Favorite Movie Moments of 2006

I don't feel like I saw enough first-run movies this year to be able to confidently make a top-anything list, so, instead, I'll just talk about my favorite moments in the movies this year.

Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine. We're talking the heart of the movie here. Perhaps the best (and unlikeliest?) comedy duo since Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock in Nurse Betty?

Penelope Cruz singing flamenco in Volver. I tend to be really lukewarm on Almodovar (despite which fact, I think I've seen everything he's done since Todo sobre mi madre mainly because Benji likes to bring me along so we can fight afterwards), and, sure enough, I thought Volver was really overrated. Esp. Cruz's pretty much universally lauded performance. But, the few moments when she sings at the restaurant with tears in her eyes is the real deal.

Anything and everything Sacha Baron Cohen touched this year. Yes, including his performance in the otherwise not-my-taste Talladega Nights.

Cameron Diaz's hair in The Holiday. I don't know what movie she was performing in because it certainly wasn't the one I was watching. No matter--her shiny, lustrous perfect shade of champagne blonde hair was so unspeakably beautiful to behold it more than made up for her general lack of character development and successfully held my interest in her plot line even when her acting, um, didn't.

Christian Bale's one-note symphony of a performance in The Prestige. The anonymous commenter to my original post about the flick says Hugh Jackman's performance is superior because he changes. In any other movie, opposite any other actor, I'd be willing to concede the point. But, Bale's sustained monomania is what this movie is about. His psychotic commitment to being right, to being the best, forces him to chisel away at anything that made him human until he's transformed himself into an avatar of his own ideas and theories of magic, until he's a beautiful, noxious flame burning with the fury of self-righteousness and vindication. And, it's even more thrilling because he knows what he's done. He knows that he's trapped himself in a cage of his own devising, and the variations in the "glowering" that he can't prevent from seeping out while he strains with frustration against the bonds of his own creation make him completely pathetic, and the performance absolutely riveting.

Being reminded of why Keanu Reeves belongs in movies in A Scanner Darkly. Somehow the feline elegance of his charisma is allowed to burn more purely when his physical self is abstracted through Linklater's animation technique. I'd never be tempted to defend him as an "actor," but I'm beginning to understand how he's built a career on being used as a vital element of the mise en scene, as the specialest special effect of them all.

Matt Damon in The Departed. Absolutely the best thing I've ever seen him do. There's much to love in this movie (Alec Baldwin commanding all and sundry to fuck themselves, being reminded of just how good DiCaprio--not to mention Scorsese--can be, Mark Wahlberg's hair), but this performance of Damon's has finally lived up to the promise and potential I'd seen in him at least since Good Will Hunting but never felt was completely actualized until now. I get chills thinking about the way he subverts, with such ease and economy, the usual function of that million dollar smile of his when he flashes it, charming as hell, in the first dinner date scene with the psychiatrist. That was the scene that really hooked me into the movie and announced that Damon has officially catapulted himself into the next level as an actor. (Anybody seen The Good Shepherd yet and care to weigh in on his progress?)

The music in Shortbus: the Animal Collective songs, Justin Bond, Scott Matthew, Jay Brannan, the Hungry March Band at the end--I'm getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about all of it. In anyone else's hands, a movie as charming but uneven as this one should have been memorable mostly for all the unsimulated sex and nudity, but JCM's finely honed musical sensibilities somehow create nearly miraculous poignancy out of the chaos without ever slipping into the maudlin. Much like Shortbus the club in the world of the movie, Shortbus the film, imperfect though it may be, manages to sanctify the longing for connection harbored by the misfits and fuckups who come to it with an open, honest heart, while, y'know, humping yr leg.

The actors who universally improve mediocre movies, temporatily redeem bad ones, and provide extra but unlooked for zest to good ones. This year I hail and salute Steve Coogan in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Marie Antoinette, Danny Huston in The Proposition and Marie Antoinette as well, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada. There's really not much that unites them as actors other than their exquisite ease in front of the camera, but that ease is an oasis of good taste for me in the midst of all the over-acting, under-writing, and general actorly attention-grabbing that so often goes on around them. It's not that each of them is not capable of a fair bit of scenery chewing on their own from time to time, but their subtly left-of-center choices, clear respect for the craft, and seeming immunity to hype keep even their boldest performances aligned with the frequency that tickles my brain and delights my imagination.

An early happy new year to you, my kittens! You guys are fucking peaches for sticking with my ramblings, and I look forward to the privilege of being allowed to metaphorically barf all over your computer screens in 2007.

Best Music of 2006

Well, my bebes, as 2006's year-end list-making extravaganza swells to positively orgiastic proportions, I simply cannot withhold the track listing of my third annual best-of mix CD any longer. The physical copies of the disks are slow in coming on account of my lamentable slothiness in getting the liner notes text to Mr. monkey.press for typesetting this month, but, rest assured, they are in the works and will be spectacular. Also, for those of you who have changed mailing addresses in '06, this gives you some extra time to pass the updated info along to me so as to ensure receipt of said disk.

All right. On with it then. Inspired by a conversation I had with CTLA earlier this week, I'll also include hyperlinks, where appropriate/available, to blog posts (and other assorted ephemera) wherein the song, the album, or the band in question is discussed.

I'm calling the comp O Unfathomable Firmament:

1. When You Wasn’t Famous--The Streets
(click for my report on seeing the Streets live at this summer's Intonation Music Festival)

2. We Used to Vacation--Cold War Kids
(click to revisit the play-by-play of my mind being blown after seeing them live for the first time, not to mention the second or third)

3. Province--TV on the Radio
(click for my regret over failing to procure a ticket for their sold-out show at the Metro)

4. Fire Island, AK--The Long Winters
(click for the afterglow of seeing the El-Dubs in concert for the first time in two years or click for the week this track first leaked to the interweb)

5. Déjà Vu--Beyonce, feat. Jay-Z
(it's not my link, but click for the write-up on Green Pea-ness that turned me on to the song in the first place; because I can't stump for him enough, I just have to state for the record that I never attempted to write anything about this song this year because James officially said pretty much everything there is to say about it back in June--please do click through and marvel at the way he matches the energy of B. and Jay's performances on the track with his own performance in pixels)

6. European Oils--Destroyer
(click for the moment I allowed myself to fall completely in love with Destroyer's Rubies)

7. Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont--The Divine Comedy
(click for my review of Victory for the Comic Muse and an early indication that this track would appear on my year-end mix)

8. Ta douleur--Camille
(again, not my links, but click for David Byrne's review of both the Cat Power and Camille shows in NYC this summer or click for the sheer comedy of watching S/FJ go from Camille to Lordi in three sentences)

9. Cowbell--Tapes ’n Tapes
(click for what basically amounts to the blog equivalent of a modest, flirtatious, behind-the-fan geisha-giggle of appreciation for T’nT on the day I first downloaded the album from iTunes)

10. White Collar Boy--Belle and Sebastian
(click for my post-concert reassessment of my entire relationship with Belle and Sebastian's music)

11. Laugh/Love/Fuck--The Coup
(rather than link to my post from earlier this month, click for Boots Riley's more in-depth explanation of what exactly happened during the Coup's nearly fatal bus crash on December 2)

12. Made-Up Lovesong #43--Guillemots
(click for my declaration that listening to this track feels like falling in love or click for a link to the video of the song being performed on Top of the Pops)

13. All the Wine--The National
(click for my post, from almost exactly a year ago, when I first started getting into Alligator or click for my big holy-fuck moment at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer)

14. Weekend--Aloha
(click to read me wank for a bit, after seeing them live one late-summer Sunday, about the "improbability" of Aloha)

15. Requiem--M. Ward
(not my link, but click for the best sentence I've read about M. Ward since Post-War's August release, the sentence that comes closest to articulating my own sentiments about this nearly perfect album: Sean Moeller's assertion that "Ward turns us all slutty, but slutty in love and that’s somehow something to be so happy about")

16. Party Pit--The Hold Steady
(click for a link to the Pitchfork interview that finds front man Craig Finn, presumably with a straight face, citing his desire for Boys and Girls in America to be "a little more Ang Lee" than Separation Sunday)

17. Kick Push--Lupe Fiasco
(click for the early days of my obsession with this track or click for my casual certainty that "this guy's gonna be huge" after catching a portion of his set at Intonation)

18. Wild Sage--The Mountain Goats
(click for the Mountain Goats post that was so cathartic to write that I pretty much haven't wanted to blog at all since then)

19. Bandits--Midlake
(it's not an internal Wrestling Entropy link, but click for my Audioscrobbler, which claims, credibly, that Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther is my second third-most-listened-to album of the year)

20. Sons and Daughters--The Decemberists
(click for the day I didn't receive The Crane Wife in the mail or--perhaps slightly more interestingly--click to read me wax rhapsodic about seeing Colin Meloy play solo again at the beginning of the year)

And there you have it, kittens! Standard hipster fare, to be sure (how many did you guess right, J.Ward?), but it's nonetheless a pretty accurate representation of the stuff that soundtracked my life (or, at very least, my commute) this year. I think a favorite-album top 10 list would probably be overkill at this point, but I will say that Destroyer's Rubies definitely would clock in at number one. It has several things going for it: it debuted early enough in the year to get its hooks in me when I still had a relatively clean mental/musical slate for '06, I didn't get burned out on it after a week of heavy rotation because it was rich enough to sustain repeated listens throughout the year, it had novelty in its favor (I didn't own any of Destroyer's previous albums at that point, and, no, the New Pornos don't count), and I was able to see a good handful of these songs performed live at the Pitchfork Festival. I realize that's all slightly precious, even overly deliberate, criteria, but the mathematics of it feel right. It's still a stunner of an album, one that's still doing a lyrical fan-dance for me, revealing a little bit more of itself to my ears every time I lean in to it with rapt attention.

We've got new Spoon, new Shins, and new National to look forward to in 2007, but it's the previously undiscovered goodies that I'll really be waiting for, without even knowing it.

Treat each other right this weekend, kittens. A happy merry all around.

Music Notes and a Dear, Departed Monster

Squee! There's a new Clientele album in the works! Even though most of their back catalog is available on eMusic, I haven't really explored any of it yet because I'm still pretty stuck on Strange Geometry. It's just such a beautiful collection of songs. I'm not alarmed about the prospect of their doing a "groovy, disco song" at all; it's probably just going to be, like, bouzouki with beats. Sign me up.

"Casino Noel"? Oh, Mikey Skinner. Why are you so effortlessly witty?

The Onion A.V. Club has released their best music of 2006 list, and . . . it locks up pretty neatly with mine. I didn't give Fishscale the fair shake it deserved this year, and Jenny Lewis doesn't really interest me at all, but Midlake, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists--it looks like a typical recently played smart playlist on my iPod!

RIP, Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond kind of bugs the crap out of me, but it's nearly impossible not to love the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein.

The Coup

Chris C. turned me on to the awesome sounds of The Coup earlier this year (their "Laugh/Love/Fuck" from Pick a Bigger Weapon will appear on my year-end best-of mix), and, as many of you may have read on the 'Fork last week, they got into a huge bus crash with touring partner Mr. Lif earlier this month and pretty much lost everything. The rest of their tour, which would have stopped through Chicago last night, has been canceled, and, as professional musicians, that means they will have no way of making a living for the time being. Via S/FJ, I discovered they have a PayPal account now set up to help them defray some of the costs of getting back on their feet. Check their MySpace page for the donation link and for a note from front man Boots Riley about the situation. The proprietress of the House That Entropy Built considers the amount of money she sent a mere pittance in comparison to the great quantity of joy they have brought her this year and wishes these revolutionaries all the best during this challenging time.

Hoboes, Rabbits, and Santa Claus

Get load of the hawt new design at Tiny Mix Tapes.

Are hoboes the new pirates?

The Rabbit is back and full of information about manufacturing humans.

It's been a while since anything has made me laugh as hard as these (via) pictures of kids screaming with fear in the face of Santa Claus. (The humor comes from the same place that got me absolutely hysterical about this last year.)

The P'Fork has hit us with some fantastically great interviews recently. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out what wonderful things Tom Waits and Craig Finn have to say.

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?

Q: Are We Not Snowmen?
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

A: We Are Devo!

(Seen on Leland between Rockwell and Western.)

Ys

Oh yeah. Ys finally really clicked for me this morning. Crying on the train--not just for hangovers anymore!

Speaking of oh yeah: our girl LK recently won the Bellevue Literary Review 2007 Goldberg Prize for Fiction for her story "Presidents, Space, Medical Miracles." It's a wonderfully sweet and sad little gem of a story, and she deserves every bit of recognition she's received for it. (Recognition from Amy Hempel no less!) Please join me in advising her to continue rocking the fuck on.

The Prestige

Gapers Block recently informed me that Jonathan Rosenbaum and J.R. Jones are now blogging for the Reader. Filmies rejoice! Just in time for the year-end smackdowns.

Speaking of J.R. Jones, he got it all wrong in his capsule review of The Prestige. I wouldn't ascribe any "elegant contours," other than those belonging to the distractingly young-looking Jessica Biel, to the utterly lightweight Illusionist. Sure, The Prestige's plot might be cluttered, and, as with Nolan's Memento, I'm not altogether convinced it's going to hold up over repeated viewings, especially when you know what the big reveal at the end is, but I was transfixed by every minute of the movie just the same. I've joked here previously about people who go into ecstasies about what a great actor Christian Bale is, as if they've just discovered what the rest of us have known for about half our lifetimes, but fo rizzle? The man absolutely devours everything (and everyone) around him with this performance. It's shocking how good he is. I mean, I'm about as big a fan of Hugh Jackman as one can be without being an X-Men fan-girl, but Bale is just so, so good, he makes Jackman's performance seem flat and dimensionless by comparison. Michael Caine is really the only actor who doesn't get eclipsed by Bale when they share the screen, and, fair play to him, y'know, seeing as how he's Moykle blaady Cayne and all. Dare we even mention the non-splash that Scarlett Johansson makes, outclassed as she is here? I've carped before about the "jittery informality" (to, embarrassingly, quote myself) of this generation of younger actors, but her lack of poise, especially in her scenes on stage as the magician's assistant, just made me really sad. Why do we no longer expect our movie stars to be able to move with any semblance of grace? Her shoulders were all scrunched and her neck was all giraffey when she was trying to make these grand voila! gestures. It was like she had no control at all over the way she was moving her body through space. And she's held up as a paragon of womanly excellence among screen actors? Whatever charms she possesses (and she can be a fine performer--she was truly winning in Lost in Translation) were just not well suited to even this relatively unimportant role. It was made abundantly clear that she was cast in the film as a gambit to bring a certain demographic of moviegoers into the theater. (This is a bad habit I'd like to see Nolan break before it's too late. From the fierce strength and intelligence of Carrie-Anne Moss and Hilary Swank he goes to the whiny schoolgirl prettiness of Katie Holmes and Johansson?) Anyway, the first entrance of David Bowie as Nikola Tesla alone might have been worth the price of admission, and what would a holiday-season blockbuster be without Andy Serkis? Sure, there are some tonal missteps that tend toward the cheesy and on-the-nose, but, for the most part, the movie is deliciously tense without being jump-out-and-give-you-a-heart-attack scary, and as far as plot complications and sleight-of-hand intrigue go, it more than made up for what I wished The Illusionist had been. And, if nothing else, it's worth it to see in Bale an actor really hitting his stride.

Slate does a noble job of looking into the so-called Pitchfork Effect.

Insofar as I can be said to have heroes or role models of any kind, Betty Comden would certainly have to be one, and I was greatly saddened to read that she died last week. Well, yeah, at age 89, so she clearly lived a long, full life. A long life full of wit and music and movies and the theater and Leonard Bernstein. (If memory serves, my dear MLBO'D actually got to meet both Comden and Green before they died, when she was performing in IU's production of On the Town in the spring of 2000.) Elisabeth Vincentelli has more, and some MP3s to sample, over at The Determined Dilettante.

Sign of the Apocalypse

Sign of the Apocalypse
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

I've been planning this (admittedly stupid) joke for close to a week now. I realize there's little hope that anyone will be as amused by it in its final form as I was by my imaginary version of it, but hey, a girl's gotta try, right?

RIP, Robert Altman

One of the masters has left the building: Robert Altman passed away on Monday night. I, somewhat irrationally, inherited some anti-Altman bias from one of my favorite film professors, but his talent and influence are of course undeniable. The elegiac qualities of A Prairie Home Companion, which I pretty much cried straight through when I saw it this summer, will only become more poignant with time and in their newly revealed context as his final farewell.

Last Week's Movies, This Week's Music

I don't think Shortbus is really all that great a movie, but I liked it a lot just the same. The fact that it was so heavily improv-based made it feel, as many of the reviews have noted, formless and repetitive, but, to its credit, John Cameron Mitchell has a way of bringing out the swoony sappiness without making you feel guilty about it. I was moved to tears right along with the random extra during that final marching-band-
orgy-by-candlelight scene. It was ridiculously over the top, yet ridiculously life-affirming, which might be another way to defend the inclusion of all that un-simulated sex. A lot of it's funny, some of it's hot, but none of it's dirty. As Stephanie Zacharek was right to point out in her Salon review, "I've felt sleazier looking at ads for Captain Morgan's rum." Plus, it just goes to show ya how much we need more gay male filmmakers (who are actually dealing with gay themes and not just trying to pass) because, egad, I can't remember the last time I saw so much wang! It was completely refreshing to see the male form joyfully eroticized on film instead of the passing glances at Ralph Fiennes's artfully soapy d or some twinked-out doe-eyed CW star trying to do "edgy" in a microbudget indie like we usually get. Bring on the autofellatio! Bring on the national anthem being sung into that cute young guy's ass!

Say what you will about Sophia Coppola's cinematic pedigree, she does have some really good taste. After all the hullabaloo about the non-period specific music in Marie Antoinette, I was expecting the tone of the thing to be very Moulin Rouge-ish and zingy (not that that would have been a bad thing, of course, ardent Moulin Rouge defender as I am). But, I was shocked by how quiet so much of the movie was (which may have been an inadvertent side effect of the theater I saw it in; I don't think the sound system was cranked very high anyway). The minimal dialogue, the long stretches of unblinking behavioral observation, the deliberate, heart-on-sleeve bites from Barry Lyndon--this does not a "giddily postmodern" take on the Marie Antoinette mythology make. It's one of the better things I've seen Kirsten Dunst do, Schwartzman continues to impress with his on-screen warmth and comic timing (his delivery of the word "obviously" in the first half hour or so is motherfucking plated in gold), and I don't think you can really ever go wrong getting Shirley Henderson to run around the place, making catty remarks under her breath. Enjoyable, if not exactly life-changing.

This essay/interview with Zach Condon of Beirut is a leeetle wanky, but mostly right on the money. I'm glad to see someone taking him down a few notches, as I, personally, got tired of Gulag Orkestar real fast and think a lot of it was fatigue with the disingenuousness of Condon's cultural appropriation. Not to keep hammering away at the tired (and, let's be honest, slightly unfair) Gogol Bordello comparisons, but Eugene Hutz just has so much more integrity in the way he's bringing gypsy music to the forefront of indie kids' consciousness. He knows what it means, politically, to harness the raw power of that playing style ("IF WE ARE HERE NOT TO DO WHAT YOU AND I WANNA DO, AND GO FOREVER CRAZY WITH IT, WHY THE HELL ARE WE EVEN HERE?") and uses that power for good, not just for good feelings (even though, obvy, the good feelings flow like the finest vodka when Hutz is rocking the mic or the decks). Sure, Condon's got a nice knack for pleasant melodies and the album has some good songs on it, but how much more apparent can his tourism be when he's already anticipating copping from Portuguese folk and Fado on his next album?

We're all enjoying Ys, yes? I'm still thinking about what I think about it, but it's wondrous, heady stuff. And, oddly, it puts me in the mood to listen to Rufus Wainwright. I think a lot of it is due to the Van Dyke Parks connection (he did some arrangements for Rufus's debut), but there's also their similar vocal quality shift from reedy-shrieky on the first album to stronger and mellower on the second.

Ooh, speaking of Rufus, Pitchfork gifted us with a whole passel of news today, including the fact that he's working on an opera commissioned by the New York Met. I've had a hunch that his career would eventually wend that way since around the time I first heard that duet with Antony on Want Two, but I just didn't think that time would come so soon. Kudos to him, and I can't wait to hear the Judy Garland concert CD.

Wang, twinks, autofellatio, Rufus, Antony, and Judy Garland--this is officially the gayest blog post I have ever written.

And, a big happy birthday shout-out (one day early) to my best girl Mary.

RIP Spymaster Wolf

When the time comes, I can only hope my own obit will feature the word "spymaster" as prominently and frequently as it is used here. Somewhere, Colin Meloy is writing a song about this guy right now.

We Voted!

We Voted!
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Handlebar, Handlebar, You Are My Handlebar!

I just got the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in the mail the other day and haven't really had a chance to read anything yet (except the piece on Matt Dillon, which seems oddly spiteful, though perhaps it's just not as gushingly reverent as most glossy magazine profiles I'm used to these days), but this exchange from the Q&A with Andre Benjamin that Stereogum excerpted yesterday cracked me the hell up:

RS: Are you with me on this: "Hey Ya!" is the best song of the twenty-first century? ANDRE BENJAMIN: Jesus. I don't know, man. That could be argued by a lot of people. RS: Can you think of anything better? ANDRE BENJAMIN: No.

Love it. Bitches, seriously, if you are not reading Green Pea-ness on some kind of regular basis, you are missing out on the best kind of celebratory exasperation the MP3 blogs have to offer. He talks a lot of shit about a lot of stuff, but always in service of wildly flipping out about something he loves. He reminds me of the Doc from Deadwood in that way; sphincter perpetually clenched and just barely resisting the everpresent urge to grab some motherfuckers by the throat who don't SEE! DON'T YOU SEE! the beauty and decency that's so readily apparent to his own eyes and ears. James celebrated the blog's first birthday last week with a five-day reappraisal of ten songs that have continued to stand the test of time for him, and, this week, gave us an inspired vision of how our musically inclined grandparents might have reacted to the shit-hot new singles of their era. Go visit now. "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" is all that's been in my head for the past three or four days. Sing it with me! "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" I can watch segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website or YouTube, I can rent TV on DVD from Netflix, and I can read wonderfully funny blow-by-blow wrap-ups of the VMAs from S/FJ and Fluxblog. Why would I ever pay good money for cable? It is revealed that Chicagoist loves Great Expectations every bit as much as I do. Yay! We've all seen Sufjan's facial hair by now, yes? I love how something as completely insignificant as a newly grown handlebar mustache has become this major issue being discussed all around the series of tubes. On quite the other hand, here's something actually worthy of being discussed all around the series of tubes: Robert Christgau got fired from the Village Voice. And now for our weekly requirement of cute-but-also-funny animal related items: bunnies yawning (via the Birdchick Blog) and Chicago's own cat circus (thanks, LK).

Borat's Cultural Learnings

I've started to think that getting ready for the Borat movie is like training for a marathon. At first, you can only do a little bit at a time because it hurts, it motherfucking sears every cell in your body, but you're hoping you're going to have built up enough endurance to go the distance on the big day.

It took LK and me, oh, I think about five months to get through the two first-season DVDs of Da Ali G Show, just because, unlike other HBO shows we've loved devouring on DVD, even at only 20-30 minutes to an episode, we can't handle much more than that in one sitting. We're terrified that the movie, at 80+ minutes, is going to wreck us emotionally, that we're not going to be able to do anything else for the rest of the day. However, much like a nice, relaxing colonic irrigation, I think it'll ultimately be worth it.

After we finished the "Belief" episode of Ali G last night and then tried to continue watching regular television, everything looked so disgusting and decadent. Under his various guises and with his various alter egos, Sacha Baron Cohen is utterly masterful at not only exposing odious interpersonal behavior and social blind spots but also at formulating incisive metacritical commentary on the most noxious aspects of televisual media by reflecting them back to us all engorged and pus-filled with their own vapidity. (And, not only televisual media--just look at the way he's exploding/exploiting the low-rent tendencies of the internet with his chintzy official home page and our Amurr'can perception of the garishness of non-Putumayo-ized "world music" with the straight-out-of-the-flea-market graphic design on the soundtrack CD.)

I only know the most basic talking point soundbites about Cohen's career pre-Ali G, but it seems that, with his gift for physical comedy (OMG, I'm still laughing at the bit [NSFW], beginning around 3:30, where he's learning how to throw a lasso and, while he's swinging the loop above his head with one hand, ends up tossing the straight end of the rope that's in his other hand) and inspired gibberish ("wahwah wee-wah!"), he surely could have settled for being a handsome, slightly daffy Britcom star with some quality supporting roles in Hollywood in the Jack Davenport or even Hugh Laurie mode. But no, in a prime example of the most noble aspects of the court jester tradition, he's making us laugh at stuff that would be untellable in any other idiom. He's pushing (stretching? perforating?) every imaginable limit--sexual, racial, cross-cultural--forcing us into a headspace that fundamentally alters the way we consume pop culture artifacts after we've peered at the world through his bullshit filter for a while.

And, what's perhaps most shocking is how unexpectedly jarring it is to be reminded of what we usually fancy we already know, of the high level of toxicity in so much of the crap that we more or less voluntarily subject ourselves to, visually. The cooking shows looked foul and vaguely sexualized with their close-ups of glistening dough being manhandled by mild-looking public access chefs; all the people on sitcoms looked ugly and stupid and mean. In a particularly perverse turn of events, the only thing I could bear for any length of time after we took the DVD out of the machine was the last fifteen minutes or so of The Shining dubbed into Spanish, which, of course, was no less misanthropic, but, compared to the subconscious sleaze permeating the best of a random Sunday night's rabbit-ear offerings, at least Kubrick's worldview is artfully hateful. (Plus, there was something indescribably delightful about hearing the Spanish-language actor voicing Jack Torrance bellowing "Danny! ¿Donde estas?" as they chased each other around the labyrinth.)

So, all hail Sacha Baron Cohen for giving us a perspective that's painfully necessary as a stiff corrective to the vast quantity of shit we're being inundated with on a daily basis that's necessarily painful. If he can keep the social satire up at such a deliciously, deliriously high level, maybe he'll be unironically invited to host the White House Correspondents' Dinner next year. A girl can dream.

Cold War Kids (Live at the Hideout)

(My humblest apologies to drummer Matt Aveiro for not including him in the set of pictures above. My camera's too shite and my skillz with it are too weak to be able to zoom back behind the drumset and get any kind of picture in the low concert lighting. Stay gold, though, Ponyboy--you're a hell of a fucking drummer.)

Went to the Hideout with LK on Saturday to see the Cold War Kids for the third time in five months. I was proud of these young pups for nailing their debut as headliners, and even more proud of the audience for being so loving and supportive. "Hang Me Out to Dry" and "Saint John" are turning out to be fantastic communal shout-alongs (lead singer Nathan Willett was actually harmonizing with us during the "Hang Me Out to Dry" set-closer before the encore), and when Aveiro's snare broke as they were kicking into "Expensive Tastes," a girl in the front row started clapping where the snare hits should have been, and about half of the rest of the crowd picked up on it and carried the rhythm until the drums were fixed. It was a sold-out show, and this crowd wanted to be there. I was up near the front, so if the indie rock salute (as John Roderick once brilliantly called it: arms folded across one's chest, weight back on one's heels, body motionless and face expressionless) was being given near the back, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway, but, regardless, I tend to think there probably wasn't all that much hipster posturing going on that night. It takes no little effort to get to the Hideout, more effort than it's worth to show up simply to be snide. The band was feeling the love for Chicago, too. They say plenty of nice things about the venue over at their official site (scroll down to the entry dated 10-20-06), sweetly calling it one of "the most vibey rooms in this country." The fact that they just walked right in the front door before the show, like a little gang of exquisitely relaxed housecats who'd just woken up from an afternoon nap on a warm windowsill, and wandered around, chatted some folks up, and grabbed some drinks speaks volumes to the Hideout's atmosphere and to the band's real-deal-ness.

The first time I caught the band, when they opened for Tapes 'n Tapes, I was mesmerized by Willett--his voice, his presence, the weird way he was banging on his chest like a conga drum. The second time out it was all bassist Matt Maust, all the time. Last weekend, I couldn't take my eyes off guitarist Jonnie Russell. Brutha's got it going on. His wiggly guitar sound is, like, the meat of the whole band. Everything is built around what he's doing. Their songs are extraordinarily percussion-driven, to be sure, but he's creating the whole vibrant midrange that allows the drumming and maraca-rattling and bass-farting to be as striking as they are. He gives the jams a dock to swim away from and back to. And he does this all without sacrificing an ounce of excitement in his own playing. Not to mention that he can sit in on piano when Willett just wants to rock the mic and provides perfect, unassuming, unobstrusive falsetto vocal harmonies. Amazing. My attention span is pretty short these days, and I should be sick of these guys by now. But I'm not. As Sean Moeller remarked when he had the band 'round the Daytrotter headquarters earlier this summer, "most bands are fucking lucky to have one dude with charisma" and yet they, incredibly, have four. Guess I have to make the effort to see them live at least one more time to finally give Aveiro his due.

More pics over on my Flickr page.

Until I Know What I Think

Did y'all see the Dean's interview in Popmatters this week (via)? Everyone and their barista has been excerpting from this quote, but it's just so damn smart, I can't resist doing the same:

"I am a good critic in that I don’t write about things until I know what I think of them. For me, it’s the essential part of my writing....
My tastes don’t evolve; they broaden....
There’s a record on in my house 12 to 18 hours a day. It’s so I can process it. It’s about acclimating my body-mind continuum, which means that the acclimatization process will have occurred so when I concentrate later I have a better notion of what I think."

That just feels so sensible and so sane in the midst of all the rest of the...chatter.

Speaking of chatter, the less said about Pitchfork's review of the Cold War Kids album today, the better. Aside from the fact that the reviewer's ad hominem attack against bloggers seems really, really whiny and perhaps would have been more appropriate to a LiveJournal entry than a respectable record write-up in a respectable web mag, it's also just, huh? I dig the criticisms to a point, but monolithic melodies? What does that even mean? Cleaner and annoyingly louder, sure maybe, but preachy narratives? Preachy? Your guess is as good as mine. The invaluable Cindy Hotpoint has more to say, better than I can say it right now. And anyway, dudes sold out their gig at the Hideout this weekend, so I'd wager they're not really crying into their maracas all that hard. LK and I will be there, loving every sweat-filled minute of it.

Fo rizzle, why do the stingrays hate us and want us to die? (Write your own "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Stab Your Ass" joke.) OK humans, group huddle over here: best to not anger them any more than we apparently already have, so for the LOVE, please nobody put one on a treadmill or make fun of them on Ugly Overload. Agreed? Agreed.

Ben Folds 'n' Blondes

There's so much Ben Folds love floating around the series of tubes this week I can hardly stand it.

I'm not sure I buy Eef Barzelay's reading of Ben's cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit" (at Said the Gramophone), but I fully support his recommendation that we "reflect on this song and why Ben Folds is generally dismissed and sometimes loathed by the indie rock illuminati."

Similarly dismissable Weird Al Yankovic jokes (at the Onion AV Club) about how he and William Shatner lower Ben's street cred.

It's not from this week, alas, but I recently snagged Kottke's link to this video of Ben covering "Such Great Heights" live for some Australian TV show. Sure it's gimmicky, but it works.

In other music news--squee!--the arrival of the Long Blondes' debut full-length Someone to Drive You Home is imminent! Thanks to James Green Pea-Ness, listening to their "Fulwood Babylon" has bordered on an obsessive-compulsive behavior with me since the summer. (Seriously, the spoken-word interlude alone is enough to send me into seizures of glee, never mind oh-ohhhhhhh! that bass line.) I can't wait to see the rest of the goodies these kids have up their sleeves.

Here's a good Neutral Milk Hotel joke worth a giggle for the indie nerdz. Or, for pastry nerdz, too, I suppose.

The Long Winters (Live at the Subterranean)

Kittens, have you rocked out recently? Have you raised a glass (or three) of whiskey to your lips and pogo'd yourself sweaty and screamed along to the harmonies you knew and shouted out requests not like a douchebag but like a person who figured that was the best way to let the band know that you love their work and are thankful for what their work has meant to your life and smiled so hard that you didn't even realize how much your jaw hurt when it was suddenly 1:30 AM and the bouncers were kicking you out onto the street with guitar strings and poetry still ringing in your ears? If you haven't, you should. And if John Roderick and his Long Winters aren't the band that would elicit that kind of reaction in you, then find one that will and check for local tour dates on their MySpace page, because, goddamn, you need to feel as good as I felt on Friday night at the Subterranean. It was the kind of good feeling that makes you think irrationally hopeful thoughts about music saving the world one indie rock bacchanal at a time, the kind of good feeling that you can't even quite put your finger on after the fact because you were too busy enjoying it while it swept you up and carried you downstream.

I'd, of course, been looking forward to the Long Winters show for weeks, but idly, not altogether consciously. But when I dialed When I Pretend to Fall up onto my iPod on the way home from work on Friday night and realized, holy shit, it's been well over two years since I've seen these guys in concert but now I'm mere hours away from hearing all my favorite songs live and warm and loud, I got all giddy, all too-excited-to-sleep-
on-the-night-before-your-birthday goofy. And, woof, was I ever rewarded for those years of patience. They played everything I wanted them to play (well, with the notable exception that I don't think they did anything from The Worst You Can Do Is Harm--"Carparts" or "Copernicus" might have been nice), but a rock-fucking-solid representation of stuff from the new one and When I Pretend to Fall. Which is not even to mention, of course, "The Commander Thinks Aloud" (a definite crowd-pleaser in its incredibly poignant way) and set-closer "Ultimatum," in its acoustic ballad incarnation. John joked, "when's the last time you went to a show where the band played an all-request Friday?" and if that really was an all-request set, man, that's a testament to the wisdom of crowds or some shit. Or, a testament to all the hipsters liking the same songs that I do. But, I'd actually prefer to think of it as a testament to this sentiment from John's recent interview in PopMatters:

"[Roderick] claims it’s important part of his music that it 'do work' in other peoples’ lives. 'There are songs out there that make people happy, simple as that, and there are songs that help people to be alright even though they’re sad. I could easily write sad-bastard music all day, featuring one lonely guitar and a glockenspiel, but I choose to make rock music because it’s fun and life-affirming and there are plenty of young, bearded guys in denim jackets to fill the sad music void.'"

Amen to that. Easily one of the best nights out I've had recently. In contrast to the standard issue up-the-nose photo-pit concert pictures, I snagged some bird's-eye view snaps from the upper deck this time 'round; they're posted to my Flickr page.

Openers What Made Milwaukee Famous were fantastic. I'd been especially keen on hearing them after reading a ton of enthustiastic write-ups on the interweb, so I'm glad they lived up to whatever hype I'd attributed to them in my own head. (They're cute as hell, too. Especially the shaggy haired keyboard player who, a propos of pretty much nothing, popped his head out from his stage-right corner, smiled at me and my girls up in the gallery above the stage, then disappeared again to finish the set.) I'm eager to pick up their recently re-released album and eager to try to get "Sweet Lady" out of my head. (Yeah, I'd like to see you try to dig it up after it's been sinking its roots in for four days straight.)

Menomena was interesting, if a bit wanky with the experimental rock. I'm sure they're a fine band and all, but they were pretty much exactly what I was not in the mood for when I came out for a night of feel-good power pop. To their credit, the drummer was really amazing to watch. At one point, he put an old film reel on one of his toms to get kind of a heavier rim sound through the whole song. That was cool. The dream catcher hanging in the hollow of his kick drum, however, was not.

Happy belated birthday to my girl MJ out in Boston, and, for those of you who haven't heard yet, my brother finally got a job--the Beaner is moving to San Francisco!

The Funny

I often fancy I would sacrifice some important appendage to be as funny as Cintra Wilson. Her latest installment of The Dregulator nearly killed me last night. Keeled me, I say.

Frank Chromewaves: "If all the print magazines are starting blogs, does that mean that bloggers should start print magazines?"

Go befriend the Geek Method boys.

Happy Decemberists day, everyone! (I've got that one on pre-order, too, and am hoping it will arrive this afternoon.)
EDIT: Oh, balls. No CD in the mail for me today. Boo.

"How Do I Handle Knowing What They Just Told Me?"

There's a really great interview with David Sitek of TV on the Radio on Pitchfork today. Return to Cookie Mountain has been getting some heavy rotation on my iPod these past few weeks, and I'm bummed to be missing them live with Grizzly Bear next week. (Do you hear that noise in the distance? That's the sound of Giddy shouting "toldja so!" from across the Atlantic.) Check out Sean Moeller's excellent progressive review of the album over at Daytrotter; I love how he manages to sneak a Mike Skinner reference in on day four.

The interview portion of this podcast with Britt Daniel is pretty much the most boring thing ever, but the pictures are cute, and it's nice to hear him reach into the back catalog and play cuts from A Series of Sneaks and the "Love Ways" EP in addition to "They Never Got You" from Gimme Fiction.

Hellz yeah, the Cold War Kids are headlining their tour this fall now that the Futureheads have bowed out due to illness. I bet there will be more schedule reshuffling to come as they iron out all the plans, so I'm not sure if they're still going to be at the Metro on October 21 or what, but I'm looking forward to seeing them again whenever, wherever they end up playing. (Yes, that'll be show number three for me this calendar year. Slightly obsessed.) I've got their debut full-length Robbers and Cowards pre-ordered from Insound so it can be delivered to my grubby little paws before its official release next week. Can't wait!

Studio 60 and Other Thoughts

I missed the premiere last week, so yesterday was my first viewing of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and...is anyone (other than Chris C.; sorry to single you out, brutha) won over by this yet? I know it's still early in the game to be making pronouncements, but, I dunno, man. It didn't feel like last night's episode contained enough material to fill the full hour, and there was a fair bit of self-seriousness and there was too much music telling you how you should be feeling beat by beat and there were too many "ripped from the headlines"-style references to blogs and popular music and there was a real disingenuous air around all that religious stuff, making an interesting topic feel spooned in simply for the sake of being timely. Whitford and Perry are great, to be sure, but I just hope that Sorkin gives them some better stuff to chew on soon that doesn't feel so up-its-ass with its own Sorkin-ness. I want him to re-earn my love all over again, from square one, not rest on his laurels and steal all his best lines and emotional entanglements from his previous shows. Maybe this is all unwarranted prejudice on my end. Maybe I'm too attached to my Sports Night DVDs. Maybe after having worked on Josh Karp's wonderful book about the heyday of the National Lampoon, I'm a little too close to behind-the-scenes comedy culture, and maybe that's taken away a little bit of the mystery I always kind of need to become really engaged with a non-fantasy-based show like, well, Sports Night. I don't know a whit about sports and maybe the fact that so much of the dialogue cascaded over my ears without ever resolving into meaningful sense kept me under its spell in a way that it never would have if the show were, say, about publishing. It is something to be pondered. (And, OK, OK, to be patient with.)

On a similar note, I freely admit I'm a big old sucker for romantic comedies and other light films built around good-looking people in urban settings saying witty and sometimes biting things to each other, but one of my least favorite tropes of the genre has to be the scene where Someone Makes an Inappropriate Comment or Gesture in Front of a Very Large Group of People. Why do writers and directors insist on perpetuating this odious crutch? It's just a really lazy way to get the characters to a place where it's clear how desperate they are in regard to the status of their relationship with the object of their affection. Public humiliation is often part and parcel of the genre, and these large group scenes can probably be linked up with the traditional happily-ever-after wedding ritual (the private being validated/normalized by its performance in public, etc, etc), but they always burst the bubble of almost-magical realism for me. I can imagine myself into these characters' lives and their clothes and their apartments and their witty repartee--and that's really all I want out of those two hours spent on the couch or in the theater--but I can never imagine myself into a situation where I would be moved to cause a scene in order to catch the attention of someone I rather fancy. All of this is apropros of having gone out to see Trust the Man this weekend. I wasn't expecting much out of it other than some charming exchanges between the lead characters and some winning New York scenery, but, gah, even with J.R. Jones's warning, I definitely wasn't expecting the whole thing to devolve into such a mess of slapstick and trite monologues about love. Also, boo to James LeGros for doing an insultingly broad and tonally out-of-place version of the spazzed-out jazzbo caricature that was way more interesting and on-point in those Sex and the City episodes when Carrie was having sex with Craig Bierko.

My weekend of moviegoing redeemed itself, however, with Half Nelson, which really is quite good. Ryan Gosling is definitely deserving of all the praise his performance has been receiving, but let's not neglect to mention both Shareeka Epps and the fantastic Anthony Mackie. Recommended.

The Mountain Goats (Live at the Empty Bottle)

And then John Darnielle does that thing where he smiles, and it's just, like, love, kittens.

It's love and it's beauty and it's an invitation to acknowledge that the world is a more interesting and varied place to live than most of us give it credit for being on a day to day basis. He's some kind of pied piper, leading us deeper into our own hearts and into a greater respect for our own humanity. He's a truly gifted musician and performer, and it's always a treat to see him live.

I've seen Andrew Bird silence a room with the enormity of his talent, and I've seen Ben Folds acknowledge an audience's attachment to certain songs by inviting everyone to lift their voices to the rafters in a multi-part harmony singalong, and I've seen Mike Skinner get a crowd jumping in unison with just a word or two, but John Darnielle did all three of those things yesterday in the same club on the same night. It was utterly masterful crowd control. Time felt suspended as he whispered his way through a stunning version of "Wild Sage"--just his painfully, plaintively hushed voice, one or two delicately plucked guitar strings hanging, reverberating, like unkept promises, and Peter Hughes's gorgeous, melodic bass rolling along underneath everything like a dusty old dirt road cutting through an impossibly green cornfield in Indiana in late August--and the room got so quiet even the bottles behind the bar stopped clanking. A few songs later, before I realized what was happening, I was shouting as loud as I could manage as he welcomed us to sing along with "This Year" (deadpan: "like you mean it") and then a few songs after that, an electric jolt surged through the crowd as the opening strums of "Southwood Plantation Road" got everyone wiggling and bouncing. And that's not even to mention his enchanting between-song banter, where he heckles back at the big mouths with as much wit and vigor as Eddie Izzard and introduces the fuckups who populate his songs with character sketches that have as much depth and color as the actual lyrics. And, his spontaneous monologue about why it won't be his fault when you forget to have a television mounted on your ceiling and then you find yourself singing "No Children" instead as you lie, bored and depressed and alone, on your living room floor could conceivably be passed off as the best excerpt from a script that Aaron Sorkin never wrote if the voice and diction and sensibility weren't so unmistakably Darniellian.

If I have any complaints about the show at all (aside from--sigh--the inevitable loud-talking, disrespectful douchebags and rude, tall girls shoving their way right into my sight line two minutes before the band took the stage) it's that, as a relative newcomer to the Goats' oeuvre, I should have recognized fewer of the songs. He repeated several from this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival setlist and, though of course he's touring in support of Get Lonely, he seemed to go heavy on material from his other more recent studio releases like The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee. They were definitely all crowd pleasers, but I have to wonder if any of the longtime die-hards in the audience felt like he didn't do enough justice to his lo-fi days. But, meh, it's not my job to keep tabs on the die-hards' satisfaction levels; I had an amazing time, and, just, wow. I'm so happy to have his music in my life and feel so lucky to have ample opportunity to see John and Peter play live.

And, as if there weren't enough musical riches in the air last night, I loved every note that opener Christine Fellows played. John has been very vocal in his support of her, both at Last Plane to Jakarta and, well, when he announced from the stage at the end of the night, "the Christine Fellows album is at the merch table and it will change your life." I didn't have enough cash on me last night to pick it up, but will be eager to do so soon. In the meantime, the song "Vertebrae," which he says is "the song of the year by a country mile, and also by a city mile, and by a nautical mile, too" is available for streaming at her MySpace.

Patience, My Bebes

Hey, kittens. I'm in the process of converting over to Blogger Beta, so please be patient with me if anything looks stupid or out of order for the next couple of days.

Wonderful Things

The Cold War Kids' video for "Hang Me Up to Dry" (via) is so sweet. I see a little bit of a Rushmore influence in it, in the way that you have these adults plopped into a middle school (?) setting but interacting with the kids as equals. And, ultimately, the shared influence there is probably Salinger; lead singer Nathan Willett even name-checks Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters in his description of their new song "God Make Up Your Mind," over at Daytrotter.

Speaking of Daytrotter, I love how Sean Moeller gets such consistently wonderful conversation and rumination out of the artists who make a point to stop off at the Futureapplestudio (not to mention, of course, such wonderful live performances). For just one example, here's George Hunter of Catfish Haven during their visit back in April:

"I’ve always had a dream of doing a crooner thing. Not like what Frank Sinatra did, but something where I’d write these angelic pop songs that are just perfect. I’d have my Price Is Right microphone and I’d just be walking around singing. I definitely try to get that fucking feeling into the songs, but we also try to wake up the neighbors every time we play too."

Aiee! That just makes me so happy. Daytrotter's also got John Vanderslice talking about, among other things, gardening blogs. So great.

I'm distraught that the Catfish Haven show this weekend is the same night as the Mountain Goats' gig at the Empty Bottle. Choices, choices. Darnielle's got my love for now, but I need to shimmy and sweat with Hunter and his boys sometime soon, soon, soon. Their full length Tell Me is out today, and if the rest of the album lives up to the soulful righteousness (in the full-on '70s slang sense of the word) of the eponymous single, hoo boy, it's going to be all kinds of good.

Matt Berninger, you totally were not doing boring things all summer. You were busy buying me boxes of chocolates and telling me how pretty I look in that new dress. Best imaginary boyfriend ever!

I'm sorry, I know this doesn't fall under the heading of wonderful things, but, seriously, enough with the cupcakes already. I am so over it. Can I get some backlash up in here?

I'd like to join the chorus with Ms. Paradise and send big love out to newlyweds Amber and Chad. There's something really special about attending the wedding of a couple that's already been together for a number of years. Rather than feeling like a uniting of one plus one, the ceremony felt like a celebration of the culture of their relationship, especially in the way they used their circle of friends as active participants in all aspects the event--everything from officiating to bartending. The repeated refrain, with variations, of "when I first met Amber" and "I've know Chad since" and "when the two of them first got together" added an intimate but communal feeling to all the romantic elegance. My snaps are up in a Flickr photoset, and believe you me I am not using the phrase romantic elegance lightly. It's not just self-deprecation when I say my photos do not do justice to how completely gorgeous it was. I was really honored to have been in attendance.

A belated happy birthday to LK!

"It Was Like Skyscraper Soup"

Things that shouldn't make me want to cry, but do (in a good way):

Andrew O'Hehir's audio-interview with Michel Gondry at Salon, and J HeartonaStick's interview with legendary New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain at BrooklynVegan.

However. Things that make me cackle with glee, and I'm glad they do (in an eeevil way!):

Ryan Catbirdseat's genius "Handy Music-Blogger 'Best Of 2006' List Cheat Sheet" chart, and the rich, resplendent head of black hair on "Suri" "Holmes"-"Cruise."

RIP, Steve Irwin

THE OCEAN WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH, BITCHES.

RIP, Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. A stingray fucking stabbed him in the heart while he was filming in the Great Barrier Reef today. That's a pretty badass way to die, and also, y'know, the stuff of nightmares.

The Clientele (Live at the Abbey)

Pictures from the Clientele's show at the Abbey last night are now posted to my Flickr photostream.

It wasn't the best show I've ever been to, but enjoyable enough. The audience was really squirrely, and, apparently, the Clientele shot their wad the night before in Minneapolis, so the whole atmosphere felt kind of low-energy and listless. Or maybe that was just me. But the band still sounded pretty great, and it turns out that that woozy intimacy in Alasdair Maclean's voice isn't, in fact, a studio effect; he really does sing like that. Their new gelfling violin, keyboard, and misc. percussion player Mel Draisey is so dewily pretty and appropriately ethereal, I wish she could stand behind me in my cubicle at work and gently waggle a tambourine whenever I do something really kickass in Excel.

First openers and local kids Canasta won me over in spite of myself. They were kind of like that goofy uncle or older cousin who always managed to make you smile when you were a little kid, even when you were trying really, really hard to be pissed off about falling off your bike or not being allowed to eat another cookie or something. I was kind of whatevs about their songwriting and general indie cuddliness at first, but as their set started drawing to a close, they launched themselves headlong into a series of particularly rousing crescendos--the first peaked with all six members of the band belting out a simple yet enormously effective two-part harmony line and the second found them exuberantly shouting "no! no! no!" in perfect, percussive unison--that warmed my jaded little heart. Second openers Great Lakes could not have been more boring. They seemed like a really competent college town bar band, no more, no less. I think the most distinctive thing about them was probably their drummer, and not because he was playing anything particularly interesting, but because he played with a kind of precision that hinted at (perhaps?) some extensive musical training in his background. Sorry, guys. Better luck next time.

No Hardball Playing

No Hardball Playing
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

(Bitches.)

Puppet Bike!!!

Chicagoans, all your base are belong to Puppet Bike (don't forget to check out the blog, too [via]). I'm obsessed. This, in fact, may be a more potent mood-lifter than even the sublime genius that is Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. Spread the love, kittens; I know we could all use a little bit extra today.

Aloha (Live at Schubas)

The Aloha show at Schubas on Sunday felt like a night full of misfits. Which is kind of perfect because Aloha has always struck me as sort of an oddball band, in the best way possible, and this apparently doesn't bother them in the least, as they continue to rock the fuck out, not giving a goddamn if people can't figure out if the band is about the marimba or the jazz fusion meets prog polyrhythms or Tony Cavallario's mild lisp or whatever.



So, so what if first act openers Rahim were plagued by feedback and other sound problems that always seem to haunt the venue? They were super-cute skinny boys in tight pants, and who's going to complain about that? Pas moi. And, does it ultimately matter if second openers The Eternals, with their slippity-slappity electro-funk grooves, assaultive keyboard screeches, and I'll-see-you-in-hell vocoder chorus effects, were the last thing I was prepared to stand through when I arrived in Aloha-mode? They had great energy, lead singer Damon Locks has immediately commanding stage presence, and I enjoyed their depth of commitment to their material.



And, even my seasonal old-lady disorder couldn't really get the best of me. I mean, oy vey already, you Sunday-night concertgoing kids, with the not being able to stand in one specific bit of floor space and the turning your back to the stage so you can scream along with the music to your group of friends and the endless reconsiderations with the waitress about whether you do or do not want another PBR. Because--you guys like Aloha? Wow. I just have to give up trying to second-guess a band's fan base. Just goes to show that if you're great musicians with great spirit and a willingness to flaunt what makes you unique instead of steamrollering over it, you too can win the affection of bitchy gays in black tank tops and loud, pretty drunk girls reeking of entitlement.



I've heard tell that Some Echoes is "the Alligator of 2006," and, whereas I would counter that Alligator is doing perfectly fine as the Alligator of 2006 (and possibly 2007), the point is well taken. Some Echoes isn't so much a grower or a slow-burner as it's a "never mind us, we'll just be patiently waiting over here for you to appreciate our awesomeness, and, no hard feelings if you find you don't fancy us after all"-er. It's quietly masterful without being overly mannered. It's one of those albums full of songs you can never remember specifically until some twisty lyric or delightful melody line breezes by and you go, "oh yeeeaah...! That song. I love that song!" I don't think I'd ever go out of my way to recommend this album to anyone, but that also means I can conceivably recommend it to everyone. It's not a grab-you-by-the-throat kind of thing; it's never going to get repeated obsessively on your iPod. (Well, except for maybe "Ice Storming." I've begun to realize that I would be perfectly capable of listening to that one on repeat for an hour or two.) But, rest assured, it will sneak up on you one day, after several months, and you will realize what you've got on your hands here, and the cumulative effect may very well leave you in tears.



Live, you have to take everything that makes them weird and unexpected sonically, and then add in the fact that you're looking at these sensitive, delicate-looking indie kids making all this noise, blowing the roof off the place. You've got this incredibly brilliant, creative drummer Cale Parks in a fucking teddy bear t-shirt, pounding the drums with the most unbelievably beautiful combination of passion and precision, and then also smiling beatifically when he sits down for a few minutes at the keyboard. Relatively new marimba player and multi-instrumentalist T.J. Lipple plays all those furious mallet lines without breaking a sweat. Bassist Matt Gengler mouths all the words to the largest, most anthemic songs, clearly still in love with what Cavallario is writing. And then Tony, wonderful and strange and as unselfish as frontmen get, caroms his way through these candied ginger melodies, vocal lines that burn and soothe simultaneously like scalded milk. These guys are improbable, to say the least. But, their musical mutations have fused together so elegantly, this hybrid beast has turned into something irreducible and capable of swallowing you whole. Politely, gently, but whole.

Right Back Up the Arsehole

"I pay tribute to John Peel. It is to John Peel that I pay tribute. The guy that kicked shit. And not only did he kick shit, but he kicked it right back up the arsehole, where it fucking belonged . . . and he made sure it fucking stayed there." —Harold Pinter

The Week's Movies in Review

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Serving up Southern fried homophobia to NASCAR fans and Will Ferrell acolytes to the tune of a $47 million opening weekend! America, I hang my head and shake my fist at you. That being said, however, I absolutely cannot get enough of Sacha Baron Cohen right now. Comedy seeps out of that man's pores. Despite the way his character was used as a grotesque prop to make the audience groan and shudder at the idea of two men kissing, the over-the-top, red-state-baiting ridiculousness of a Camus-reading, gay French Formula 1 champ driving a car sponsored by Perrier is enough to make me erupt in peals of laughter. Cohen somehow manages to nail, with every performance of his I've seen to date, no matter the character or situation, the perfect balance of broad slapstick and subtle, behavioral comedy. I've got the lurve.

Lady in the Water
I fancy myself one of Shyamalan's few remaining defenders, but he's gone too far for even me to follow with this one. Lady in the Water is a mess of self-serious self-awareness and is way more about the "subtext" than about the story it purports to be telling. That way lies death. And perhaps the plot, such as it is, was doomed from the start, as it shows a laughable sense of disconnect from the way that people actually live and behave. There's no truth in any of it, even emotional truth, which should be Shyamalan's stock-in-trade. People always rush to compare him to Spielberg, but this trafficking in stereotypes that are not just flat but also as ripe-smelling as unrefrigerated pork products is uncomfortably Woody Allenesque. Night is beginning to adopt Allen's head-in-the-ground egotism that squelches the life and creativity out of a movie under the guise of hewing to a singularity of vision. (I find this observation from Jonathan Rosenbaum's now-ancient review of Allen's Everyone Says I Love You continually instructive on matters of this nature: "[I]f you take a look at the remarkable elevator sequence in Jerry Lewis's The Errand Boy it's immediately apparent that Lewis can't enter an elevator without becoming stimulated, and the same thing obviously applies to Albert Brooks when he walks through a grocery store or mall and to Jacques Tati when he simply walks down the street. But Woody Allen walking down the street desperately needs a topic to blot out whatever he might see or hear, and his practice as a filmmaker repeatedly proves it.") The caricature of a book and film critic played by an ill-served Bob Balaban is easy to spot and sneer at from a mile away, but there's also me-love-you-long-time Korean student Young Soon (Ms. Cheung should have gone for the big paycheck, at least, and signed on to play ambiguously Japanese in The Last Samurai's Vagina instead of this dreck), the "guild" of young male smokers who seem roughly contemporaneous with Maynard G. Krebs, and--oh, it pains me to say this--the reclusive, compulsive news-watching character played by the normally peerless Bill Irwin, who is forced to deliver the line, "I wanted to believe! I wanted to feel like a child again!" Even Paul Giamatti, who is to me what Steve Buscemi was to many women in the late '90s (that is, dead fucking sexy in a non-obvious, non-ClooneyPitt way), didn't get touched by any of the magic that Shyamalan has always taken pains to lavish on his leading men. There's always the chance that I'll find new life or significance in the film after I have a chance to see it again, as happened with my revisiting of The Village last year, but unlike Giamatti's character, I'm not going to be able to hold my breath (while swimming! and prying open rusted-shut doors! under water!) for much more than, say, fifteen minutes.

Little Miss Sunshine
Quite possibly the movie of the summer. Do not miss this one. Pure delight from beginning to end. I can't rememeber the last time I laughed as hard and as genuinely in a movie theater.

Cold War Kids (Again)

Because I am a slave to the groove, I went drinking at Tuman's after work, happily chilled with some friends I haven't chilled with for a while, then took in the Cold War Kids show at the Abbey (they were opening for Mates of State and are in town to play Lollapalooza on Saturday). You know you read the internet too much when you leave after the opening act because they're all you wanted to see anyway. Please listen to their EPs. Up in Rags is prolly the best overall, but With Our Wallets Full is rangy and excellent and hints at great things to come on their first full-length. I shook bassist Matt Maust's hand at the merch table and told him they were amazing. They were.

Or Is It, "These Other Cats Is Just Pluto"?

I've been obsessed for a little while now with the Kut Masta Kurt remix of Diverse and Mos Def's "Wylin Out" available on the free, downloadable Chocolate Swim EP here. I love, love, love that line in the chorus that goes, "I'm Diverse / these other cats is just Whole Foods." I feel like it's the perfect way to kind of affectionately poke fun at the Adult Swim demographic of now-responsible early-thirtysomethings who own condos and hold down steady, interesting jobs and are politically liberal and like to buy organic food whenever possible but still jones for some funny, subversive cartoons at night. And, that would all be true except for the fact that, you guessed it, they're not actually rapping about Whole Foods. The line, rather, is "these other cats is just hopefuls." I only just realized this a few days ago and was so disappointed, and a little bit embarrassed, when it finally clicked, but, holy shit, what a fucking funny way to mishear the line, huh? Seriously, John Darnielle, will you just HAVE MY BABIES ALREADY??? This week on Salon he discusses (brilliantly, strangely, hilariously) television and boxing and how bright Sebastian Bach would be "if he could just stay focused." (OMG, does this betray a Gilmore Girls habit as well?) I couldn't even bring myself to read the rest of the contributions because I knew I'd just be disappointed that he didn't write them. There's also, of course, the new album, which, yes, is very, very sad, but, at first blush, nowhere near as emotionally impenetrable as all the "I'm still processing [it]" comments might lead one to believe. It's beautiful and cold and feels kind of perfectly breathless, like all the air has been crushed out of it, with a few trinkets and other bits of discarded, gilded dross left rattling around inside. I feared that his falsetto work would tip the whole boat into dirge overload, but it doesn't at all. I can't remember which blog I found it on originally, but here's a link to the music video for "Woke Up New," directed by Rian Johnson, the guy who did Brick. (Seriously, if his spine-tinglingly perfect choice to run "Sister Ray" over the closing credits is any indication, this guy knows good music.) Gorilla vs. Bear points us in the direction of the Cold War Kids' free Daytrotter session MP3s and the wonderfully juicy corresponding interview. The band sounds just as exhausted as the write-up claims they were after the drive back out to Iowa, but that battle fatigue brings something really beautiful out of "Hospital Beds" that I'd never quite heard in the song before. I don't know if I'm posting this for anyone other than myself at this point, but, if you have any interest in these cats at all, don't miss these links. Good Hodgkins links to a great interview with Chicago oddball Devin Davis. I laughed out loud at his perfect encapsulation of what it means for him to have reached a certain level of success as an indie musician: "People now introduce me to friends as 'Devin Davis' instead of 'Devin' which is kind of funny, but flattering." The best thing, in my mind, about the whole Pluto demotion thing is that people are talking about and thinking about space, about our solar system. As funny as I find stuff like Kottke's mnemonic contest and Colbert talking planetary smack, I'm firmly in support of the scientists trying to figure out just what the fuck a planet is. It seems to me the height of respectable, forward-thinking science that they aren't afraid to make these intense pronouncements that are forcing us to redefine what we had previously held as "true" about our little corner of the cosmos. I'm not discounting the fact that this decision was probably fraught with dissention and contention and debate and that the new "dwarf planet" classification might not satisfy all the voters from the International Astronomical Union, but still, if we can no longer expect our politicians to have the courage to say, "you know what, upon further evidence, I need to reconsider my position," we need to support and encourage astronomers, biologists, mathematicians, and the like when they're doing their damnedest to help us understand the amazing, confounding, continually unfolding nuances of our known universe.