Performance Review

John Corbett recently published a nice summary of Ken Vandermark's career to date. Section #4 is of the of most interest to me, since it covers the time when I was living in Chicago and discovering both Vandermark's music in particular and free jazz in general. I feel very fortunate to have been there during the so-called "golden age in Chicago", when I had the chance to hear the Vandermark Five and other groups play on a weekly basis, if not more frequently. Simpatico is one of my favorite V5 recordings and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I was at the Empty Bottle nearly every Tuesday night during the summer of 1998 listening as the songs that were recorded for that album were being rehearsed and developed.

Good Knight

We finally went to see The Dark Knight last weekend. It's as good as everyone says it is, for the most part. It's certainly the darkest of all the Batman films (though, oddly enough, it probably has more daylight scenes than any of the recent Batman movies). All I can add to the litany of praise heaped on the film are my own, mostly geography-related observations. For one, it appears that Gotham is both a city and a state (or perhaps a city-state) since all of the cars in the movie had Gotham licenses plates. These license plates look very similar to those of the State of Illinois, which leads me to my second observation - Gotham City looks a lot like Chicago in this movie. As it turns out, most of the movie was filmed in Chicago. I thought it was kind of strange, since I had always assumed that Gotham City was a synonym for New York City, but as it turns out, the real-life location of Gotham has been a subject of considerable debate for quite some time. This isn't a case of slopping filmmaking however, Christopher Nolan, the director of the Dark Knight, deliberately used Chicago as the prototype for the Gotham City of his movies. Finally, (mini spoiler alert) I thought that scene at the beginning of the movie where the Joker shows up at a meeting of Gotham's criminal underground was a subtle reference to the 1960s Batman movie, but I'm not sure if that's something that a director like Nolan, who has succeeded brilliantly at rescuing the Batman franchise from its descent into camp and idiocy in the late 90s, would even want to do.