Breeders are back for twentieth anniversary of LAST SPLASH
Webster Hall
125 East 11th St. between Second & Third Aves.
Thursday, December 19, and Friday, December 20, $30, 8:00
www.websterhall.com
www.breedersdigest.net
www.speedyortiz.bandcamp.com
Twenty years ago, indie supergroup the Breeders exploded onto the scene with their second full-length album, The Last Splash, which featured the monster hit “Cannonball,” reaching platinum heights propelled by an ultracool video directed by the impossibly hip team of Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon. Consisting of bassist Josephine Wiggs from the Perfect Disaster, drummer Jim Macpherson, and twin-sister guitarists Kim and Kelley Deal from the Pixies (Kelley replaced original Breeder Tanya Donelly of the Throwing Muses, who went on to form Belly), the band created a punchy, infectious sound that influenced such other groups as Nirvana, whom the Breeders opened for on a European stint. The Breeders are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Last Splash, which also includes such gems as “Invisible Man,” “Flipside,” “No Aloha,” and “Drivin’ on 9,” with the release of the deluxe box set LSXX (4ad, May 2013) and a tour in which they are playing the record in full. They’ll be doing so at Webster Hall on December 19 & 20, adding all of 1990’s Pod as well. But be sure to get there early, because you won’t want to miss Northampton’s Speedy Ortiz, a band whose music evokes the heyday of the Breeders.
Speedy Ortiz will open Breeders shows at Webster Hall (photo by Noe Richards)
Named after a street-gang punk in Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics, Speedy Ortiz is currently on the road in support of its debut album, Major Arcana (Carpark, July 2013), a ten-song treat in which the band is constantly changing tempos and volume, offering tantalizing surprises every step of the way. Guitarist and lead singer Sadie Dupuis writes the music first, then adds lyrics that fit into her shifting melodies. “Was it the teeth or my tongue that said / ‘Go shut your lips, let us take a rest’? / Oh, my mouth is a factory / for every toxic part of speech I spew,” she begins on “Tiger Tank,” adding, “Oh, my face is a label / to convey how very awfully I’m doing.” In its short three-year history, Speedy Ortiz hasn’t been doing awfully at all, releasing the cult hit “Taylor Swift” (“Blood-shaking, clot-making viper that feeds on a mouse / Poaching the eggs of the snakes that I slayed in the South), an EP called Sports that includes songs about basketball, indoor soccer, and curling, and the speaker-rattling Major Arcana and have the EP Real Hair, featuring “Everything’s Bigger,” scheduled for early 2014, reteaming them with Pixies producer Paul Q. Kolderie, who worked on the “Taylor Swift” / “Swim Fan” single. Dupuis, shredding guitarist Matt Robidoux, Christmas-born bassist Darl Ferm, and drummer Mike Falcone will be opening for the Breeders at the Webster Hall shows before going off on their first European tour.
Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. (For our 2012 twi-ny talk with Geoff Dyer, the author of Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, which offers quite a unique take on Stalker, go 
Although the screwball romantic comedies are perhaps best loved for their madcap antics and fast-paced dialogue, there was also a fascinating underlying motif to many of them — as America came out of the Great Depression and WWII beckoned, the films tackled the theme of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. George Cukor’s 1938 classic, Holiday, however, looks at the world from a slightly different perspective, pitting the rich vs. the super-rich. Based on the Broadway play by Philip Barry, which was turned into a 1930 film featuring Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Robert Ames, and William Holden, Cukor’s version stars Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made humble financial wizard who dreams of making just enough money to be able to afford to leave the business and go find himself. Following a whirlwind ten-day courtship with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on vacation in Lake Placid, Johnny is shocked to find out that his fiancée is a member of the Seton clan, one of the richest families in America. Julia’s father, Edward (Henry Kolker), is not about to let his beloved daughter marry just anyone, so he puts Johnny through the ringer. Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Julia’s sister, the black sheep Linda (Katharine Hepburn, who was the understudy for Linda on Broadway), who is desperate to live her own life but seems trapped in a fantasy, receiving only marginal support from their brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), who is never without a drink and a cynical word about the family, washing away his failure in cocktail after cocktail. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit,” he advises Johnny. Honest, dependable, and a surprisingly good gymnast, Johnny finds solace from the crazy Setons in his longtime friends, Nick (Horton, reprising his role from the earlier film) and Susan (Jean Dixon), simpler folk with a fine sense of humor and little time for high society. As midnight on New Year’s Eve approaches, the main characters’ lives come together and fall apart in hysterical yet serious ways. Holiday is not your average screwball comedy, instead seeking to take on more personal, psychologically intimate issues and succeeding wildly, continually defying expectations and turning clichés inside out. Grant is as cool as ever, but he adds a seldom-seen vulnerability that adds to his charm. Holiday is screening December 18 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Discreet Charm of George Cukor,” which runs through January 7 and consists of all fifty of the Lower East Side native’s films, from Keeper of the Flame and Heller in Pink Tights to Our Betters and Tarnished Lady as well as such unforgettable classics as Sylvia Scarlett, Pat and Mike, It Should Happen to You, Camille, Gaslight, and many others.
