I'll Talk About Drinking Later, I Promise

Caught up with Rent and Capote this weekend. I tend to want to agree with the good folks at the A.V. Club about the former, which I think is actually more telling as a generational stance than a critical one. I shouldn't have been surprised that several older, more established/establishment critics, such as A.O. Scott, Owen Gleiberman, and even J.R. Jones, took the "yeah, it's cheesy, yeah, it's Disneyfied and reductive, but it still put a lump in my throat and won me over in spite of myself" cop-out instead of excoriating it for the completely uninteresting waste of time and talent it so clearly is. I was thankful, then, to find Nathan Rabin had as little patience for the soured milk in this time capsule as I did, which I'm going to chalk up, in a flailing belly flop of probably faulty logic, to the fact that we're younger and closer in age to the characters and have a more visceral memory of both the era in which the show is set and the heyday of the musical itself. Somehow that proximity seems to allow for a clearer perspective on where it went oh so wrong and a willingness to call it like we see it.

I guess I just have a hard time letting this movie slide by with a shrug, despite the fact that I was never really a Renthead back in the day. I just love musicals so much, and they're such a huge part of me and will probably always inform a great deal of my musical and artistic tastes, and I want, and expect, so much from them that I feel personally let down when they don't live up to my expectations, or, even worse, do live up to the cliched expectations of what a musical is "supposed" to be (cheesy, overwrought, culturally irrelevant, etc.). Not to mention that, in a world where the very nearly perfect stage-to-screen translation exists in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, there's just no fucking excuse for a movie musical—especially a moderately rock 'n' roll movie musical—not to have a healthy dose of self-awareness, formally. I think part of what subconsciously galled me most about the whole thing was its increasingly nested levels of abstraction: a movie based on a musical based on an opera using most of the original Broadway cast members playing characters a good decade younger than they are, filmed in the mid '00s but written in the mid '90s and set in the late '80s, on a San Francisco soundstage version of a New York milieu that doesn't really exist anymore. In another, more capable director's hands, this project could have gone to some thrillingly Brechtian places with a few meta gestures here (without resorting to the goofy "we're putting on a show in the desert" thing that Jesus Christ Superstar does), but Columbus, big shocker, simply wasn't up to the task.

(Amusing sidenote: on the brown line platform at Randolph and Wabash around 7:30 on Thanksgiving evening, a bunch of young DePaul students were keeping us all warm with how much they were flagrantly flaming in their discussion of appropriate lip gloss for the cold air and whether they should see Rent or the new Harry Potter movie later that night. The train eventually pulled up and an upper middle class, upper middle aged white lady who had been quietly sitting by herself on a nearby bench the whole time meekly offered to one of the boys as we were all stepping into the same car together, "oh, I saw Rent on stage when it was here in Chicago." Ha! Classic. That exchange totally made my night.)

On the complete other side of the tonal spectrum, I admired Capote for its restraint. I liked that there were no big, obvious Oscar moments, that the score was both fairly spare and used minimally—and never overly ham-fisted when it was—and that the acting was nicely nuanced and not necessarily splashy in the usual biopic way. However, having never read In Cold Blood, I don't feel like I have much more to say about it.

Finally saw Andrew Bird perform live for the first time this weekend and was every bit as wowed as I expected to be. BAK said she was disappointed that it was a relatively low-energy show, but, having nothing to compare it to, I was just blown away. Any performer who can captivate an audience so intensely and so thoroughly is clearly something special. Each song he played from Mysterious Production instantly became my favorite song from the album, at least until he played the next one, and I don't think I've ever yelled louder at a relatively demure show than I did at the end of "Fake Palindromes," which was just impossibly awesome. Bird somehow seems to burn a little more cleanly as a human; I get the sense that he's probably a vegan and most likely has come close to levitating a couple of times during what I imagine to be his early morning yoga and meditation regimen. All this is to say: the focus, my God, the focus. He actually walked by me at the end of the show as I was on my way to the bathroom, and I was so breathless with excitement I could barely force enough air out of my lungs to croak "brilliant show" at him. Which, right after I said it, immediately felt as pointless and irreducible as telling the Eiffel Tower that it is certainly is a pretty structure.

Oh, the tragicomic Romeo and Julietness of it all! The headline says everything you need to know: Teen with Peanut Allergy Dies After Kiss. (Note also that the URL defines it as "canada_deadly_kiss".) Kinda awesome in its own sweetly sad way. That poor kid is going to need so much therapy.

Get ready to have some strong opinions about this, one way or another: Dating Without Kundera—Milan, that is (via mimi smartypants).

Now for the Liz Armstrong portion of the post: and then I got really drunk last night and fell down. Big love to the Pimp Ninja, who once again was responsible for getting me out for a fair bit of alcohol-related mischief on a school night.

Happy Bowieday

Two David Bowie-related links in one day? He really is omnipresent:

David Bowie's Area (thanks, Nora Rocket—you've excelled with the phallic links this week).

Bowie joins the cast of Christopher Nolan's new movie, playing Nikola Tesla (via Pink Is the New Blog)! Sounds like it has the potential for much awesomeness.


"Well, let’s just say I usually take a break from my pro-life policies on Thanksgiving day...." (Thanks for the picture, Lisa Ro.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It's Also Björk's Bjïrthday

Music for Robots freaks out about the goddamn fucking awesomeness of The Long Winters' "Ultimatum" today. My breath actually caught in my throat a little bit when I was scrolling through my live bookmarks this morning and saw the words "my arms miss you, my hands miss you" pop out at me. Good to see that someone else is with me on this.

Let's welcome pin.monkey.press to the sidebar, shall we?

You've gotta be kidding me. (Thanks, Nora Rocket.) What, no "ribbed for her pleasure" option?

Local photographer Johnny Knight has a cute series of photographs called Her Special Day, showing brides doing unbridelike things. My favorite, as many of you will probably guess, is the graffiti bride, though the oven bride and the pickup bride are pretty awesome, too. (Thanks, Lisa Ro.)

Ladies and germs, I've found my blog-brother. I was googling something or other a few days ago and stumbled upon—wait for it—"You're Tacky and I Hate You: Where the Streets Are Paved with Cock." Are we talking best ever or best ever?!

I swear to God, if you go see Walk the Line, you will preface every sentence that comes out of your mouth for at least the next 24 hours with "Hi...I'm Johnny Cash" in a nice basso profundo rumble. You will also likely want to have nothing but cigarettes and beer for your next meal.

Big, big love goes out to my best girl on her birthday today.

Dandelions Induce Smooches

Leave it to The Believer to make me give a damn about popular countercultural artists I generally have no interest in. September's interview with Sarah Silverman and this month's interview with Devendra Banhart lured them both out of their respective brands of skewed preciousness that usually bug the crap out of me, helping me understand a little more readily what so many people find so appealing about them. There was a delicacy in Sarah's discussion of the mechanics behind her humor that pleasantly undercut the thick coating of ironic narcissism and self-satisfaction that I just can't get beyond in her naughty girl persona (her calling Rushmore "a perfect movie" certainly elevated my opinion of her as well), and Devendra temporarily dropped the stream of consciousness crazy-talk (he didn't mention yams once!) to quote Miles Davis and lucidly shed some light on his perspective of the different phases he's already gone through as a songwriter. (Side note: did everybody else but me know that he was born in 1981? I'm usually not the kind of person to get all bent out of shape about feeling old, but this knowledge stresses me out. Brutha is the unofficial representative of a whole musical movement, and has been for the past two years or so, and he's only 24? ::sigh::)

I find that once or twice a year I'll get really fired up about some ad campaign either because I love it ("Tito: Enjoy the empanadas and Coke. Love, Mom") or because it annoys me so severely that looking at it everyday in magazines and on El platforms becomes like the pleasureable pain of pressing on a bruise. This season's irritation comes from those Starbucks "it only happens once a year" ads that have started popping up everywhere. Arrrrrrg. It's a clever concept that just went horribly, horribly wrong. It's not bad enough that the corporate appropriation of the indie-annointed style of willfully cutesy-poo monochromatic drawings with delicately elogated limbs (sort of Marcel Dzama meets Edward Gorey) is like the most cloying burnt sugar topping on an otherwise tasty little bit of pastry—no, no, the text has to fuck with your brain's ability to parse the grammar at a glance. I can't tell you how long it took me to resolve the phrase "plants prompt kisses" the first time I saw it on a billboard. It was the first example of those ads I'd seen, so I didn't know what the gimmick was yet, and it was too far away for me to clearly make out the mistletoe the man in the drawing is holding above his head, so I thought that, based on the way the woman is kissing him on the cheek, it meant "drinking a peppermint mocha will make people give you immediate kisses"—plants (Web 11: verb, 'to place firmly or forcibly') prompt (Web 11: adj., 'performed readily or immediately') kisses. In the name of Steven Pinker, I can't believe no one in the Starbucks marketing department would have considered the possibility for misinterpretation here! Sure, it's not like there's an offensive double entendre hidden in the homophone or anything egregious like that, but still, ads live or die in their ability to cut to the chase without too much mental labor. So now, even though I've seen that ad a million times, I still can't help but read both meanings simultaneously, which gives me the kind of dull headache you get from staring too hard at one of those "is it a vase or two people looking at each other?!" optical illusions. And, of course, that headachy association can't help but rub off on all the other sweater/dancing/decorating variations as well. Fleh.

Save Me from Myself!

You know how diabetics and people who are allergic to penicillin have those bracelets with their special medical information on it in case they have health trouble when they're out alone somewhere? Well, I think I need one that says "Do Not Let This Woman Talk to Rock Stars, Ever." I was out at the Devin Davis show last night, having a great time, catching up with newly engaged SC and CP whom I randomly happened to run into, and, just before I ducked out the door to head home, I swung by the merch table to tell Devin how much I love the album. Well, any modicum of coolness or self-possession I may have had earlier in the night flew right out the side of my brain and into the chilly November air. This is not the first time this has happened, kittens. I get all spazzed out and tongue-tied in that moment when I'm finally face to face with some talent I'm digging on, trying to convey my admiration while striving to also be concise, witty, nonchalant, genuine, and unaffected. Granted, standing around the merch table at the end of the night isn't really the time or place to say much more than "good show" or "I like your work," and, what can he possibly be expected to say in response other than "thanks a lot" or "glad you liked it," but still. I'd rather not have to ride the El back home with my Miss Dork Patrol USA sash on display for all to see.

Despite the fact that, by all accounts, it was a relatively creaky show (the sound was pretty ass-tastic), I still had a hell of a good time. I've previously extolled the virtues of the Monday night rock show and this one even improved on the formula by getting me home by 10:15. (It helps when the person you're going to see is the opener for the main act.) Devin is adorable; he looks like a Bottle Rocket–era Luke Wilson, which is to say, kind of lanky and awkward and long-haired and adorable. His band is everything you'd (that is, I'd) want out of a group of musicians assembled to play songs from an album called Lonely People of the World, Unite!—they all looked like the dorky kids with genuine chops I knew in high school band, played the hell out of the material, and weren't afraid to look like they were really having fun doing so. I guess it's hard to be pretentious when the onstage instrumentation includes a maraca with a monkey head, a keytar, and a theremin. They played everything from Lonely People... except "Transcendental Sports Anthem," "Sandie," and "Paratrooper with Amnesia," but included one new song that rocked out in a jaunty 6/8. Their penultimate song was "Giant Spiders," which they started off with—get this—a short percussion jam using shakers and agogo bells and whatnot. How totally dorky is that! And how much did I love it! I had the biggest, stupidest smile on my face during the whole song, and not just because I think it's one of the strongest tunes on the album. Anyway, Devin and his boys put on a great show, and Chicagoans will have another chance to check him out when he plays The Empty Bottle, opening for Rogue Wave, on the 25th.

The Harry Potter Legal Age Countdown Clock: sick, sick, sick. I love it!

There's some really interesting discussion going on in the comments section of this Stereogum post about the continuing popularity of classic rock versus the anticipated long-term musical/cultural viability of today's big indie rock bands.

Fell in Love with a Michel

Boo! Hiss! The bastards finally did it: Arrested Development got canceled. I haven't exactly been keeping up with the new episodes, but I still would count it as one of my favorite shows, based on my love for the first season alone. Let's hope it can survive a Buffy-esque shift to another network, cable or otherwise.

Those of you who know me well know of my obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Giddy would often come home late at night and see the DVD case open on the floor near the television, every bit as incriminating as an addict's dirty needle. The next morning, I usually got a mock-accusing, "Did you watch it again?" to which I, sheepishly, had to reply, "...yes. It's just the only thing I ever want to watch anymore!") Anyway, I only bring that up to contextualize the mind-bending excitement I felt watching Michel Gondry's Director's Series DVD over the past two evenings. What a flipping genius. I'm absolutely enamored of the way he combines dark childhood whimsy, French self-deprecation, a magician's sleight of hand, a technician's precision, and his own obsessive-compulsive repetition of certain themes/images (skeletons and skeleton costumes; trains; multiple, disparate realities impinging on each other until they result in either messy, chaotic havoc or a kind of infinite regression) to create these eminently charming and sweetly melancholy visual poetry bombs. (All this being said, I suppose I should link to the new Stripes video [via Stereogum], which doesn't disappoint.)

When You Believe They Call It Rock 'n' Roll

Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog is only the most recent example of passionate Spoon defenders/apologists/(fuck it) FANS I've been tracking online since my own heart and ears were won over by Britt & Co. earlier this year. Here he talks about seeing them live in NYC last weekend. I've never paid much attention to the lyrics of "The Beast and Dragon, Adored," as it's not really one of my favorite songs on the album, but the way he tied them in to the "recurring theme in the Spoon catalog - 'Believing Is Art'...(Or more simply: 'You Gotta Feel It')" gave me chills. Props.

Personifying sloth with the name "Chad McBro" in the fourth line of the first paragraph here nearly made me choke on my own tongue with the kind of laughter that's half being amused by the turn of phrase itself and half wordlessly acknowledging the right-on truth underneath it.

I wiped out on the sidewalk spectacularly last night. I must have hit a wet leaf or something, I don't know quite what happened, but it's another Fleet-Footed Felus tumble for the record books. I started off walking at a good pace on the right edge of the sidewalk, felt my right heel slip out in front of me, started lurching sideways into the splits, realized I wasn't going to successfully regain my balance, so decided the best thing to do would be to hurl myself toward the berm on the left edge of the sidewalk, where I landed on my back. There was no one around to witness this (I was on a quiet neighborhood street in Evanston after dark), but when I was finally able to compose myself and start walking again, replaying the whole sequence of events made me start laughing uncontrollably for the next four or five minutes. Which made me look even more drunk and insane. Something about seeing my little bundled-up self in my own mind's eye slipping and sliding and stumbling in this ridiculously wide trajectory through space in such a condensed period of time struck me as really, really funny. (No scars to remember it by this time, though.)

Not a Post About John Cusack

Jason Schwartzman is the new John Cusack, just in case you were wondering. I finally had a chance to catch up with Shopgirl this weekend, and in the process of fleshing out a character that was a tad underwritten in the novella, he proceeds to both steal the whole damn movie and create his own updated version of the sensitive, intelligent, and slightly spazzed-out girl-porn archetype that can be traced through Lloyd Dobler all the way back to Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story ("hearth-fires and holocausts!"), and probably even further. Schwartzman comes fully loaded with far more funny little bits of stage business and under-the-radar, hilarious line readings than he needed to. He's endearing as fuck.

Today on Pitchfork: in praise of rock operas. Whereas I'm always glad to see high-concept albums with sustained through-narratives given their due, it's funny to me that the tone of this article is all, "hear ye, hear ye, this is the second coming of the rock opera—you should be thankful we're pointing this out for your benefit." Um, thanks Rob. I'll be sure to get right on my thank-you note after I've stopped listening to DC's Fin de Siecle, and, uh, pretty much everything else I own.

Has anybody else ever been on the brown line with the guy who does the card tricks? I know I've seen him at least once before, but he sat next to me the whole way north to Western during rush hour on Friday, shuffling and bridging and fanning the entire time. I had my earplugs in, so I was fairly successfully able to ignore him, but he eventually got the pretty girl sitting to the other side of him to pick a card, any card. Dude, didn't you get the memo that the only time card tricks are cool are when you're not making a big deal out of them? The more attention you draw to the fact that you're doing one, the lamer it is. Just like impressions. Other humorous things I saw on the El this weekend: a guy reading Rob Gordon's all-time favorite book, Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash, and one of those iPod Nano ads vandalized so that the screen says "Fatboy Slimey" instead of "Fatboy Slim." (You totally can't bust me for referencing Cusack twice in one post. I used the character name for just that reason. Hahaha—catch me if you can, suckas! Quick like lightning!)

¿Que Onda?

This just in from the Department of Where Have I Been for the Past Ten Years:

I've finally discovered Beck.

Since I was a complete musical theater dork in high school who wasn't listening to anything remotely cool or of the era at that point in my life, I missed Odelay when it happened and have consequently spent the greater portion of my late teens and early twenties relatively Beckless. (Except for "Tropicalia," which I fell hard for when Mutations came out. I played it nearly every week on my radio show at WIUS. Good Christ, how I love that song.) I've always known, intellectually, that I would like Beck if I ever took the time to get into his stuff, so I've been happy to accept burned copies of his albums from friends of mine who want to convince me of his greatness. I just stockpiled them in my CD case, waiting for the day when I would feel like making the commitment to him.

Kittens, that day occured last weekend. I don't know what clicked, but all I want to do right now is listen to Beck. I downloaded Guero a day or two ago and it is sooo good. "Missing" will be an easy addition to my end of year CD comp. It's such a joy to listen to an album that's so confidently produced and performed and sequenced. There's no nervousness that there's going to be a clunker hiding somewhere, and there's no stress that I'm going to have to digest something new and undiscovered. It's been discovered, dammit, oh how it has been discovered, and now I just have to sit back and reap the rewards. Hell yes.

Not the Brosnan/Moore Movie; The Van Der Beek/Sossaman One

Hmm. Whereas I'm instinctively appalled when I read about these "Kill Whitey" dance parties (via Brainwashed, which itself is via Tiny Mix Tapes), I can't help but feel a bit concerned that CocoRosie is all of sudden being cast as the representatives of this new breed of so-called post-ironic racism, all based on Bianca Casady's quote in the Washington Post. I mean, yeah, that was a slightly stupid thing to say to a reporter, and, yeah, white trust-fund hipsters in Williamsburg can be just as sexually aggressive as any of the "hard-core" guys at hip-hop clubs (in part because they're protected by the equally biased assumption that white trust-fund hipsters must be safe to get freaky with because, y'know, they're white trust-fund hipsters [hello, did no one see The Rules of Attraction {kidding}]), but it's not like the Casady sisters are the ones organizing those truly abhorrent sounding gatherings. On quite the other hand, however, I find it a whole lot easier to swallow the comment that their new album is just "a collection of willful, calculated eccentricities clumsily juxtaposed with each other," even though I've heard nary a track from it. I suppose I find it easier to sleep at night with my knee-jerk judgment calls about the music as long as I'm giving the humans the benefit of the doubt. Until they give me definite reason to think otherwise. (Related: Gapers Block's post about all the campus trouble caused by U Chicago's "Straight-Thuggin' Ghetto Party." Fleh.)

Saw a hell of a trio of movies this past weekend, and wouldn't you know, they all started talking to each other (I love it when that happens): A History of Violence is a brilliant companion piece to Caché (which of course I saw the week before), and the epically weird The Night of the Hunter (showing, gorgeously restored, at the Music Box) seems like a significant touchstone for History of, a connection I haven't really seen acknowledged anywhere (except for, maybe, this review in German, which my language skillz aren't polished enough to translate at the moment; schade). The wildcard movie was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, whose flabby pomo smugness probably wouldn't have annoyed me as much if I'd not just walked out of that horrifyingly creepy dinner table scene at the end of History of and straight into what felt like a crystal punch bowl full of Robert Downey Jr.'s recently detoxed neurotransmitters. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about contemporary notions of masculinity in crisis, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the ways that Caché and History of are using deeply traditional family structures to deal with this idea of men as the keepers of secrets, men as the catalysts for the fulfillment and perpetuation of tragic destiny. The various implications for the wounds that are transferred onto and modified by the next generation break my heart when I stop to project a governmental metaphor onto them.

After all that heavy shit, I feel like I need some bouncy balls. (Which makes me suddenly remember that I've had two dreams in the past month and a half—the second one last night—about getting an uncontrollable case of the giggles in inappropriate settings. Hmm. Odd. Well, at least it usually puts me in a slightly better mood when I wake up in the morning.)