Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness

February 25, 2016

Vinyl: Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese's Mini-series

The past few weeks have given us some insights into the music industry.

Firstly there was a biopic mini-series on Australia's rock music guru - Ian 'Molly' Meldrum, and now we have 'Vinyl'.

Martin Scorsese has never pulled any punches with his movies: always hard-hitting and well-executed, and having Mick Jagger along side,,,well it's hard to mess it up!

Both shows are worth a look, and having Mick Jagger compile the 'Vinyl' soundtrack makes it even more interesting.

I think it is fair to say that Mick, or should I say Sir Mick, is part of the most successful rock band ever inasmuch as the Rolling Stones are still performing , currently in South America, and are largely intact with the obvious exceptions of Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor who joins them from time to time.

Whilst 'Molly' is definitely a bio-pic it is hard to say whether 'Vinyl' really is but it appears to be.

Not being 'in the know' who is Richie Finestra supposed to be in real life?

And yet we see actual people portraying Robert Plant, Bo Diddley, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Gram Parsons,Jerry Lee Lewis, Andy Warhol and many others.

Here is a review by Michael Idato from the SMH:

If you look back in time, through the crystal ball of nostalgia, the 1970s were a decade of flare-wearing misadventure, where your hem stretched from your heels to your hair, drugs were served in large tin buckets, technology consisted mostly of Bakelite phones and transistor radios and we were all bopping at Studio 54.

In truth, they weren't nearly so glamorous, and most of us weren't bopping for the whole 10 years, though Vinyl (Mondays, Showcase, 3.30pm and 7.30pm) seems determined to make you think they (and we) were. This is the music industry, writ large, with Martin Scorsese at the helm and Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger on the sideline.

That's a formidable imprimatur to hang on any show, let alone a show set in a decade two of the key creatives lived through as adults. The third, showrunner Terry Winter, was mercifully just a teenager, though he had older siblings who exposed him to a wide palette of music. Brace yourself: it's gonna be a noisy series.

Vinyl stars Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, a record company executive battling to save his label, American Century, as external forces swirl, foreshadowing its ruin. Olivia Wilde plays Devon Finestra, his wife. Ray Romano is Zak Yankovich, the label's head of promotions and the man who Finestra leans on and confides in. Also Juno Temple from Maleficent as Jamie Vine.

Cannavale is a Scorsese/Winter favourite, having cut through their earlier collaboration, Boardwalk Empire, like a tornado. Cannavale played psychopathic mobster Gyp Rosetti with the kind of mad brilliance that makes you immediately want to cast him in your next project, which plainly they did.

He is brilliant here, if trapped a little by a slightly superficial characterisation that, in the first few hours at least, feels impenetrable. It takes time for the sharp corners to smooth but it's worth the investment. Cannavale in full flight is a sight to behold.

The biggest challenge with the first hours is that they're simply slow. Which is odd, because there is a lot of colour and movement, but behind that the narrative is glacial. That's a tough thing to hit tucking in to the first hour of a new drama, particularly one that demands, by virtue of its pedigree, your undivided attention.

Those first few hours are properly Scorsese's too – he directed – and they feel weighty, full of pauses, like a nuanced feature film. Television's nature is to be lighter, leaner, faster, so it jags, though there will be many who disagree. And if it's down to a TV critic's opinion or Martin Scorsese's, I offer unconditional surrender.

What doesn't help is the tendency to mistake dick-swinging dialogue and wild gesticulation for action, when audiences now are far more attuned to the smaller moments and more subtle gestures. There's a lot of over-talking and over-walking in Vinyl. It's distracting and sometimes frustrating.

Romano is the great revelation here: a sitcom actor best known for playing a goofy TV husband and father who brings an unexpectedly complex dimension to Zak Yankovich.

It's a bit like finding the dad from The Brady Bunch, Robert Reed, playing the lead in House of Cards. It jars for a second, but then it's kind of awesome.

Musically the show is perfect, stylistically it's brilliant, though perhaps because if its pedigree it has been indulged a little.

Those wrinkles are forgivable. It's also wholly subjective, but that's forgivable, too, so it's not the story of the 1970s but how Richie Finestra saw them. "Clouded," he notes, "by lost brain cells, self-aggrandisement and, maybe, a little bit of bullshit".

No Series 2!!

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February 23, 2016

Julia Child’s French Cooking Book Was A Trail Blazer

I have never seen the movie Julie & Julia, the one about the blogger and the superstar cook, although I’m told that while the character of Julie was an obnoxious one, Meryl Streep was expertly cast as Julia. Julia Child, that is.

I’m not American. And when Julia Child published her masterwork, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I was in nappies. So apart from the spectre of her reputation, which is powerful, I was a little ignorant of the specific contribution Child had made to food in the US and, by extension, the rest of the English-speaking world. My mistake.

And I now have some perspective. I have just finished Child’s autobiographical My Life in France, published following her death in 2004 at a very respectable 92. The book apparently provided inspiration for Julie & Julia, and it’s not hard to see why, although there is speculation as to what Child herself, late in her long innings, actually thought of Julie Powell’s blog, which led to the movie.

Regardless, the book’s a gentle, delightful read for any nostalgic Francophile, touching on many aspects of the nation that have quietly slipped away. Postwar Paris, seen through Child’s stoic eyes (for it was not all biere and boules), was a magical place of characters, food, wine and culinary discovery.

The raw material for the book is undeniable. Child led a fascinating, colourful, energetic life, and truly broke ground by fronting what was probably the first television series on cooking, The French Cook. Lots of books reminisce about a bygone Paris.

What you cannot help but take from reading My Life in France, however, is profound respect for the achievement that was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, on which Child collaborated, to a greater or lesser extent, with two French friends while living in France, the US and Norway.

Much of the book is about The Book. In an age of almost instant food titles from celebrity chefs — the annual from him, another friends/simple/fast/family book from her — the 12-year gestation of this brilliantly researched and tested masterpiece must seem confounding.

The simple premise was this: introducing enthusiastic American home cooks to the foundations, techniques and ingredients of real French food.

Remember, it was the late 1940s when this project began in Paris — a time of snail mail and typewriters, and no such thing as market research. Would anyone in the US buy a comprehensive manual on French food when it was eventually published in 1961? Nobody knew.

As Child herself writes of that period when the project was launched, in the 2001 anniversary edition of Mastering: “Nobody I knew, either American or French, seemed at all interested in la cuisine francaise. My American colleagues had a little femmes de menage who did the housekeeping, shopping, and cooking, and I was considered more than a little odd because I did all the cooking and marketing — such fun — as well as all the serving when we have company.”

Fortunately, that didn’t stop Child and her friend and main collaborator Simone Beck from ploughing on. Her instincts, and those of her ultimate editors and publishers, were spot on. And, as much for its fastidious research and plain-language explanations as for its moment in history — a time when interest in food was rising and servants were becoming an unaffordable anachronism — MTAFC, as Child herself referred to it, sold its socks off.

Flicking through that anniversary edition, you can see how the original manuscript took more than a decade. It’s all the more commendable for the fact that, prior to arriving in France in 1948 with her husband Paul, Child had barely cooked.

The product of a well-to-do Californian family, there had been cooks and maids chez Child. It was their mutual sense of adventure that took the couple to Paris and her boundless appetite for French food and life that took Child down a path of discovery that led to the book.

She was a motivated researcher and student, and a Cordon Bleu qualification was only a small piece of the Child culinary jigsaw.

Also, flicking through, I am reminded that between the covers of My Life in France is much discussion of Child’s and Beck’s beurre blanc method.

I gave it a whizz. For me, it was more a beurre jaune: cheap, yellow Australian butter probably doesn’t cut it for a sauce like this, and my technique will need a little practice, but with steamed asparagus, it was delightful.

Even more satisfying was souffle demoule, mousseline — an unmoulded cheese souffle usually called a “twice-baked souffle” these days because it goes back under the grill bottom-side-up with a bit of cream, for colour. Brilliant.

Julia can stay in the kitchen.

So, I’m a little late for the Queen of American Cooking, as she ultimately became known. My loss.

I suspect that without her, many Australian heroes of my generation — Stephanie Alexander, Tony Bilson, Neil Perry and Peter Doyle, to mention only a few — might never have picked up a whisk.

Julia, we owe you.

By John Lethlean
With many thanks to The Australian