lives

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Piercing

By Ryu Murakami

Translated by Ralph McCarthy

Penguin, 185 pp, 13 dollars

An ice pick is a very simple tool that focuses the strength and weight of the user's arm onto a tiny, needle-sharp point, allowing the shaft of the ice pick to easily penetrate deep into a rock-hard block of ice.

Like the ice pick that figures so prominently in its pages, Ryu Murakami's Piercing focuses the life stories of a pair of complex characters into single harrowing encounter that transfixes the reader from the arresting opening scene.

To say Murakami's work is often dark would be an understatement.

In his best-known novel, Coin Locker Babies (1980), one of the main characters drops nerve gas on Tokyo. In the Miso Soup (1997) is about a psychopath carving a bloody trail through the capital's red-light district. While the body count in this newly translated 1994 novel is considerably lower, for sheer creepiness, Piercing puts both of the aforementioned books in the shade.

Ralph McCarthy, having previously translated In the Miso Soup and the considerably lighter 69 by the same author, seems well versed in the intricacies of bringing Murakami's subtleties into English with a sparse, matter-of-fact prose style that adds further impact to the stark brutality of the violence.

Piercing begins with Masayuki Kawashima, a successful graphic designer for an advertising agency, married to a kind and loving wife. His life seems the paragon of domestic bliss, but for the last 10 nights he has spent hours after his bread-baking wife has gone to sleep standing over his baby daughter's crib with an ice pick, trying to convince himself he won't stab her.

Kawashima decides that the only way to overcome his obsession with using the ice pick, and the fear that he will harm his daughter, is to stab someone else instead. He puts a few days into planning the perfect crime and under the pretext of taking a business research trip, checks into a top-end Tokyo hotel intending to use it as a base of operations to murder a prostitute. Further meticulous preparation ensues, during which the reader gets glimpses of Kawashima's nightmarish childhood and the brutal beatings his mother routinely inflicted on him before he was taken away to live in an institution for abused children.

Murakami then switches point of view to Kawashima's intended victim, Chiaki, a call girl who specializes in S&M games and who is also a survivor of childhood abuse. Chiaki's mental health is as dubious as Kawashima's and the roles of predator and prey become confused as the novel teeters between psycho-thriller and black farce as Murakami switches points of view, often revisiting scenes to give contrasting perspectives. Such a he-said/she-said approach would be doomed if not for Murakami's use of third person narration.

On the surface, Piercing is a chilling horror novel in the vein of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter books, but on a deeper level it is about the vulnerability of children and the lasting damage that results from abuse. Both Kawashima's and Chiaki's deranged behavior stems from the coping mechanisms they have developed to survive their respective childhood ordeals. In the widening gyre of their adult lives, things fall apart and the coping mechanisms become psychoses that fill them with passionate intensity of the worst sort.

(May. 26, 2007)

Faking it
(the edited review of this ran in The Daily Yomiuri on Sunday, this is the longer original draft)

The illusion of keeping it real

Faking it—The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

By Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor

Norton, 375 Pages, $25.95

By Kevin Wood

Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

All performance is, by its very nature, artifice, so why are music fans so obsessed with “keeping it real?” Why is it that raw authenticity is valued above artful contrivance in music? What makes one performer real and another a fake?

These are not idle questions for Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, authors of Faking It – The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. Rather they are central to their book’s thesis, which seems to be that full representational, cultural and personal authenticity in music is an ideal rather than an achievable goal and may not even be such a laudable end in itself. The obsession with authenticity, they argue, “has limited the kinds of music that musicians aspire to make and that critic and listeners appreciate.” The authors seem to come to the conclusion that authenticity is highly overrated as a yardstick of musical talent or quality, which may be true, but it is their examination of the notion of authenticity in a variety of popular genres that is likely to spark arguments wherever music obsessives gather.

In making their case, Barker, a former musician, and Taylor, an author and editor, start with a shared chapter comparing Kurt Cobain and Leadbelly and the notion of selling out or faking it and then move chronologically with Taylor authoring early chapters on racial segregation in southern music, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and Neil Young’s “Tonight’s The Night”, while Barker tackles the Monkees and the Archies, Disco and Punk. A pair of co-authored closing chapters take snobby potshots at Ry Cooder and the entire genre of World Music, accusing them of trading on notions of authenticity while being inauthentic, and sing the praises of Moby and KLF for their ability to toy with the whole idea of authenticity.

Part of the problem with Faking It seems to be that the authors never really nail down a clear definition of authenticity in music beyond some fairly obvious comparisons between Ozzy Osbourne’s “Iron Man” (inauthentic) and Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (authentic) in the introduction. It seems to be like pornography, they can’t describe it exactly, but they know it when they see it. c

The opening chapter is something of a microcosm of the book as a whole. It compares and contrasts Cobain and Leadbelly, noting that Cobain’ s last public performance was of a Leadbelly song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” and makes the argument that Cobain was obsessed with authenticity and was authentic, while Leadbelly was uninterested in the concept and was presented in an inauthentic, even racist manner. Some of the chapter is consumed by trashing the reputation of early musicologist John Lomax for promoting Leadbelly as an unsophisticated primitive and speculating, not without some merit, on the correctness of the racial politcs of Lomax and his era. Interesting points about the notion of primitivism are raised, but as happens again and again in the book, salient points made are later undercut by logical overreaches and statements that, taken at face value, are just plain laughable – such as the notion that the failure of other grunge musicians to kill themselves like Cobain did, robbed the genre of its “essential gravity” or that fans insistence on authenticity, not his own drug addiction and manic depression killed Cobain.

“It’s too simplistic to say that it is our fault, but deep down we wonder: if we had not encouraged them—if we had thought less of “authenticity” and more simply of good music—might they have survived?”

Faking It is the kind of book where you might read nodding in agreement for pages as the authors build a carefully constructed proof of a theory and then blow their accumulated credibility by describing Donna Summer as “a brilliant musical innovator” or suggesting that the contribution of the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith to the evolution of Country Rock was somehow on par with Gram Parsons’. Barker’s efforts to draw parallels between Nesmith and John Lennon also become more than a little labored—the two aren’t in the same ballpark, they aren’t even in the same sport. Lennon was a brilliant songwriter and musician, Nesmith, despite his ambitions to do likewise, merely played one on TV.

And don’t even get me started on the chapters on John Lydon, Donna Summer and Ry Cooder. I’m not a violent person by any means, but a discussion over a sufficient number of drinks between the authors and myself would likely end with us circling each other in the parking lot with mayhem in our hearts—we are the people Nick Hornby was writing about in High Fidelity. This is very much a book for music geeks, and I mean that in the best way.

For all its many faults, Faking It is worth reading and does have some valuable things to say about the notion of authenticity and its importance in pop music. Like any argument among obsessives, there is plenty of opinion masquerading as fact and hyperbole presented as considered positions, but it is an interesting argument.

In Yer Ear

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

THE KINGS OF LEON

Because of the Times

BMG Japan, 2,548 yen

There is not a great variety of sounds or musical styles on the new Kings of Leon album, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Followill clan work with their limited sonic palette in much the same way photographer Robert Capa worked with black and white. Because of the Times, their third album, shows them at their most versatile yet, but there is still little to differentiate one broken-hearted, buzzing power-chord anthem from another.

As always, Caleb Followill howls, moans and declaims in throaty splendor about an array of wicked women who have steered their men wrong while his cousin Matthew picks out distorted, ringing repetitive riffs reminiscent of a southern-fried version of the Edge, all backed by the thrashing drums of brother Nathan and the often sinister basslines of brother Jared.

The centerpiece of Because of the Times --named for an evangelical conference the brothers attended annually with their itinerant preacher father when they were growing up--is the lead-off track, "Knocked Up," an atmospheric seven-minute stunner about a couple of rebellious teens determined to escape the confines of their small town in a Cadillac, have their baby and live happily ever after no matter whose body they have to step over to do so--James Dean would star in the movie. Menace and youthful angst hang heavy in the air on this and most of the other tracks, reaching almost Jim Morrison-esque dramatic heights on "Trunk"--though Caleb's rough-and-ready emoting is unlikely to be mistaken for Morrison's coiled and oiled Brechtian theatrics.

If the howling, bluesy trailer-park gothic of "Black Thumbnail" and the Red Hot Chili Peppers-meets-U2 insistence of "My Party" manage to get some radio airplay, the Kings of Leon may be the next big thing.

JOHN BUTLER TRIO

Grand National

Warner, 2,580 yen

If the Kings of Leon present a series of gritty black and white snapshots of young white American male macho angst, the John Butler Trio lay the flipside on us with a Technicolor touchy-feely grab-bag of an album that mixes reggae and funk rhythms with hard-rock and blues sensibilities, folk instrumentation and hippie-trippy lyrics put to hip-hop cadences. The American-born, Australian-raised Butler made his mark with 2003's Sunrise Over Sea, an independent release that debuted at No. 1 on the album charts in Australia.

Grand National is in the same vein as Sunrise Over Sea, but the influx of major label money into the recording process has allowed Butler to branch out even further in term of arrangement, adding string sections ("Caroline") and brass bands ("Gov did Nothing") to his already potent mix of searing electric slide guitar, acoustic six and 11-string guitars, banjo and harmonica, backed by drummer Michael Barker and bassist Shannon Birchall.

Major label support has not blunted Butler's socially conscious approach to songwriting, with songs like "Used to Get High" decrying the demons of fast food, drugs, neo-conservatism and political apathy all at one go. "Good Excuse" has the counter-culture would-be guru delivering a wake-up slap to sullen, self-absorbed, video game-obsessed teens, urging them to "Go take a step outside, see what's shakin' in the real world."

While Butler's lyrics may lack subtlety, his heartfelt playing more than makes up with numerous extended slide-guitar solos and even some easy-skanking ukulele on "Groovin' Slowly."

(Apr. 28, 2007)

Just say moe.

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

What do you get when you combine rock influences as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan and Gram Parsons, as played by five talented musicians with a passion for improvisation?
Less corporate radio pop and "moe." music.
Hot on the heels of the release of its critically acclaimed eighth studio album The Conch, moe., the band with the unusual orthography, brings its wide-ranging jams to Japan for a whirlwind four-stop tour that starts tonight in Yokohama.
"We are an improvising rock band that likes to write pop songs," writes moe. guitarist, singer and songwriter Chuck Garvey in an e-mail exchange with The Daily Yomiuri. "It is a mix of every possible influence, style and idea we like--channeled through three different songwriters and five (multi) instrumentalists exploring the unknown. It is schizophrenic, yet familiar. Psychedelic, yet defined and memorable. It's the sound of a really diverse, fun record collection played by your friends."
Garvey is one of the original members of the quintet that started off playing college parties in upstate New York in 1989 as Five Guys Named Moe (the title of an old Louis Jordan song). After brief stints as Haggis and the moe guitar army, the band finally settled on moe., complete with the period, in 1991.
The band released three albums on Sony subsidiary label 550 Music during the next few years as it worked to build an audience with a shifting lineup--the band had five different drummers in as many years and even Garvey left for a few months at one point. Finally moe. hit its stride in 1999 with the creation of its own record label and an appearance at Woodstock 1999.
The current group, together since then, comprises Garvey, founding bassist-singer-songwriter Rob Derhak, guitarist-singer-songwriter and sometime keyboard player Al Schnier, drummer Vinnie Amico and percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Jim Loughlin.
Moe. takes a collective approach, according to Garvey: "The dynamic of the five of us (and our crew and management) adds up to a great whole. To a certain extent, our decision-making process is highly flawed, yet very democratic and satisfying at times. As far as leadership, the ball (or 'Conch') gets passed around so that everyone gets time at the top, but no one has to carry the whole weight all the time either."
Writing and arranging are also influenced by the group's collective nature. Garvey, Derhak and Schnier bring their initial versions of songs forward to be molded by the group to one degree or another.
"We used to jam to come up with parts that complement each other, then arrange them into a song. Now that our writing skills have developed, it is more likely that we can 'hear' complementary parts and put them together on the fly. We also 'harvest' improvised sections of live performances--especially when they have become a very identifiable entity on their own--to use as songs or parts of a song in progress," Garvey says.
Derhak's description of The Conch (the title is taken from William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies) on the band's Web site bears out the close-knit, collective nature of the band's endeavors: "The Conch is a symbol of keeping things civil. We sort of took all these elements of us playing as if one of us has a conch and then it's taken away and it turns to chaos. That is very similar to our lives."
Moe. has evolved its own way of recording that combines painstaking studio work and the energetic live shows they have built their career on.
Like many jam bands, moe. has its own tribe of fanatical followers who see as many shows as possible--The Grateful Dead had deadheads; moe. has moe.rons.
Garvey and Schnier also have become icons in the rock guitar world and were named by The Rolling Stone's David Fricke as being among the top 20 "new guitar gods" in February, an experience Garvey described as both exciting and humbling. The duo are also featured in the June issue of Guitar World magazine.
Asked to compare and contrast their styles, Garvey writes: "Al's technique seems to be equal parts discipline, structure, noise and abandon...My technique is based around phrasing and melody up to a point, with white noise being an alternative to make a point. I think we occasionally operate as the left and right hands of a very accomplished chord/melody guitarist--'Two is better than One'!"
Moe. will play April 21, 6 p.m. at Bay Hall in Yokohama, (03) 3444-6751; April 22, 6 p.m. at Ax in Shibuya, Tokyo, (03) 3444-6751; April 24, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Nagoya, (052) 264-8211; April 25, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, (06) 6535-5569.
The Daily Yomiuri, April 21

AUDIOBOOK REVIEW
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
By Bill Bryson
Read by the author
Audio editions
7-1/2 hours on 6 CDs, unabridged
Bill Bryson, best known for his humorous travelogues (Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburned Country) returns to more familiar territory with his latest work, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the '50s and '60s.

The title is derived from Bryson's childhood alter ego, a superhero whose "thundervision" is used to incinerate teachers, parents, classmates, shop clerks and other assorted "morons."
While telling his own story, Bryson also takes pains to put things in context for his audience, supplying statistics and historical notes on the era and opening each chapter with quotations from period newspaper stories.

The 1950s was unquestionably the golden age for Middle America: The booming economy and swift and steady march of technology meant a standard of living that soared at a rate unparalleled before or since. Some Midwestern families went from not having indoor plumbing or electricity to owning color TVs, refrigerators and even air conditioning in the space of a decade. It was the last gasp of what Greil Marcus refers to as the "Old, Weird America" that existed before the era of fast food, network television and retail franchising took their toll on regional differences, a time when department stores and restaurants were strictly local, family-owned enterprises. Bryson rhapsodizes at length about Des Moines' main department store and the specialties of local eateries.

A longtime resident of England who was rewarded for his contributions to the written word with an honorary Order of the British Empire (OBE) in December, Bryson has mostly lost the rough edges of his regional midwestern accent--though the pronunciation of the northern plains is very near the model of the neutral North American accent. His dry, subdued delivery is almost English in its understatement, never succumbing to the overenthusiastic, near manic emoting typical of some comic narrators, regardless of the sometime electric energy of the text. There are no funny voices, sound effects or ham acting here, just solid writing delivered in an almost conversational tone, like a friend telling tales of his own boyhood over a sociable beer.

And those stories cover the broadest range of topics. While Bryson looks back on his childhood and adolescence as a golden era, he does not present a bowdlerized version of his youth. While Des Moines is hardly Hell's Kitchen, we are treated to stories of an onanistic neighbor, class and racial divisions in the town, adolescent lust and Bryson's affiliation with a high school beer bandit whose ultimate caper involved the emptying of a full warehouse over a weekend.

He also writes movingly about his father's considerable skill as a sportswriter and his mother's magical ability to turn food into charcoal. While the book is an affectionate look at the time and place in which Bryson grew up, it also pokes fun at the limited horizons and narrow outlook of his childhood hometown. In a final chapter that revisits Bryson's childhood home and friends 40 years later, one can sense how glad the author is to have come from Des Moines and also how happy he is to have left it when he did. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid manages the rare feat of embracing nostalgia while eschewing sentimentality.
(Apr. 7, 2007)

IN YOUR EAR

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

RY COODER

My Name is Buddy

Warner, 2,680 yen

Call it a folk opera, a roots song cycle or even a musical socio-political analysis of modern U.S. history--whatever label you stick on it, Ry Cooder's new concept album My Name is Buddy is an entertaining road trip into America's past.

Best known for his 1997 project (and the subsequent Wim Wenders film) Buena Vista Social Club, an attempt to preserve the music of prerevolutionary Cuba, Cooder is a keen musicologist who dabbled in African music on his Grammy-winning 1994 collaboration with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu. He's also scored several films.

Artistically, My Name is Buddy picks up where Cooder's previous album Chavez Ravine left off. While that album used jazz, Latin-infused rock and pop and mariachi band music to tell the musical story of the Los Angeles barrio that was bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium, Buddy uses blues, rags, union anthems, bluegrass, dust bowl folk, country and roots rock to trace the history of the American progressive movement from the early days of the labor movement ("Strike"), through the Jim Crow era ("Sundown Town") and Red Scare ("Red Cat Till I Die") to the current frustration of those turned away at the polls in the most recent U.S. presidential election ("One Cat, One Vote, One Beer").

To keep things from getting too serious--the usual fatal flaw in political music--Cooder tells the whole story through a group of talking animals. The titular Buddy is a wandering cat who teams up with Lefty the mouse and the Rev. Tom Toad. One Internet wag at CD Universe aptly described it as "Woody Guthrie meets Beatrix Potter."

While there is anger in many of the songs, Cooder vents his frustration over injustice through not-too-subtle humor. Sings Cooder: "God help us J. Edgar, nothing's safe from you" in a song about a voracious hog named for a brand of vacuum cleaner.

Cooder wears his political heart on his sleeve--Karl Marx's Das Kapital is pictured on the inside cover of the accompanying booklet that provides the narrative context for each of the 17 songs.

Pete Seeger, the last of the great progressive activist-folksingers, plays banjo on the album and is feted alongside the legendary labor organizer and singer Joe Hill on the terrific "Three Chords and the Truth." Cooder and Seeger are joined by a number of guests including the Chieftains' Paddy Moloney, famed session drummer Jim Keltner, Van Dyke Parks and Flaco Jimenez.

If there is a weak spot in this hootenanny opus, it is that aside from some elegant country slide guitar on "Hank Williams" Cooder never really stretches out and delivers any of the scorching solos longtime fans might expect. While this will pass unnoticed by the casual listener and in no way detracts from the finished product, it is a little disappointing not to see the guitarslinger ranked No. 8 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time showing off his chops at greater length.

BAKER BROTHERS

Hot Cakes: Live in Japan

P-Vine, 2,100 yen

When one thinks of funk, the first places that spring to mind are not Bournemouth, England or Tokyo, but P-Vine Records capture and release of Britain's fraternal funkateers' energetic Nov. 2006 performance in Japan's capital may put both cities on the list. Often reminiscent of the Meters, the Baker Brothers' jazzy old-school R&B sound is bound to put the cut in your strut, the glide in your stride and separate the funk from the junk. This disc is an instant party.

(Mar. 17, 2007)

McCarthy does some

hard traveling on 'The Road'

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Picador, 241 Pages, 24 dollars

Bleak, desolate, cheerless, barren, joyless, disheartening--there are over a dozen synonyms in the thesaurus, but none of them really do justice to Cormac McCarthy's stark, dark vision of postapocalyptic America put forth in The Road.

And yet, amid the cold ashes of a nuclear winter, McCarthy shows us a tiny, glowing ember of hope in the love between a father and son and the purity of a small boy's heart.

In an ash-covered world of eternal twilight and biting cold, where nothing grows and the living often envy the desiccated corpses that litter the landscape, a nameless, tubercular father and his sickly young son travel the highways of the Northeastern United States, heading south and east. Their goal is the distant coast, where they hope in vain that things will be better somehow. Masked against the drifting ash, their meagre possessions piled in a shopping cart, the two trek on, scavenging canned food, tools and clothing where they are able and dodging gangs of cannibalistic bandits and slavers. Their only protection from such marauders is a revolver with just enough ammunition to take their own lives. Their only safeguard against the constant specter of death from starvation and cold is each other.

It is about as cheerful as it sounds. McCarthy's greatest strength as a writer is not his plots or characters, but the atmosphere he creates through artful minimalist descriptions and sparse narration. The atmosphere here is forbidding, to say the least.

At the same time, in a strange way, The Road may be McCarthy's warmest, most emotional work. The contrast between the bleak, hopeless landscape of a dying Earth and the tenderness for each other displayed by the father and son is heartrending.

McCarthy describes the two as "each the other's world entire" and it is clear that while it is the man who keeps the boy alive by foraging for food, building fires and protecting him from human predators, the father needs the son as much or even more than the son needs a provider and protector. The man, like the rest of the world, is dying and knows it, but goes to great pains to keep hope alive in the boy that things will get better. Despite having abandoned any pretense of morality in their fight for survival, the man draws strength from his son's insistence on kindness to strangers and faith that the parent and child are "the good guys." In an utterly amoral world, the boy is his father's moral compass, keeping him from following the rest of the world into savagery. At one point the child pleads for the life of a starving stranger who has stolen all their possessions, convincing the father to let the man go free after they have reclaimed their food and meagre equipment:

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.

He's going to die anyway.

He's so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.

The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? he said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."

Indeed, the boy is the personification of all the good left in the man's world. His wife has given in to despair and taken her own life, and every vestige of the old world is gone. He stays alive only to make sure the boy survives and does not despair.

The two live a life of almost complete immediacy. For them there is no future but the vague aim of reaching the coast and, for the boy at least, no memory of the past except for a hazy recollection of his dead mother.

McCarthy's spare prose matches the barren landscape of the novel. It is stripped even of much of the punctuation--there are no quotation marks and precious few commas or apostrophes. Like Hemingway, McCarthy pares his writing down to the barest essentials, purging it of descriptive excess and extended metaphor until it becomes akin to prose poetry. One can open the book and chose a passage almost at random and see McCarthy's mastery of rhythm and imagery:

"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

Unlike Hemingway--whose entire body of work probably comprises a lexicon of no more than a few thousand words and only a few hundred of those of more than three syllables--McCarthy has a clear affection for using obscure but appropriate terminology. The man descends to a "gryke" in the stone of a mountainside; a roaming bandit army is accompanied by a "consort of catamites"; the man and boy are described as "mendicant friars."

Despite the gloom and doom, the book is ultimately uplifting and even moving, without descending into mawkish sentimentality or emotionalism. McCarthy is one of the most skilled writers working today, and The Road shows him at the top of his form.

(Feb. 3, 2007)

In Yer Ear

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

NORAH JONES

Not Too Late

Toshiba EMI, 2,500 yen

New York-based pop-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones is back with her third solo album, Not Too Late.

Jones continues to mine the same vein of subtle, sophisticated and subdued ear candy that made her two previous solo efforts smash hits. Not Too Late is possibly Jones' most personal album to date, recorded as it was in the home studio she shares with partner and longtime collaborator, bassist Lee Alexander.

Jones wrote or cowrote all 14 songs on Not Too Late and the recording shows her maturing as a songwriter and singer. While her previous albums were stylistically diverse with covers of Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, and even a bluegrass duet with Dolly Parton laid alongside Jones' own jazz-inflected mix of country, soul and classic pop, Not Too Late has a more cohesive feel to it. The songs flow into one another and there seems to be a more focused artistic vision.

That is not to say Jones' sound has become homogenized--if anything she has become more adventurous. As with her previous outings, most of the songs are built around Jones' piano and acoustic guitar played by a variety of guests including Jesse Harris, Tony Scherr and Kevin Breit. Jones even takes a crack at the fretboard herself on one track.

As a composer, Jones' early jazz training shows in every note, as does her obvious affection for simpler country, folk and old-time soul. Her songwriting style harks back to the prerock days of the Tin Pan Alley composers who wrote for artists such as Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline. While songs of that era may seem bland in comparison to punk rock, bebop jazz or more flamboyant modern pop, they, like Jones' compositions, have a sense of substance, craftsmanship and musicality that most rock-based pop music simply doesn't have. Jones' songs are very much in the tradition of these so-called standards.

Still mostly understated and midtempo, songs like "The Sun Doesn't Like You" and "Not My Friend" show a darker side than Jones has previously revealed. She also gives us some political ruminations--the Brechtian "Sinking Soon" sounds like something accidentally left out of "Cabaret." "My Dear Country" is an ominous minor key lament that reminds the listener that "Nothing is as scary as election day." Going a step further, Jones shows her political colors with the lines "Who knows, maybe the plans will change/Who knows, maybe he's not deranged" with the context leaving very little question who she's singing about.

Not Too Late is a deeper, darker and more complex work than any of Jones previous material but still eminently listenable.

KELLER WILLIAMS

Dream

Buffalo Records, 2,500 yen

Keller Williams is a name that is not well-known outside the jam-band subculture, and that is unfortunate because the singer-songwriter and one-man-band has the kind of positive, upbeat, quirky sound that has broad appeal.

Dream, Williams' ninth studio album, pairs him with a wish list of favorite artists who are also mostly off the beaten track. The guest list includes Grateful Dead frontman Bob Weir, experimental banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, bass whiz Victor Wooten, jazz guitar ace Charlie Hunter, String Cheese Incident, Michael Franti, John Scofield and Martin Sexton.

Oddly enough, the standout track among the many excellent duets is "Restraint" a bouncy, earthily sexy and funny number that is pure Williams.

Dream is a must-have for Williams' fans and an excellent introduction to Williams and his kindred spirits for the uninitiated.

(From The Daily Yomiuri Feb. 3, 2007)

Frankenreiter now riding his own wave

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

For Donavon Frankenreiter, life is all about balance. Hardly surprising for someone who started surfing at age 9 and turned pro at 16. But it isn't just a matter of keeping a low center of gravity on his surfboard. For Frankenreiter it means keeping a balance between family and career, between staying home in California and traveling the globe, between the artistic and the athletic.

Now 34 years old, Frankenreiter is still an active pro surfer, jetting off to ride the big waves in front of the cameras and promote his various sponsors. Since 2002, however, he has split his working life between surfing and making music.

"It's something I've always done. When I was traveling for surfing, it was just one of the things I always took along--some surfboards, a bag of clothes and an acoustic guitar," Frankenreiter told The Daily Yomiuri earlier this month over the phone from his home in California. Frankenreiter had just returned from the Caribbean, where he had been plying one of his trades for an upcoming surf film, the latest in the popular Drive Thru series, and was about to jet off to Brazil to play as a supporting act for Ben Harper a couple of days later.

After Brazil, Frankenreiter is planning a short recreational surfing trip to Hawaii to break up his flight to Japan, where he is to play nine shows across the country in just 12 days in February. The breakneck pace continues in March with a whirlwind tour of Europe.

Frankenreiter is no stranger to Japan, having visited about a dozen times on surfing expeditions and for the shooting of at least one surf video. He also wowed the crowd at the Fuji Rock Festival last summer and has a real affection for Japan.

"I love coming to Japan, it's like nowhere else in the world. We had a lot of fun at Fuji Rock. I just wish we could have stayed longer and checked out more of the bands."

"It's hard; I'm gone a lot. My wife is expecting our second child in April, so I'm taking some time off. It's tough to balance music, surfing and family--this will be the first break I've had in about four years, but I'm taking four months off," says Frankenreiter, adding sheepishly that he will probably spend a lot of time writing new songs with an eye to going back into the studio later this year to work on a new album.

Asked whether he considers himself a singing surfer or a surfing singer, the shrug can almost be heard over the phone. A few moments of conversation show that the two pursuits are very much Frankenreiter's yin and yang: "I love doing both, but it's great to be able to get away and do something else. The music thing can get pretty crazy with the touring and recording and promotional stuff, so it is really nice to be able to put it down and not think about it, just go surfing for a few weeks and then come back to it fresh. I've been surfing since I as 9 and surfing still keeps me healthy. It clears my mind and my soul...The two really balance each other out."

Frankenreiter's surfing connections have played a big part in his musical career. When he was 16 he moved to Hawaii's famed North Shore and rented a room from the wife of surfing legend Jeff Johnson, father of pro surfer-cum-pop star Jack Johnson. Being the same age and both fanatical surfers, the two became fast friends.

"I was already playing guitar when I met Jack and so was he, but we sort of bounced stuff off of each other. I'd teach him a song; he'd teach me a song. Later on, we did a few surf movies together," Frankenreiter says. "We've been friends a long time."

Both started getting more serious about music around the same time, and Johnson's early success enabled him to start his own label, Brushfire Records. Frankenreiter's first eponymous album came out on Brushfire in 2002.

The comparisons were inevitable and possibly even apt, given how much the record was shaped by Johnson as producer. The two share some stylistic similarities and are old friends, but after a while Frankenreiter clearly got a little tired of being written off as a Jack Johnson imitator by people who clearly had not listened to his music.

"I wanted people to listen to my music and to know who I was...Sometimes it was a little too close for comfort," he says.

For his second effort, last year's Move by Yourself Frankenreiter moved to a new label under the Universal Music umbrella, Lost Highway. Two years on the road with his own band and a different approach to recording made for a different record.

"The first album was done with Jack's band and we recorded it on Pro Tools, which makes it really easy to move stuff around. I'd never done a record before and I was really impressed by the things they could do...It was great working with Jack at his studio in Hawaii."

The second album was done with Frankenreiter's own band, and most of it was recorded live onto two-inch tape. "Recording live like that is very much about capturing a moment, getting the best vibe down that you can," Frankenreiter says.

A slight departure from the mellow folksy charm of his debut, Move By Yourself is full of funky blue-eyed soul grooves that sound reminiscent of '70s R&B stalwarts Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder with a dollop of Lenny Kravitz and a smidgen of Beatles thrown into the mix for good measure.

The last track on the album, "Beautiful Day," was recorded in one take on the spur of the moment with bassist Matt Grundy improvising a guitar lead and drummer Craig Barnette playing a shaker that happened to be close to hand.

"It was about two in morning and I had this idea and I wanted to get it on tape, mostly for the guys to learn the song with the idea that we might record it. So we just crowded around one mike and I started playing--if you listen to it, you can hear the rhythm guitar is slightly out of tune--and it just worked. It has this great vibe to it."

In music, as in surfing, sometimes you just have to ride the wave.

Donavon Frankenreiter (with special guest Timmy Curran) will play Feb. 6-7, 7 p.m. at Ax in Shibuya, Tokyo, (03) 3444-6751; Feb. 9, 7 p.m. at Drum Logos in Fukuoka, (092) 771-9009; Feb. 10, 7 p.m. at Weather King in Miyazaki, (0985) 20-7111; Feb. 11, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Hiroshima, (082) 542-2280; Feb. 13, 7 p.m. at Big Cat in Osaka, (06) 6535-5569; Feb. 15, 7 p.m. at Club Quattro in Nagoya, (052) 264-8211; Feb. 16 7 p.m. at Kyoiku Bunka Kaikan in Toyama, (076) 432-5566; Feb. 18, 7 p.m. at Jasmac Plaza Zanaedu in Sapporo, (011) 261-5569.

(Jan. 27, 2007)

In Your Ear

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

BERT JANSCH

The Black Swan

P-Vine, 2,520 yen

Revered in Britain since his debut in the mid-'60s, Scottish folk guitar wizard Bert Jansch has undeservedly cruised just under the radar in North America, never achieving the wide popularity of a James Taylor or even a Don McLean. His latest album The Black Swan is unlikely to break into MTV's Big 10 or be featured on Total Requests Live any time soon, despite Neil Young comparing him favorably to Jimi Hendrix.

Jansch's appeal as a solo artist and as part of British folk supergroup Pentangle has never fit with mainstream pop tastes--he doesn't prance around in spandex, date starlets or regularly get arrested. What he does do is sing, write interesting songs and play the acoustic guitar very, very, very well.

Jansch's guitar on Swan is as warm and refreshing as a sudden shower of rain on a hot, sunny day. There are no head-melting solos, just solid, consistently interesting and off-beat instrumental work as Jansch backs up his own dry, deep vocals and those of guest Beth Orton on a selection of sparsely arranged tracks built around his guitar. The tracks run the gamut from meditative ballads such as "High Days" to folk blues such as "My Pocket's Empty" and the titular sci-fi story-song. There are even a pair of protest songs--"Texas Cowboy Blues" and "Bring Your Religion."

An excellent antidote to the commercial hurly-burly of the holiday season.

JERRY GARCIA

The Very Best of Jerry Garcia

Rhino/Warner, 3,150 yen

'Tis the season for greatest hits collections, and Rhino has assembled an excellent cross section of Jerry Garcia's recordings as a solo artist.

Best known for his lengthy guitar solos in concert with psychedelic jam icons the Grateful Dead, Garcia started his musical career as a folk banjo player, and his musical tastes pretty much covered the waterfront, something reflected in this collection that includes covers of songs by Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, Alan Toussaint, the Beatles and Jimmy Cliff, as well as numerous joint efforts between Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter.

The first of the two discs is drawn from Garcia's solo studio rock albums recorded in the '70s and early '80s and not all of it has aged especially well. The second disc, made up of live recordings from 1973 to 1990, offers a better example of Garcia at the top of his game, stepping out for extended solos and crossing genres from bluegrass to folk-rock to reggae.

While it contains some absolute gems, the album could have been shorter and is better suited to fans and Garcia completists than neophytes.

NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE

Live at the Fillmore East

Reprise/Warner, 2,580 yen

While not technically a "best of" collection, this 1970 concert recording of Neil Young and Crazy Horse showcases the group at their best.

Young, in 1970, had not yet reached the peak of his fame and it was performances like this one that earned him a place in guitar hero Valhalla. He wails, crunches and twangs his way through an energetic set of his early material with extended pregrunge workouts on "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand." Also included is an early version of "Wonderin'," a minor hit for Young when he finally recorded it in 1983. This album is must-have for fans and will come as a revelation for those who only know Young's Harvest-era folk material.
(Dec. 16, 2006)

Dark look into underground
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

A Scanner Darkly

2.5 stars out of five

Dir Richard Linklater

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder


Paranoia, betrayal, dependence and confused identities are not exactly standard themes for an animated film, but then not even the animation is standard in director Richard Linklater's adaptation of sci-fi noir author Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

The film was made using an animation technique known as digital rotoscoping that allows animators to essentially trace and overlay photographic images with digital graphics, resulting in an impressionistic film in which characters look and move like real people, but with the altered perspective of the filmmaker superimposed.

Set in the near future, the film follows an undercover narcotics officer codenamed Fred (Keanu Reeves) who is assigned to investigate suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. Undercover police agents in this world are fully undercover, their true identities concealed even from their coworkers and superiors through the use of a so-called scramble suit worn at the police station that completely masks their appearance and voice. Arctor is suspected of dealing in the pernicious and highly addictive substance D, a drug that gradually splits the user's mind into multiple personalities.

We quickly realize that Fred and Arctor are the same person, but what isn't clear is whether Arctor is posing as a Fred or vice versa, or whether either is aware of his link to the other.

Aside from a few twists and turns, the story follows Fred/Arctor and his friends through their descent into further drug addiction and eventual attempts at redemption. The narrative often takes a backseat to dialog-heavy set pieces revolving around urban legends, low humor and drug-induced obsession and paranoia. While the set pieces are often amusing or sad, they slow the pace of the story to a glacial crawl.

In a stroke of obvious but effective casting, noted Hollywood druggies Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. play Arctor's housemates, with Harrelson's dopey hippie an ideal comic foil for the fast-talking, occasionally sinister character played by Downey. Where Harrelson's character is generally just spaced out, Downey's is more mischievous and conspiracy-minded. One funny scene in the film has him convincing another character that he can make cocaine out of Solarcaine sunburn spray.

Downey's performance is definitely a bright spot in the film, as is that of Rory Cochrane, best known for his turn as a conspiracy buff in Linklater's Dazed and Confused and his work on the various CSI television programs. The less said about the wooden Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, the better, though Reeves' lack of affect does give the character the sort of blankness that can pass for confusion over his true identity.

While there are a number of laughs in the film, most of them courtesy of Downey, the overall tone is fittingly very dark as we watch the main characters spiral down into madness, desperation and even suicide.

Linklater made good use of rotoscoping to convey a sort of cinematic version of magic realism in his 2001 film Waking Life and it serves him well here, allowing him to show the jangled, stuttering and occasionally hallucinatory point of view of the main characters as they slide in and out of drug-induced psychosis. While occasionally distracting, the effect is key to the overall atmosphere of the film.

Unsuspecting fans of animation, science fiction and Keanu Reeves should be forewarned that this is a film with an important message.

At its heart, A Scanner Darkly is a plea for a more forgiving and humanitarian approach to drug addiction. In an epilogue to the novel reproduced at the end of the film, Dick wrote: "This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow."

Linklater has taken a book that is clearly dear to his heart and rewritten it for the screen, probably with the foreknowledge that it would be difficult to translate the novel into a film, but he did it anyhow, because sometimes the message is more important than the medium.

The ice machine cometh

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Zamboni: The Coolest Machines on Ice

By Eric Dregni

Voyageur Press, 128 pp, 19.95 dollars

Some brand names become so identified with a particular product that they enter the lexicon. North Americans Xerox papers at the office, eat Jello for dessert, and wipe their noses with Kleenex. In Britain, one cleans up with a Hoover and writes notes with a Biro (ballpoint pen). In Japan, most offices are equipped with at least one Hotchkiss (stapler).

At last count, at least five U.S. companies and eight Canadian firms have made ice resurfacing machines, according to Eric Dregni, but only Zamboni is listed in the dictionary.

This is just one of the many facts in Dregni's corporate hagiography of Frank J. Zamboni & Co. The slim coffee-table book is extensively illustrated with photos from the company archives detailing the evolution of the world's favorite ice resurfacing machine.

Dregni has mined the company archives heavily, bringing forth informational nuggets about the development of the Zamboni and bons mots from its late inventor, the company's namesake. The author obviously spent time with several members of the Zamboni family, who continue to run the company, as Frank's descendants provide numerous anecdotes about the company's early days and the founder's penchant for innovation.

While it may be every Canadian kid's dream to one day drive the Zamboni at the local hockey rink, the big, boxy ice smoothing machine was born in Paramount, Calif., where the Zamboni brothers started one of the state's first skating rinks in 1940.

The ice proved no match for southern California's hot, dry climate, and skaters were reluctant to wait the 90 minutes it took to resurface the ice with a tractor-drawn planer and four-man team armed with scrapers, squeegees and hoses. By March of 1942, Frank had built his first prototype, a tractor-drawn model, but he didn't settle on the design that won him his first patent until 1949, when war surplus vehicles made parts easier to find.

A year later, figure-skating star Sonja Henie bought the third Zamboni--built onto a Jeep chassis--for her touring ice show, and the resurfacers spread to areas across North America overnight.

Dregni brings a light touch to what is essentially a company history, adding plenty of anecdotes of rink-rat hijinks and cross-country voyages to leaven the dry statistics.

(Dec. 2, 2006)