For Those About To Rock

Foo Fighters' Grohl to kick off BottleRock with 'Sound City' screening, Q&A

BottleRock Napa Valley has added another event to the lineup.

A screening of "Sound City," a documentary by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl featuring a Los Angeles recording studio, takes place May 6 at the Uptown Theatre in Napa.

After the screening, Grohl will speak with the audience in a question-and-answer session.

Doors open at 6 p.m. for a wine and food reception with the screening at 7:15 p.m.

Proceeds from the screening benefit the Napa Valley Film Festival as well as Autism Cure, Housing, Ocean Resources, Development, Socialization, an organizing which helps families cope with autism.

The inaugural BottleRock Napa Valley festival is scheduled to take place May 8 through 12 at the Napa Expo. The Black Keys, Kings of Leon, Zac Brown Band and Furthur headline the four-day, five-night event.

Tickets for the "Sound City" screening are available to BottleRock VIP pass holders, but additional tickets may be available on the day of screening, depending upon availability.

For more information, call 707-255-5249 or visit BottleRockNapaValley.com.

Is withstanding repetition indicative of artistic success?

Last weekend, I attended a 4 year old’s birthday party.

As long as I can remember, he’s loved “Thomas the Tank Engine.” His party had a Thomas tablecloth, Thomas plates and, if I recall correctly, Thomas napkins. Later, he went home and played with his Thomas train set.

Children watch the same movies and TV shows ad nauseam because there’s comfort in the familiarity, much like how they want to hear the same bedtime story over and over.

I couldn’t help but feel the boy and I weren’t all that different, however, as I exited San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Wednesday night after seeing Icelandic post-rock masters Sigur Rós.

The band played its show-closing signature, “Popplagið” – translated as “The Pop Song” – to end its second Bay Area show in as many nights. For the uninitiated, it is a jolt of adrenaline. The song swells during its nearly 10-minute conclusion, beginning with drummer Orri bashing his kit. The band’s other members jump in around him until the song erupts in an ominous cacophony.

It’s a visceral, thrilling performance to witness, despite knowing it’s coming. The band has ended virtually every show with it for more than a decade. As lights went up, I overheard one fan saying to another, “That’s why they close with (that song).”

“Popplagið” wasn’t the only repeat. Wednesday night’s setlist was identical to Tuesday’s at the Fox Theater in Oakland (top photo).

Seeing the same show twice made me appreciate the magnitude of the band’s stage presence. Visuals add to the band’s extraterrestrial aura. On “Svefn-g-englar” – “Sleepwalkers” – video screens set the audience adrift among galaxies far away. “Hoppípolla” (“Hopping Into Puddles”), a joyous romp and a personal favorite, showed a confetti-like rain and bright lights. “Popplagið” favored smoke and aquatic images.

The conclusion about the visual components of Sigur Rós’ shows, however, made me wonder if the 4 year old and I are that different.

On Monday night, I finished watching all three seasons of “Arrested Development” (left) for the third time. After spending much of 2013 watching shows I hadn’t seen, I wanted to reacquaint myself with “Arrested” prior to its long-awaited return next month via Netflix.

But TV shows, I thought, are hulking, cumbersome beasts. It’s easy to forget certain details, so while a series rewatch is time-consuming, I understand it. I plan to watch “Breaking Bad” once more before the show’s final season, now slated to begin Aug. 11.

People talk about the greatness of something in its ability to be rewatched, reconsumed, reviewed. This is how cult movies build their audience.

Some things, however, are better when a person chooses scarcity. When we self-select, we preserve the rarity, richness and newness of something. It’s why “Lost in Translation” is one of my favorite movies, but I’m not sure I’ve seen it five times.

Because of this, I’m hesitant to declare that repetition is the most-defining characteristic of a movie, TV show, piece of music or other work of art’s greatness.

With some things, repetition reinforces our belief that our first impression was accurate. For Sigur Rós, I loved both shows, so this isn’t a complaint that I saw the same set twice. I’d consider going to see it again tonight if I could, so the phrase “diminishing returns” does not apply.

When we find out a movie or a song we loved stands up to repeated consumption, it wins our respect and appreciation.

But repetition alone does not prove a piece of art’s greatness.

I wouldn’t sign on for a “Groundhog Day”-esque experience in which I saw “Popplagið” live every night from now until death. Some things need to be preserved in order for their greatness to maintain the same power and resonance as that initial consumption.

That’s a truth that holds true for movies, TV shows and music other than Sigur Rós live.

Luckily, Sigur Rós hails from Iceland, which limits my chances to see “Popplagið” repeatedly. But on the occasions the band makes the trek across the Atlantic from Iceland to perform in the Bay Area, you can bet I’ll be there with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm my 4-year-old buddy has for “Thomas the Tank Engine.”

Ebert's legacy goes beyond critique

Creative Commons-licensed photo by chicagopublicmedia

In a funny way, Roger Ebert was just as iconic and enduring — if not more — than those who starred in the films he reviewed.

Winning a Pulitzer Prize didn't hurt, though.

His death last week at the age of 70 saddened me in that bittersweet way protracted deaths do. It is inevitable for all of us, but he fought such a prolonged and public battle with cancer during his last decade that to know it was over brought sadness as well as a strange comfort.

Though he endured in high spirits, thyroid cancer took so much from him in his final years — his ability to eat, speak and drink.

Through a text-to-speech program, he was able to simulate his voice after a Scottish company, CereProc, mined hours of his show with Gene Siskel and, later, Richard Roeper.

He imagined an afterlife of endless screenings of his favorite film, "Citizen Kane," and vanilla Häagen Dazs ice cream.

Two days before his death, he announced a "leave of presence" on his website, with plans to scale back the frequency of his reviews as well as relaunching his website.

Regrettably, I never met the man, though we traded comments on his Facebook page once about a subject I've already forgotten. (I think he needed help posting something.)

I can only speak of my admiration for him and his pioneering of critique as an art form of its own.

He shaped my perspective as a critic and a writer. He pulled no punches, but he also knew tact. For as many people as posted or retweeted his most famous barbs, Ebert got by in good graces with Tinseltown for more than four decades because he was savvy enough to distinguish the characters from the people playing them. He never suffered fools, but he never played one, either.

Not to talk shop too much, but from Ebert, I learned perhaps the most important lesson about critique — judge a work by the choices it made, not the ones it didn't. He also taught me that reviews are not regurgitation. Anyone can vomit up a shot-by-shot recap of a film, but what's important is the discussion the piece sparks, if any.

One of my proudest moments as a journalist was seeing a list of critics who had placed "Winter's Bone" (left) in their top 10 films of 2010 and seeing my name there with his.

It was flattering because I had such deep respect for how he saw films. He loved them and that was clear from his reviews.

His eye was unnerving. After viewing thousands of films, their flaws were transparent to him. His reviews mentioned things other critics never noticed, but he didn't ignore obvious details.

After seeing many movies and finding our tastes lined up, his writing was the word of god for me. "Did Roger like 'The Last Airbender?' He hated it? He called it 'an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented?' Oh. Then I won't bother."

More than any film critic in history, Ebert had his finger on the cultural zeitgeist. He knew himself, his voice and his audience. He knew what the discussion would be about a particular film.

Heck, he didn't just know what the discussion would be. He dictated its terms to other critics.

That's a legacy all writers hope to leave.

And I hope right now he's out there with a spoon in one hand and vanilla Häagen Dazs in the other as "Citizen Kane" starts to roll.

White Stripes’ ‘Elephant’ turns 10

A moment of savvy song selections starts the 2010 film “The Social Network.”

As the characters chew through dense, Aaron Sorkin-written dialogue, The White Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit” opens the bar scene and fades into the background, as if emanating from a jukebox within.

Its cool, bluesy swagger and sexually suggestive title hint at a dynamic that underlies the film — men and women. More specifically, the lengths to which the former will go to win the latter’s approval.

The song cements the movie in time, too. With “Ball and Biscuit” and The White Stripes’ album from which is comes, Elephant, turning 10 years old today, it places Zuckerberg, Erica and the Facebook creators in the Millennial set.

As Elephant hits its aluminum anniversary, it must be looked at as one of the defining musical documents of the 21st century so far.

It stands as the apex of the Aughties’ post-punk, garage-rock revival. It came at a time when rock needed a boot to the bottom. Hip-hop took over in sales in the early ’00s against rock’s collective of angry young white men leading post-grunge, nu-metal and rap/rock groups.

As counterculture often provides, a glut of groups dubbed the “The” bands surfaced: The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, The Von Bondies, The Dirtbombs, The Detroit Cobras, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The White Stripes and more. These groups reached back to the ’70s for influence and were less interested in machismo than the angry young white rocker crowd.

What makes Elephant memorable is its dual appeal. It garnered commercial success, cracking the Billboard 200′s top 10, as well as critical accolades, grabbing a Grammy for best alternative album.

“The Hardest Button to Button” was a minor hit on rock radio, but lead single “Seven Nation Army” stands as The White Stripes’ biggest single, sneaking into the low end of Billboard’s Hot 100.

Mistaken for a bass guitar lick, Jack White’s legacy will be that song’s seven-note guitar phrase. The sporting world has embraced it, coming to international prominence as the soundtrack to the Italian victory in the 2006 World Cup. Now, it’s a veritable staple of live sporting events. (And on an unrelated note, has anyone ever sounded as excited about going to Wichita, Kan., as Jack?)

Although “Seven Nation Army” is the flashier and more noticeable side of the importance of Elephant, the peppermint-striped duo of Jack and Meg White also helped engineer a blueprint for the modern wave of indie rockers.

Indifferent, although not unwelcoming, of radio success, The White Stripes seemed more interested in building a devoted fan base and maintaining artistic integrity.

For Jack and Meg, part of their appeal was creating mystique. They were ex-spouses, not siblings, as they had insisted. Elephant’s closing track, “It’s True That We Love One Another,” played the subterfuge for laughs — “I love Jack White like a little brother,” sings guest vocalist Holly Golightly with a wink.

Jack and Meg (left) also stayed true to themselves as a creative force. Despite being the first record the duo cut for V2 after leaving the Sympathy for the Record Industry label, the Whites didn’t streamline their sound to appeal to a broader audience. Elephant flexes the muscles of the blues rock albums that preceded it; “Ball and Biscuit” is the formula amplified, standing as the longest studio effort the pair released.

Jack White has a Luddite streak, so the fact that Elephant was cut in a London studio with equipment from the 1960s seems less novel now than it may have circa April 2003. That choice gives Elephant a perceived integrity.

In the ensuing decade, many of the “The” bands have split up, fallen out of public favor or withered, including The White Stripes, which split in 2011 after a hiatus. As soon as the garage rock revival began, it seemed to disintegrate, largely because it was never intended as a collective movement.

Regardless, some of today’s most celebrated indie groups owe some measure of debt to Jack and Meg for wedging into the mainstream a space for rock not just be angry white guys with microphones, but to be about craft, mystique and artistic integrity.

That is as much the legacy of Elephant as the celebrated seven notes of “Seven Nation Army.”

White Stripes photo by Michael Morel