Judy Collins at Tupelo Music Hall, Salisbury Beach MA 2/21/10

For folks who have even (only) a casual acquaintance with The Great Folk Scare (or folks who have no use for it like Jerry), the name Judy Collins is instantly recognizable, and more often than not probably thought of in tandem with Joan Baez. They were, at a couple of levels, the First and Second ladies of the GFS, and which was which depended a lot on personal taste. I leaned toward Baez myself, but enjoyed Collins very much also.

Watching Golden Agers of The Folk Era (in both senses of "golden age") has become a national pastime lately, what with all the PBS fundraisers with the wheezers of the Wobbly era, and the various tributes to people like Seeger and Baez and Dylan (Scorsese's film on Zimmie a couple of years ago was quite good, I thought), and I have all too often found myself wincing (and whingeing) at the sight of either old farts on the verge of decrepitude croaking out sad echoes of their glory tunes, or groups that have nothing in common with the Scare but their names, totally without connection to the original Kingston Trio or Limeliters, etc. And I recently found myself picking a nit over the fact that - at the age of 68 or whatever it is - Baez's voice seems to have lost a fair amount of the supernatural vibrato that made her such an object of veneration in 1962.

Well, this Judy Collins is the real thing, not a substitute or contractor who bought the right to use the brand for promotional purposes. The billows of silvery hair are as they have been for 20 years or so, the 12-string guitar strumming is pretty much as good as it ever was, and here's where I diverge from some popular opinion, her guitar work has never been distinguished, she limits herself to a journeyman flat-pick strum on the gorgeous signature Martin 12-string; it seems to be more a tool to help her stay on rhythm and something to hold onto than an instrument on which to demonstrate virtuosity. But as I said, it's as good as it ever was, so this is an observation rather than a criticism.

Her voice is absolutely gorgeous, as it ever was. If she's lost any vibrato, it must have been excess to begin with, her tone is crystal clear. She did seem to have a couple of instances of control problems - a crack here or there, and once in a while she seemed to have to sneak up on a note, but no matter, there was more than enough glory in her pipes to justify driving to the beach to watch a 70-year-old remember and re-enact.

More troubling to me was a recurring difficulty with remembering the words to some songs. I assume that when you've sung as many songs as many times as Judy Collins has, there are necessarily some that get relegated to the mind's attic and aren't always right on the tip of the tongue. S'ok, it didn't hurt anything, nobody minded (one thing that was clear from the instant she hit the stage was that - of course - there was no need to win over the audience, we were hers from the outset).

She opened with a couple of Scare standards, Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Ian Tyson's "Someday Soon" both signature tunes for her in the glory days. They were creditable renditions, but rushed, as if (understandably) she wanted to get them out of the way.

She did more chatting & storytelling than she did the last time I saw her onstage, and seemed more comfortable; the jokes were flippant and funny but clearly planned rather than offhand. For me the highlight of the songs was an absolutely rip-it-up rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" with a raucous, rowdy up-tempo piano backing by Russ Walden (her accompanist/music director). She finished with some of the long, slow, meditative stuff that she's done a lot of over the past decades, and which is not my favorite of her work. She gave us the Arlen/Harburg "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" for an encore, and it was perfect.

Kenny White, a NY artist unknown to me, opened and he's a very talented musician and writer. He's also very loud and uses WAY too many words in most of his songs, but check him out, he does what he does extemely well.

I watched "A Serious Man" the other night.

Someone characterized it as "the movie you get to make after you make "No Country For Old Men." Probably true, though having made "Fargo" and "O Brother" didn't hurt either. I suspect no one but the Coen Brothers could have made "Serious Man" because only they wouldn't need to pitch it, and who could pitch "Well it's like the story of Job only in suburban 60s America and funny."

Maybe the point was in fact that the husband in the parable was a mensch, and so what did it get him? Bupkis... but you can bet he went on being a mensch anyway (and his wife went on being a wacko, no doubt) A couple of sources I've stumbled across indicate that the prologue* of "A Serious Man" - according to the Coens - isn't intended to correlate directly to anything in the film itself. It was a faux Yiddish folk tale, concocted by the filmmakers, to get them into the mood for writing the main movie.

I'm damn glad they decided to stick it on the movie, it could have been a throwaway, and I think it adds to the movie quite a bit.

At first I assumed it was directly connected - these people were ancestors of Larry. Then I wondered if they were more emblematic Ashkenazim. Now I dunno what the point was either, especially since it was left unresolved whether the old reb was in fact a dybbuk or maybe the wife was a wacko.

The more I think about it the more I think they were another anecdote in the long history of Yiddish wisdom that finds its outlet (in this film at least) in Rabbi Nachtner's "who knows; who cares" parable of the goy with the letters on his teeth (I loved that - and it only got better when the Adam Arkin character asked Larry about whether the rabbi told him the story of the goy's teeth.)

But it is all those things, as well as sad and disturbing and about as nonjudgmental as only the CoBros can be. The things that beset us aren't mad at us, there's nothing personal really - like Anton Chigur in "No Country" or Gaer in Fargo (or Margie in Fargo, for that matter) it's just the force of nature - the way things are. Shrug it off, move on.

*for those who haven't seen the film it opens with a story in Yiddish, set in an old-country shtetl, with some Ashkenazic Jews, an old reb who might be a dybbuk and a wife who stabs the dybbuk/reb with an ice pick.

I recommend "A Serious Man" a lot; lots of great actors you recognize but can't quite put your finger on like Richard Kind, Adam Arkin and George Wyner.