Keith Urban in Concert

My wife and I went to see Keith Urban last Saturday night at the Bangor Waterfront. We have gone to many shows that I was interested in, it was an easy decision to go see Keith Urban one of my wife;s favorites.

I cannot say that I was on pins and needles for the show but certainly by the time Saturday evening came around I was looking forward to the show.

When we arrived at the show we noted that the previous night's full moon was still shining bright this night. The opening act was a fellow named David Niall that my wife was familiar with, some of the songs were identifiable as hits based on the crowd reaction.

The crowd was energetic and excited. A great deal of young college age girls, high school girls, and women too old to be dressed the way they were. I joked to my wife that one wonders if these, truthfully very pretty young ladies, thought that Keith might offer them a date that night if they looked extra good. Urban took the stage and I have to admit here and now that I do not know a great deal of his songs. I have not paid much attention to country music over the last couple of years.

Still I did find out in watching the show that Urban can truly play the guitar very well. He did play the song Stupid Boy, a song I am a fan of, that features a good bit of guitar work.

The show was fine but I think what it is most important to talk about here is the way Mr. Urban treats his audience. Which was absolutely incredible. Many musicians speak well of their fans, many claim to love them and appreciate them, however I have never seen a musician be as thoughtful as Keith Urban was.

During the show Urban brought up some young girls to have a picture taken with him, he went into the crowd a few times, at one point giving his guitar to a young girl. He had a sing along during the song " I Want To Kiss a Girl" in which he brought up four folks to sing with him and engage in a singing contest. Anyone who was at the show will not soon forget the wild man. a fellow named Ryan, that he brought on stage with him. Frankly I do not think that Mr. Urban will be forgetting his visit to Maine and his new friend Ryan.

In introducing his band members he lets them each take the stage and sing a bit of a song. After hearing the three folks sing With or Without You, American Girl, and It's A Long Way to the Top ( from AC/DC) makes clear that Urban owes more to the classic rock of Tom Petty than to the traditional country of years past.

As the show ended and my wife were filing our way out I was surprised to see the members of the band, including Urban, on stage posing for pictures ten minutes after the show ended. They were speaking to individuals until, it seemed, that most folks ( in the pit) that wanted to say a word or touch a hand received an opportunity to do so.

I can take or leave the music though I think Urban has a strong sense of what makes a hit and continues to put some vibrant guitar effort into all his music. For me, however, what is the most important thing to remember is that Keith Urban, married to a movie star, has a strong sense of how lucky he is and how important it is to show genuine gratitude to the people, his fans, who make him successful.

Urban convinced me. A good singer, a great performer, a better person.

Engines of Change by Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia made his name as a journalist writing primarily on the auto industry. His most recent book is called Engines of Change. In this book Ingrassia tells the tale of America in the story of fifteen cars.

The author points out that this is not a list of the most successful cars but the cars that in one way or another had a major impact on society.

Any story about cars in America has to begin with Henry Ford and the Model T. Ford invented the assembly line in the production of his cars, created the five dollar a day wage, and also, importantly, year by year lowered the price of his cars to make them more affordable. Today when we see technology such as flat screens, computers, and the like and their prices go down lower and lower we can remember Henry Ford.

The proliferation of tailfins in the 1950's, the Corvette, the Corvair and the rise of Ralph Nader, Lee Iacocca, Hayley Earl, John Delorean, the Mustang and the Minivan are all discussed in their own chapters.

Well written, filled with interesting pieces of information, the infatuation with cars and how integral cars are to the American experience, indeed our national psyche, this is a very good book.

From Here to Eternity

In 1953 this movie won the Oscar for best film, best adapted screenplay, best supporting actor and supporting actress. The movie, adapted from the best selling novel by James Jones tells the stories of soldiers based in Hawaii in the weeks prior to the beginning of World War II.

The movie has an all star cast. The movie begins with Private Robert E Lee Prewitt transferring to the Pearl Harbor base. Prewit is a bugler, has transferred in after having undisclosed troubles in his last regiment. As his reputation as an accomplished boxer precedes him the company commander assumes he will be a boon to the regiment's boxing team. Prewitt however insists he does not wish to box any longer leading to his being pressured to do so. Montgomery Clift gives a strong performance.

Burt Lancaster stars as Sgt. Milton Warden. Warden is an enlisted man who feels disdain for his commander who makes little effort at performing his duties, often neglecting them and or leaving Warden to perform them while he chases women. Eventually his disgust with his commanding officer leads Warden down a dangerous path, he begins and affair with the his commanders neglected wife played infamously by Deborah Kerr. Most anyone who has watched a movie or two in their lives has seen the infamous scene in which Lancaster and Kerr lay in the surf in a romantic clinch.

The movie also features Frank Sinatra in an Oscar winning performance as Private Angelo Maggio. Maggio befriends Prewitt when most of the soldiers either ignore or ostracize him. Maggio comes to a bad end however when he gets on the wrong side of the sadistic Fatso Judson. Ernest Borgnine is famous for this role.

Also winning an Oscar was Donna Reed as Alma Burke. Called Lorene in the gentleman's club she works at she and Prewitt develop a relationship after Maggio takes Prewitt out for a night on the town. Seeing Reed in any role that is not innocent or later, matronly, is a bit of a surprise. She was strong enough in this role to win the Oscar. We forget what a strong actress she was.

I have seen several movies Lancaster started in now and what becomes more clear each time is that he was a towering figure. Truthfully I have not seen anything that makes me think that he was a great actor, but he certainly could carry a role.

Eventually the Japanese come to call and our characters lives change forever. The movie offers more depth than a typical World War II film and is well worth a look. Sinatra, so skinny he looks like he could blow away, is especially strong.

The Carpenter by The Avett Brothers

A week from tomorrow The Avett Brothers next album will be released. Thanks to the good folks at NPR we are able to stream the entire album and get a preview. As the Avett's have , for the last year or so, and currently continue to do so, sit at the top of our favorite current artists this album has been much anticipated in our house.

We discovered the Avett's early in the year 2011 when the Palladia network aired the DVD of their recent concert album Live Volume III. The performance was so spellbinding that it was almost impossible to not recognize that this was a rarity, a band that wrote beautiful, insightful lyrics, and yet was as much fun to see in person as any band that you will see.

In listening to the new album, which is very good, what becomes apparent quickly is that living up to Live Volume III might well be impossible. For those fans of the Avett's who had discovered them long ago, the live album was a recording of songs they already knew, just in live format. For latecomers like myself the album was just an album that was fantastic beginning to end. It was, however, a greatest hits package.

Still the new album as I am on the third listen is certainly to be on heavy rotation on our house station this fall. Some of the initial buzz said that this album is a little more rock oriented but in listening to it I do not find that to be the case. There are a couple of songs that do so, including the album highlight " Paul Newman vs the Demons which surely does not sound like anything I have ever heard from the Avett's before.

Paul Newman vs The Demons harkens back to REM, and early nineties rock. Certainly it's background Yeah chorus sounds like a song far from 2012. Truly a fantastic song.

The first single Live and Die is easily likable and certainly could fit on any previous Avett album. Another soon to be classic song entitled " Down with the Shine" shows off the lyrical ability of the brothers as well as their harmonies. It is easy to forecast the popularity of these three songs in concert.

Where the album might suffer a bit is in the uniformity of many of the remaining songs. They are all strong, all offer their own special features but they are quite similar. Songs such as The Once and Future Carpenter, Winter in Our Heart and Through My Prayers are all beautiful songs. If an album had any one of these songs it would be blessed, the effect of having all three however shows the ever so slight danger of The Avett's losing some of the fun dance folk music and not being perhaps just a little too much singalong with lighters ( or if you prefer cell phones) in hand.

The album is an embarrassment of riches most bands would welcome. Still in order to make sure each new fan hears the Avett sound I fell in love with they do need to be careful not to become too one dimensional.

Grizzly Man

I think I might be one of the last people to watch this movie. A documentary by the controversial German filmmaker Werner Herzog the movie primarily uses footage filmed by Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a man who spent 13 summers in the Alaskan wilderness filming and interacting with bears.

The film has gotten great reviews, still some complain that Herzog intended to make Treadwell look disturbed and not the intelligent, naturalist that he was.

The only answer I can give to that is this is indeed how Herzog portrays him. Interspersed with the footage filmed by Treadwell are interviews taken by Herzog with wildlife officials, friends of Treadwell, and the pilot who yearly flew Treadwell in and out of his remote spots. It was this man that first discovered Treadwell's body in the fall of the fateful year.

Some of the footage that Treadwell shot is amazing. His interactions with bears and foxes are incredible. Touching some of the bears on the nose, cuddling with a fox that became almost tame to him, these are things we can all admire, feel jealous of, and yet at the same time most of realize how foolhardy these decisions were.

With incredible amounts of footage filmed by Treadwell we have no real idea what Herzog did not use. Herzog filmed an informative interview with the mans parents, they miss their son but seemed like they were resigned to the life he led and that the end result while tragic was not entirely unexpected.

As I watch the film what seemed most apparent to me that, whatever good intentions Treadwell started with, he became afflicted with some kind of persecution complex and also felt like his impact in the protecting of the bears was greater than it was.

How much he loved the bears is clear, he often becomes emotional in his speeches before the camera, as he is overcome by the beauty of what he films and his love for his subjects. Yet his diatribes at park officials, his constant referencing to his successful summer spent protecting the bears, and his constant vile language is a bit off putting.

One cannot ignore the many park officials who felt that by teaching bears to interact with humans in anyway, only made it more dangerous for other people who came into contact with them later, presumably by accident. As to his saving the bears perhaps he would have protected the bears, but seeing him hide in the woods while guides tossed rocks at his bears while he hid and whispered about how he needed " to stay hidden" makes one wonder if he was still a little kid playing at hiding from the adults in his life.

That he loved the bears can in no way be doubted, Timothy Treadwell however had some serious issues which he was was projecting onto his relationship with the wild bears of Alaska. Over and over he claimed that he would die for the bears, in the end he did, one cannot really doubt that in a way this might be fitting. Still as the filmmaker and other friends of Treadwell listen to an audio of the attack that led to his death one wonders if at some point he wished he could have made better decisions.

The movie offers natural beauty, it is interesting, if, however, one person walks away thinking that what Mr. Treadwell did is something to be replicated than the film has provided a disservice.

The Station Agent

A while back we watched the Thomas McCarthy movie Win/Win and enjoyed it immensely. In learning about McCarthy we learned about this film, an earlier effort of his, that as his first movie was received very well by the critics.

All of the positive reviews of The Station Agent prove to be nothing more than absolutely correct. This is a fantastic movie. Small in scope but with a quietness that belies how much impact it can have on a person.

Peter Dinklage plays Finbar McBride. Dinklage, for those who do not recognize the name is a little person. After performances in Elf and over the last couple of years with a major role in Game of Thrones Dinklage now has reached such stature that he is now an actor who happens to be a little person rather than a little person who is an actor. He is a brilliant actor.

In the movie Fin is a reclusive, hermit like man who works at a hobby shop. With a love of trains his life is made up of his relationship with his tactiturn friend and boss and a train aficionado group to which he belongs.

His life is changed when his friend dies, and the hobby shop closes. Fin is left however, as an inheritance a small piece of land with an old train depot on it. With no other opportunities seeking solitude Fin moves to Newfoundland, New Jersey to take up residence.

Seeking to be alone he soon finds himself immersed in the lives of Joe, a Cuban American man running a snack track while his father recovers from illness, and Olivia a woman separated from her husband after the sudden death of her child. Throw in a little African American girl who shares Fin's loves of trains, and Michelle Williams as the town librarian who has a problem she has to deal with and you have some acting performances that are not to be forgotten.

Nothing is forced in this movie, it comes at its own pace. Patricia Clarkson as the grieving mother Olivia offers a performance that you can feel the pain dripping from. In watching the movie and seeing the unlikely friendship develop between Joe, the fast talking, always upbeat and chatty, Cuban American, Olivia, the distraught mother, and Finn, the quiet lonely man who just happens to be a dwarf, I told my wife this movie might illustrate better than any I have ever seen how many lonely people there are in this world, that on some level each of us is hurting or hurt.

I cannot reccomend this movie highly enough.

Sideways

When you watch an old movie from the era when you were not really watching movies yet it is one thing, you have an excuse for missing it the first time around. When you are my age and watch a movie from eight years ago, sometimes you wonder where you were.

This 2004 movie was released to almost universally positive reviews. The film won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and all the actors and actresses were lauded for their performances.

For all that the movie is small and self contained. Paul Giamatti plays Miles Raymond, a writer who cannot get published, a self professed wine aficionado, and a middle school English teacher. In the course of the movie he comes to the realization that his ex wife is not coming back to him. How he comes to realize this is more painful than most of the ways in which one could.

Thomas Haden Church plays Jack Cole. Jack was the college roommate of Miles and is now an actor who is about to be married. The two men take a week together in the wine country of California. They, however, have different reasons for the trip. For Miles it is a chance to get away, enjoy some wine, and spend time with his friend. Jack wants only to have some last sexual fling before his impending marriage.

Their trip, the people they meet, and the conflicts that develop show lonely people trying to make the best of a world that continually disappoints.

Giamatti might well be incapable of a bad acting performance, Church, who I last saw in Wings ,is much stronger than one would expect and Virginia Madsen playing a love interest of Miles is as always perfect.

Another of the nothing movies as in " What happens in the movie?" with the usual response being Nothing really this movie shines. Proving again that things do not need to blow up, we don't need models we just need a good story we can relate to and good acting. This movie serves that up in big servings.