Every month, Cosmik Debris brings you a ton of CD and record reviews, but the writers manage to find a little time for other pursuits, like reading, going to movies and watching videos. That's where Everything Else In Review comes in.


FILM: Genghis Blues
DIRECTOR: Roko Belic
RATED: Unrated, but contains graphic images of a traditional Tuvan sheep slaughter
Reviewed by Eric Steiner

Genghis Blues has to be seen and heard to be believed. It's the story of San Franscisco bluesman Paul Pena and his remarkable musical journey to Tuva. Genghis Blues is more than a great documentary; it's an inspiring story of one musician's drive and talent to overcome formidable odds to learn more than just a new set of chords or a new song. Six months from now, I hope Roko and Adrian Belic will be at the Academy Awards accepting their first Oscar for Best Documentary.

If the blues is a response to bad times or bad mojo, then Paul Pena's life is a recipe for the blues. Paul lost his wife to renal failure that left him in a six month funk. Paul is blind and can only go one place unescorted: the corner store in his Mission District neighborhood. After cashing a check, a passerby asked him for directions outside the market. Paul turned around, his money was gone.

While sightless, Paul's taught himself how to play a mean blues guitar. He's no slouch as a songwriter either: he wrote the Steve Miller hit, "Jet Airliner." This self-taught bluesman has played the blues with the best, including Johnny Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt and T-Bone Walker.

To keep the blues at bay after his wife died, he discovered the world through an old shortwave radio. As he scanned the dials for music, he settled on a gutteral and unforgettable style called throatsinging, but it took him years to find out what it was or where it came from. Just like horseback riding and wrestling, it's part of the unique culture of Tuva, nestled in the mountains above Mongolia and West of Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal (Siberia, that is). Tannu Tuva was an independent nation from 1921 to 1944, when the Soviet Union annexed it as the Tuvinian Autonomous Administrative Region.

For more than seven years, Pena immersed himself in Tuvan language and music. He did it the hard way, since he had no choice. There were no English to Tuvan dictionaries, only Russian to Tuvan phrasebooks. Remember, Pena's doing all of this without the gift of sight. Paul first had to learn Russian so that he could learn Tuvan.. He'd then translate from Tuvan into Russian and then into Tuvan and back into Russian then English, with an intermediate step to and from Braille with the help of a special machine that would create raised letters in each language on paper.

Along the way, he finds fellow Tuvan enthusiast Ralph Leighton, who's founded a Friends of Tuva club with noted physicist Richard Feynmann. It's a club," Leighton says "that's loose and up for doing crazy things."

For Pena, things turn out to be not so crazy when Paul meets acclaimed throatsinger Kongar-Ol Ondar in San Francisco. Paul impresses Kongar-Ol with his ability to throatsing and speak Tuvan. After trading notes after his show, Kongar-Ol invites Pena to the next National Throatsinging Symposium and Competition in 1995.

That's where Genghis Blues gets magical. We follow Paul and his crew as they navigate post-Soviet Tuva as they help him prepare for the nationwide festival. He's got filmmakers Roko and Adrian Belic in tow, but they're pretty unobtrusive. Paul's friends include some the most unlikely travelers, including a tree-trimmer who's also a recording technician and a Bay Area musical maven from the Pacifica Radio Network. This merry band of 90's pranksters overcome whatever life throws at them with good humor, music and a few cups of the local moonshine called araka.

Watching Paul compete against Tuvans who've trained their entire lives to be in a national competition is worth the trip to the art house theater to see Genghis Blues. Champion throatsinger Kongar-Ol Ondar is his host and treats his guests like royalty. Together for a couple of weeks, they experience traditional Tuvan meals made from a lamb freshly slaughtered before Pena and dirt ribbons carved in the hillside that loosely resemble roads.

The trip, though, is marred by some pretty bad mojo. Paul's also on medication for depression, and during the course of filming the documentary in Tuva, his prescription runs out. Paul's a musician at heart, though. To work through daily life in post-Communist Tuva (remember, this is 1995), he's confronted with bureaucratic logic only the Soviets could invent. The crew needs to get out of Tuva to get Paul home to his doctor, but cannot purchase Aeroflot tickets to get out of Dodge because they are foreigners. His hosts cannot purchase them, since that would be "aiding and abetting" outworlders.

Paul keeps the demons of his depression at bay by doing what he does best: he sings the blues about being stranded in Central Asia. After a while, a solution presents itself that involves a street fight, a Tuvan shaman and more than a few swigs of Tuvan moonshine. Not to mention some more throatsinging with his hosts.

Genghis Blues is a powerful example of one man's ability to triumph over some pretty extreme obstacles. Fair warning: when you're along for the ride on Genghis Blues, it's a rough ride full of cinema verite filmmaking. What Genghis Blues lacks in polished production values, it more than makes up in telling a remarkable story of a remarkable bluesman. I wish Paul could see himself when he accepts that prize at the National Throatsinging Symposium and Competition. He'd be damn proud that he used humor and his musical ability to show that he's a rare talent.

As the closing credits rolled, Paul plays his own version of "You Gotta Move" on an old, battered National guitar. I'll never hear acoustic blues the same way again after seeing Genghis Blues.

Postscript: Since Genghis Blues premiered, Paul Pena has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. To learn more about the film and the filmmakers, and to contribute to Paul Pena's medical fund, please check out http://www.genghisblues.com.


(C) 1999 - Eric Steiner



BOOK: Gruhn's Guide To Vintage Guitars
AUTHORS: George Gruhn & Walter Carter
PUBLISHER: Miller-Freeman Books, Paperback, 581 pages
Reviewed by DJ Johnson

George Gruhn is a respected authority on vintage guitars, and this book seems to be about as complete as can be. Understand up front that this isn't a trip down nostolgia lane for the casual, non-collecting guitarist, but rather a detailed, itemized list of every essential statistic on almost any guitar you can think of. We're talking which year's model had which inlay, which one had that brand of tuning heads, and which one was made with koa back, sides and top. Not exactly something that most normal people would curl up in front of the fire to read. As a tool for collectors and others that just want to know what they have in their closet, it's downright dyno. And for those of us who obsess on the instrument and all its minutia, well... it is a great book to curl up in front of the fire with.


(c) 1999 DJ Johnson



FILM: Eyes Wide Shut
DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick
STARS: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Sydney Pollack
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes

So is Eyes Wide Shut the kind of sexy thriller that Brian De Palma only wishes he could make or is it just another Hollywood excuse for making soft porn?

Everyone is driven by sex in this movie, except for our doctor hero, played by Tom Cruise, who seems to be more driven by curiosity than lust. Cruise is probably the weakest thing about this movie. He's still sporting the same tousled hair he had in Top Gun, Rain Man and Days of Thunder. Playing a successful doctor here you'd think that he'd have a little more conservative look. It's a small gripe though; he has to look fetching enough to get his share of passes in the movie. Anyway, director Stanley Kubrick is the reason I came to see it.

Our boyish hero's faith in his wife, played by Nicole Kidman--his real-life wife--is shaken one night after a party. They smoke some pot together, and she confesses to him that she has lustful feelings for other men. She drives home the point by relating her fantasizes about a Naval lieutenant she met only briefly, but would have surrendered to without hesitation. His world is rocked. The same night, at an emergency house call, The patient's wife makes a play for him. On the way home he has an encounter with a lady of the night. Nothing happens, but by the next day a fantasy of his wife screwing the Navy man has taken firm possession of him. Late the next night, driven by his curiosity and a series of chance encounters, he finds his way to an incredibly classy orgy.

Why don't I ever get invited to parties like this?

Maybe this movie was all originally an excuse to have beautiful women disrobe for "screen tests." Can you hear Kubrick's "casting director" on the phone saying, "C'mon over, Yvonne, and bring all your friends, we're making a movie!" How does something like this get made without the crew getting too distracted by their woodies? "Take 69. And keep the lighting steady this time guys!" Ain't nobody with Eyes Shut on this set. Or in the audience.

Indeed, Kubrick makes us all into voyeurs. But there's also plenty of fish-out-of-water tension when something goes terribly wrong at the upper crust sex ritual. The doctor is found to be an imposter and his life is forfeit. Or were they just going to make a plaything out of him? He spends the rest of the movie trying to find out what the hell happened to him.

Kubrick handles the tension as well as anything Hitchcock ever did. It's beautifully, baroquely shot and the soundtrack ranges adeptly from single piano notes to symphonic heights. I haven't quite decided if there's some meaning in the movie deeper than being a study in sex habits of the stratospherically rich. No question that it keeps your interest, though, like all of Kubrick's work. Too bad it's his last movie; they'll be talking about this one for years. And wearing out more than a few videocassettes of it.


(C) 1999 - Rusty Pipes