Out In The Mountains : Arts

    I learned in a college acting class that the secret to being a good liar is to be specific: the more detail you include in your lie, the more credibility it has.
Here I Am, advertised as "A Musical Personal Ad" written and performed by aspiring 27-year-old New York writer-actor David Sisco, is a song cycle of gay discovery, coming out, and search for romance. The navel gazing and self-absorption of its central character suggests a Sondheim-esque sensibility, and a couple of the better numbers ("Here I Am!" and "Uncle D") would not seem out of place in Sondheim's Company.
     But Here I Am lacks the verbal dexterity and wordplay that distinguishes Sondheim. And perhaps more to the point, David Sisco isn't a good liar. He shortchanged his opportunities to illuminate universal themes and generate an emotional response in his listeners by relying on worn stereotypes to tell his story. Almost nothing about his songs is fresh, clever, or intellectually engaging. For example, the travails of a fifth grader ("Fifth Grade") are so inconsequential to an adult gay man (can you believe it? - he was the last one picked for gym!!) that the song is tiresome. Sisco strains to wring grand emotions from what are, in retrospect, minor slights.
     Sisco is a pleasant singer, and demonstrates deft dynamic sensitivity, but he was not gifted with a compelling voice. He unfortunately demonstrates a lack of awareness of his vocal limitations with a disastrous foray into blues singing with "Baby, You'd do Right by Me" for which he just doesn't have the chops. In a cringe-inducing performance, he ultimately screams much of this number.
     To be fair, there are some good ideas underlying a couple of the pieces. I found "Beautiful Boy," a song about the beautiful boys Sisco has loved (as opposed to the pretty boys), the beginning of an exploration of a lovely concept, but it too quickly dissolves into insipidity. Along with "Here I Am!," the only truly successful number in the song cycle is "Uncle D," in which Sisco recounts how he adores his sister's daughters but longs for children of his own. This number communicates the specificity it needs to feel honest and real.
      The complete song cycle Here I Am won the Alex Libby Award for Best Musical Performance for its presentation in September, 2002 at the Columbus National Gay & Lesbian Theater Festival. It may be more interesting in a live performance, but I am not inclined to give this CD another spin.

The movie “Latter Days” has an exhilarating pedal-to-the-metal start: the picture opens on a handsome Los Angeleno primping for a night out. There's a knock at the door, which he answers with an aggressive offer: "I'm going to give you the blow job of a lifetime." The guy at the door is helpless against this lean and hungry shark, but it's not until after his - um - mind is blown that he clarifies that he actually has come by to take the shark’s female roommate out on a date. This case of mistaken identity both provides for the immediate establishment of characters and promises a lusty sex romp to follow.
From that charged up opening, though, this pleasant film mellows out and takes a softer route to its conclusion. Appropriately enough, the soundtrack is true to this structure. The first cut is energetic electronica - good driving music. Subsequent tracks, though, generally mellow out, some of them dangerously close to being numbingly derivative - at their worst, almost even porn-video banal.
One sweet exception stood out for me: a love duet entitled, "If I Could Be With You Now" is charmingly performed by two men, Dean Nolen and Bobby Joyner. It's not so much that the song is exceptional, but having the two men trade off lines in the kind of power love ballad that once dominated the top 40 pop charts helps to enliven this otherwise listless soundtrack.

Bennett Law listens to sound tracks in Bethel.

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