Ray LaMontagne on MBE Today

American troubadour Ray LaMontagne creates modern folk songs that are lush and earthy. Joined by his band, he’ll perform live songs on the Morning Becomes Eclectic radio program on Monday July 13.

Morning Becomes Eclectic, a daily showcase of fresh new music, can be heard daily on kcrw.com and in the Los Angeles area on KCRW FM 89.9. Also link to the show via Bosco Radio Music beginning at 9 AM PST/12 Noon EST. The link is in our sidebar.

American Masters Profiles Garrison Keillor

American Masters
Garrison Keillor
The Man On The Radio In the Red Shoes
PBS (July: Various Times)
Five Scoops of Bosco

PBS's "American Masters trains it lens on an icon of the heartland: Garrison Keillor, host of public radio's A Prairie Home Companion and raconteur of the doings in fictional Lake Wobegon, Minn.

It's an enjoyable 90-minute presentation that shows Keillor working behind-the-scenes on his radio show and often at his laptop writing. He essentially narrates the program, rarely in the form of interviews by American Masters producers, but often in chunks of dialogue taken from his monologues.

Masters trails Keillor to a Minnesota rhubarb festival where one church lady fan proclaims, "He's not a fancy kind of guy. ... He likes rhubarb like the rest of us." Another woman, who could just as easily be a character on Prairie Home Companion, declares, "Baking rhubarb pie is a metaphor for finding happiness in your own backyard."

Ya, sure, you betcha.

American Masters interviews some of the other Companion performers and shows how each episode is put together with many contributions and how all those contributors answer to Keillor, who appears to have final say in decisions ranging from script to music.

Outtakes from performances on the road depict Keillor coaching a young girl who's accustomed to singing in her Lutheran church but finds herself in a bigger venue for Companion. And Keillor muses about the reaction of younger listeners to his radio program who sometimes think he invented the form. He discusses the value of performing Companion in front of a live audience saying, "It's a novelty for people to see what radio looked like when people used to do radio shows like this."

If this American Masters program is missing anything it's more on Keillor as a person. Viewers get a sense of how he does his job, but not necessarily what formed him or influences his work. There's a hazy sense of his love of the "authentic," including the midwestern charm of Minnesota, and how he's also drawn to the more highbrow life of a literary icon in New York City where he's owned an apartment since 1988.

But the film never addresses the obvious: How someone who rarely smiles and often appears joyless is capable of spreading so much joy among his devoted listeners.

Obviously American Masters isn't Biography and there's no reason to expect it to get into his three marriages and the disconnect between aspects of the life he lives and the more mundane fictional world he's most closely associated with, but the program would benefit from a deeper exploration of why and how Keillor became the master of gentle, soothing midwestern humor.

This episode of American Masters can be viewed throughout the month of July on Public Television PBS. Check local listings for times in your area. Prairie Home Companion can be accessed live via Bosco Radio Nostalgia and Entertainment each Saturday at 3 PM PST/6 PM EST. The link is in our sidebar.

Reviewed by Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

America's Most Unlikely Tourist

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude,
Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist
By Peter Carlson
327 pp. $26.95
Five Scoops of Bosco

In September 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech before Hollywood's biggest stars at the Café de Paris, Twentieth Century Fox's elegant commissary. Forty-five minutes into his talk, as celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (wearing, on orders from her studio bosses, her slinkiest dress) and Frank Sinatra watched in amazement, a red-faced Khrushchev began to punch the air. He wasn't complaining about American nuclear plans or Cuba but an even graver matter: his American guides' refusal to allow him to visit Disneyland. (The problem was security, they said.)

Khrushchev's mood didn't really improve as his motorcade went on a meandering, two-hour tour of tract housing developments, while curious Angelenos gathered along the roads to catch a glimpse of the communist dictator. Most were friendly, but one woman, dressed all in black, clutched a black flag and a terse sign that read: "Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary." Enraged, the premier asked Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the United Nations who was accompanying him, "If Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?" Lodge was baffled. Surely Khrushchev didn't believe that the president had personally arranged for the woman to stand on that particular street corner? "In the Soviet Union," Khrushchev replied, "she wouldn't be there unless I had given the order."

It was never going to be easy to host Stalin's combustible successor, and as Peter Carlson shows in K Blows Top, Khrushchev's two-week journey across America quickly became one of the most outlandish episodes in the annals of Cold War history. Carlson, a former feature writer for The Washington Post, confesses to being obsessed with Khrushchev's peregrinations ever since first reading old newspaper clips about them several decades ago as a rewrite man at People magazine. Since then, Carlson seems to have sought and discovered every piece of arcana associated with the Soviet leader's American sojourn. A deft and amusing writer, Carlson does a marvelous job of recounting it.

The traveling road show, which Carlson discerningly calls the "television debut" of the "multiday media circus," wasn't really supposed to occur in the first place. To Eisenhower's dismay, a senior State Department official had badly bungled matters by inviting Khrushchev without insisting on vital Soviet concessions about West Berlin in exchange. Khrushchev was elated and seized every opportunity to show that under his leadership the Soviet Union had left Stalinist terror behind to steal a technological march on decadent, bourgeois America.

Khrushchev insisted on flying to Washington in his new TU-114, the world's tallest aircraft, despite being warned of the plane's potential mechanical problems. The Soviet premier was welcomed by a 120-member military honor guard, four 75-millimeter howitzers to fire a 21-gun salute, and a crowd of 3,000 that included, Carlson reports, Eisenhower, "his face uncharacteristically glum under his gray Stetson." After Eisenhower delivered a dreary homily about universal peace, Khrushchev, who had been hamming it up by holding his homburg over his face like a sunshade and waving to the crowd, walked to the lectern to brag about the rocket Soviet scientists had launched to the moon days earlier.

As Khrushchev veered between trying to seduce America and threatening to blow it to smithereens, he met with a mostly fawning reception. In New York, W. Averell Harriman hosted a cocktail party at his Manhattan townhouse, where the titans of American capitalism, including John D. Rockefeller III and John McCloy, chairman of Chase Manhattan, spent the evening trying to persuade Khrushchev that they wielded no great power. Scarcely less ingratiating was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's former henchman G. David Schine, who had gone into his father's hotel business. When Khrushchev arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Schine greeted him effusively. Carlson tartly observes, "Finally, the famous Commie-hunter had found an authentic Communist, and he sent him upstairs to the hotel's luxurious Royal Suite." During a brief stop in San Luis Obispo, Khrushchev plunged into the crowd gathered around his train.

After the trip, Soviet relations with America deteriorated rapidly. Thanks to his triumphalism over the downing of America's U-2 spy plane in 1960, his banging of a shoe at the United Nations and his attempted installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev scuttled any chance for an incipient detente. By 1964, his erratic judgment led to his ouster. Still, the Soviet reformer's voyage across America prepared the stage for the biggest Soviet celebrity of all, Mikhail Gorbachev, who visited America and ended the Cold War. Perhaps Carlson can make those trips the subject of his next book, but it won't be easy to top this sparkling effort.

Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn for Washington Post

Dave Matthews Band Triumphs Over Tragedy

Dave Matthews Band
Big Whiskey & The GrooGrux King
Five Scoops of Bosco

Tragedy has a way of putting everything into perspective, a truism that's brought into sharp relief by the Dave Matthews Band. LeRoi Moore, the group's saxophonist, died in an ATV accident in 2008, something that shook the DMB to their core and they've responded as any working band does: by carrying on, playing gigs -- including one on the day of his passing -- and finishing the album they were recording at the time of his death, turning Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King into a tribute to their fallen comrade.

By saluting his spirit, DMB wind up returning to their roots, jettisoning any of the well-manicured crossover pop of Stand Up and reviving the loose-limbed jams that were their '90s specialty, a sound they've largely abandoned -- at least on record -- since 1998's Before These Crowded Streets.

During that long, long decade between Before and Big Whiskey, DMB remained one of America's biggest bands even though much of those ten years found Matthews working through various existential crises -- things got too big so he pulled away from the band, turned out a dark solo record, then came back -- and his namesake band drifted along with him.

Here, everything snaps back into focus: what was glossy is now clean and unvarnished; there is no avoidance of their rangy, loping rhythms or predilection for elastic solos; and these signatures -- shunned on record, not on-stage -- are embraced warmly, given muscle, and married to the dark undercurrents that have flowed throughout Matthews' new-millennium writing.

Surely, Moore's early death weighs heavily here -- he is the GrooGrux King of the album's title and there are many allusions to him in lyrics -- but Matthews also ties in references to Hurricane Katrina and war, all as part of his wide-open meditations on mortality and morality.

Not all of Big Whiskey is about death: there is an equal amount of love tunes, plus one of Matthews' casually vulgar sex songs, all celebrating enduring relationships, providing a counterpoint to the waves of melancholy. But what makes Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King the Dave Matthews Band's richest, and quite possibly best, album is the implicit message that all the love and loss can be felt and shared through the music, that the creation of the music itself is the reason why they're here -- and that's not just a moving tribute to LeRoi Moore, it's a reason for the band to keep moving on. ~

Reviewed by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Shooting Blanks

Public Enemies
Directed by Michael Mann
Johnny Depp; Christian Bale
4 Scoops of Bosco

For some months now, Public Enemies has been positioned as the thinking person's event movie, a rare steak to be tossed to cinemagoers between stultifying buckets of popcorn. It's neither sequel nor spin-off, features no giant robots; rather, this is a crime epic of the type that polymath Heat director Michael Mann specializes in – set during the Great Depression to boot, giving it a further, timely cachet.

I wish I could say the film delivered on this promise, especially midway through this miserable movie summer season, but alas, no: in its own manner, the film is just as hollow and unsatisfying as anything else around.

The set-up is the cat-and-mouse played out between bank robber and 'public enemy number one' John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the G-Man assigned to bring him to justice. This Dillinger is another of Mann's characters locked into patterns of repetition: he robs a bank, gets caught, busts out, starts again.

His lover Billie Fréchette (Marion Cotillard) serves the same purpose as Amy Brenneman's bookseller in Heat, reminding the robber of the consequences of his chosen path, and to be roundly ignored for it. In a film in which even the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire comes to sound terribly familiar, the suspicion grows that the director may be repeating himself.

Mann has often been accused of pastiche, of artfully glossing over genres rather than deepening our understanding of their codes. I'd normally disagree, but Public Enemies strikes me as evidence for the prosecution: while he's assembled a typically interesting and left-of-centre supporting cast, Mann tests Depp less than he did Will Smith in Ali (2001) or even Tom Cruise in Collateral (2004), asking only that his star be suave and carry a Tommy gun correctly. If Dillinger gains our sympathies, it's only because he has Johnny Depp's cheekbones.

Then there's Christian Bale, rapidly becoming the most anonymous figure in American movies, retreating from the limelight off-screen and – more problematically – the camera's gaze upon it. His Purvis rarely rises above the level of a blank with smirk or frown attached: we never see him outside of his job, nor are we encouraged to care much.

As the Depp-centred publicity campaign makes clear, this is an entirely one-sided face-off: it's a sad day when Jack Sparrow trumps Bruce Wayne, but emblematic of a work in which the betrayals and plot reversals lack any kind of emotional or psychological weight.

This sense of something one-dimensional is only confirmed by the film's temporary-looking digital camerawork. Mann's technical nous looks to have forsaken him entirely here: the drama fails to engage partly because so much of it resembles a taped rehearsal, or a DVD making-of.

I'll make allowances for the Depression setting, but even so: how could a major studio production, photographed by the great Dante Spinotti, and starring Depp and Cotillard, have been allowed to turn out something this drab and – let's say it – ugly?

Reviewed by Michael McCahill, The Sunday Telegraph

Woody Allen & Larry David Return To NYC

Whatever Works
Directed By Woody Allen
Sony Pictures Classics
Now Playing
Four Scoops of Bosco

Whatever Works, Woody Allen's prodigal return to New York, takes the disconcerting form of a disquisition on quantum physics, love and chance, ranted directly to the camera by terminally misanthropic Larry David. Though stuffed with witty one-liners and wondrously convoluted tirades, this far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.

Still, the David/Allen hybrid makes for a fascinating beast, of interest to acolytes of both comedians, if a far cry from Vicky Cristina Barcelona, whose Box Office haul is unlikely to be matched by this Sony Classics release.

Dusting off a script he wrote more than 30 years ago, Allen casts David as Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant string theorist "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize." Consumed by the big picture of the universe hurtling toward its own extinction, Boris despises all mankind, apparently angry that people are too stupid to be depressed. Having abandoned his rich wife and uptown apartment by jumping out a window in a failed suicide attempt, a limping Boris survives in a dilapidated apartment near Chinatown, supporting himself by teaching chess to little kids he flagrantly insults ("Inchworm!" "Sub-mental cretin!") and hanging out with old academic pals (Michael McKean, Conleth Hill), who are amused but unconvinced by his vitriolic spewings.

Into this semi-hermetic existence stumbles Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young blonde pageant queen from the Deep South, sweet as pie and dumb as dirt. While she cooks him crayfish and calms his anxiety attacks with Fred Astaire movies, Boris alternately bemoans Melody's dimwittedness and regales her eager mind with everything from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to a "Mikado"-like list of petty crimes that should be punishable by death. Much of the pic's comedy revolves around Melody's skewed or surprisingly apt regurgitations of his teachings, and Wood handles the evolution of her improbably Daisy Mae-ish character with surprising finesse.

A year into the odd couple's union, fate comes knocking at the door (to the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth) in the form of Melody's Bible-spouting mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson, in typically high-drama mode), who greets the sight of her daughter's irascible, elderly, gimpy hubby by falling out of frame in a dead faint.

But hedonistic New York proves the making of Marietta -- instantly divesting her of her born-again Christian mindset, liberating her starved sexuality and validating her amateur photography. Indeed, the city is big enough to turn around even the most backward misguided soul: When Melody's gun-fetishizing dad (Ed Begley Jr.) finally arrives, he too sees the light, thus proving the pic's moral that one must grasp whatever works to bring a bit of joy into a benighted world.

Throughout Whatever Works, there are moments of discordance, ghostly echoes of the alter-ego problem Allen has faced for years in the absence of himself as central character.

On the plus side, Allen avoids the creepy ventriloquist effect of a younger actor mouthing his words and intonations by choosing as raucously individualistic a performer as David. Boris, who turns everyday anxieties into comic angst (he periodically wakes up in cold sweats chanting Kurtz's "the horror ... the horror") reps a distinct variation on Allen's persona. Boris may be a cooler know-it-all on the surface, but his equilibrium is more easily shaken, as demonstrated by his reaction when Melody drifts toward a Viagra-free relationship with a younger prospect (Henry Cavill).

But by forcing David, a total improviser who rarely delivers scripted lines, to incant impossibly long monologues (his to-the-camera ramblings effectively self-kidded by the visible bewilderment of the other cast members), Allen the director loses sight of what works. The film lacks breathing room -- it rushes forward like a stage play with pre-planned exits and entrances, soliloquies and asides. Even the city appears to be a set, with real Chinatown locations looking like isolated backdrops and touristy glimpses of Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty sardonically inserted.

Kudos to David for having collaborated with the two greatest comedy icons of the generation prior to his: Allen here and Mel Brooks on TV (the entire fourth season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" involves David's fictional assumption of the Bialystock role in Broadway's "The Producers"). It's undeniable that David's rawer comic style jibes more felicitously with Brooks' unromantic ethos, yet oddly, in keeping with the pic's celebration of random coincidence, both the Bialystock and Boris parts were originally conceived for Zero Mostel.

Revewed by Ronnie Scheib, Variety Magazine

Roger Wilco

Wilco (the album)
Nonesuch Records
Available Tuesday in Stores
Four Scoops of Bosco

Something of a wolf in sheep's clothing, Jeff Tweedy's new album flirts with electro in the process of playing the soft rock straight card. His poetry has never sounded so noir and paranoid – "I can't calm down, I can't think" he frets on the epic "Black Nova", which sounds like it ends drenched in cold sweat.

The contrast is supplied immediately with the sweetly strummed "You And I", and that, as ever with Wilco records, is the charm, the gentle diversity that can take you from chilling out to something that genuinely chills. 'You Never Know" bounces along like an Elton John piano pounder from the Seventies, with George Harrison on slide guitar, coloured with Tweedy's resigned refrain "I don't care any more".

Nels Cline embellishes with clever guitar motifs, from steel work imitating Hawaiian birdsong to chunky pub rock chords on "Sonny Feeling". "Deeper Down" is where Tweedy's storytelling is best heard, studded with the detail of a Chandler or Leonard, populated by punchdrunk worthies struggling to stay on their feet.

Melodies? Well, "One Wing" takes a bit of beating, the guitar hook soaring defiantly to a groaning climax. Then the closing "Everlasting Everything" demonstrates that devastating ability to do the simple thing brilliantly as Tweedy has done so often in the past.

Not his best album, but maybe five of his best songs.

Reviewed by Colin Somerville, Scotsman.com