Ornette Coleman’s death prompts a dramatic resurrection
Among the people at the bar in 1959 when the jazz revolutionary Ornette Coleman played his historic engagement at the Five Spot in New York was Charley Gordon, then a political science student who would have rather been a trumpet player. He worked that episode into a play, as yet unproduced. Coleman's death this week brought the play out of a desk drawer. This is a scene from A Different Drummer. SCENE 1
A nightclub, jazz playing in the background. Rich and George and a total stranger are sitting at the bar. Rich is drunk, talking to the Total Stranger. RICH You know the way I am, first thing I notice is the drummer. But I don’t know who this guy his. He’s just driving like crazy. The horn stuff is odd, but I’m just fixating on him. I’m trying to figure out who this drummer is. I’m 20 years-old, right, and I read Downbeat, cover to cover, memorize the fucking thing. But I never heard of this guy, never saw his picture. I know ...
Interview: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon found new life in death
The director of the Sundance standout Me and Earl and the Dying Girl says he made his first 'personal movie' and it changed him as a filmmaker, and as a man, writes Katherine Monk
By Katherine Monk
“When you suffer a deep loss, you can dive into it and hide – and I had suffered a deep loss,” says Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, the director of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, opening in theatres this weekend but already one of the most buzzed-about movies of the year thanks to its double-barreled win at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Gomez-Rejon says he needed to process the loss of his father, but he couldn’t do it head-on. He needed to get some distance, and he found it in the 2013 young adult novel written by Jesse Andrews dealing with two teens who befriend a classmate diagnosed with cancer. “I’d rather not talk about the personal side too much. But the film is dedicated to my father. It’s a private thing that I made public and I don’t regret it because we are ...
The road to rebellion smells like peppermint
Rebel, rebel, I love you so... and so does everyone else, which means the last bastion of unfiltered anti-authoritarianism is the menthol cigarette, writes Charley Gordon
By Charley Gordon
It’s hard to be a rebel these days because these days you can do anything you want and nobody bothers you. Even doing something as formerly controversial as changing your gender lands you in a warm bath of tolerance and encouragement. Also you can wear anything you want and say anything you want, so long as you do it anonymously on the Internet. So to be a true rebel you have to do anything you don’t want to do, wear anything you don’t want to wear and say anything you don’t want to say. Most people don’t see the fun in that. Still, there are people who want to be defiant and need things to defy. Now, this isn’t hard to find in repressive dictatorships, but around these parts most people’s taste in defiance doesn’t run quite that far. Would-be rebels among us would like to ...
