Seriously, if my cellphone supported MP3s, I would so make Lordi's "Rock the Hell Outta You" my ringtone right now. It may not be Eurovision Song Contest winner "Hard Rock Hallelujah," but, it'll do, pig. It'll do.
I recall reading about the group on David Byrne's blog a little while back, but the curiosity ultimately came to me last night after reading S/FJ's online only New Yorker Q&A about--get this--why certain British acts have so much trouble crossing over in America. Bwah-hahahahaha! The fact that that Q&A (and his column on the same subject) exist at all strikes me as being very Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard as "punishment." It's like the editorial Powers That Be at the NYer thought the best way to address his involvement in the whole Merritt rockism/racism flap was to get him to write about, Dizzee Rascal notwithstanding, a bunch of whitey white motherfuckers! Or maybe he dreamt the idea up himself. Who knows. But still. Anyway, slight and perhaps unintentional comedy to one side, it's nice to finally hear someone with some highly acute listening skills (rightly) praise the Arctic Monkeys and (politely) explain why Coldplay used to be really quite good but now not so much.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Monday, May 29, 2006
The Proposition and Lady Vengeance
Went in for a bloody revenge/ties-that-bind double feature on Sunday: The Proposition at the Music Box, then Lady Vengeance at the Landmark. I'm glad I saw them in that order because the second served as a much needed corrective to the first.
I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.
It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)
I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.
Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)
Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.
The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.
Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.
It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.
On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!
"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).
"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.
"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).
And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.
I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.
It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)
I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.
Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)
Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.
The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.
Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.
It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.
On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!
"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).
"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.
"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).
And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Post-BEA Reading Material Glut
"If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn't pick Jose. Nehru, he's nearer the mark. Wendell Willkie. I'd settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or--listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o' War, I'd respect your feeling. No, I'm serious. Love should be allowed. I'm all for it. Now that I've got a pretty good idea what it is." --Breakfast at Tiffany's
"I had this whole history with [David] Byrne. In New York, I used to get mistaken for him all the time....Then at some point I saw 'Burning Down the House' and I remember something in me just twitched when I saw Byrne because he was this fully realized version of myself. We're both these uptight white guys trying to stumble into grace....
"You know, there are two kinds of singers: those who sing about who they are, like Townes Van Zandt, and those who sing about who they wish they are, like me. But I'll tell you, what happens sometimes is that, incrementally, you become that person you're singing about. What people see in my songs is me in my deep-focus mode. That's when I get to tear away the veil of my anxiety. If I'm holding out for anything, I guess, it's that: to become the 'me' in my songs." --Jim White, interviewed in The Believer, May 2006
"Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!" --Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street, excerpted in the 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1 sampler
"I had this whole history with [David] Byrne. In New York, I used to get mistaken for him all the time....Then at some point I saw 'Burning Down the House' and I remember something in me just twitched when I saw Byrne because he was this fully realized version of myself. We're both these uptight white guys trying to stumble into grace....
"You know, there are two kinds of singers: those who sing about who they are, like Townes Van Zandt, and those who sing about who they wish they are, like me. But I'll tell you, what happens sometimes is that, incrementally, you become that person you're singing about. What people see in my songs is me in my deep-focus mode. That's when I get to tear away the veil of my anxiety. If I'm holding out for anything, I guess, it's that: to become the 'me' in my songs." --Jim White, interviewed in The Believer, May 2006
"Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!" --Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street, excerpted in the 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1 sampler
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Wild Animal Edition
Bears killed and ate a monkey in a zoo on Sunday in the Netherlands, jest in time for visitors to witness the carnage and be traumatized forever.
(Link)
The first wild grizzly bear/polar bear hybrid is found in Canada. Any word yet on the gorilla-shark mutant of the Discovery Channel's dreams?
(Link)
Alligators killed three women in Florida this week; previously, there had only been seventeen confirmed deadly gator attacks in the state since 1948.
(Link)
A British website's report on the same story features the headline "Florida rocked by alligator attacks." This could also work as a perfect lead-in for a review of a really kick-ass Cajun music festival. In this article, an exasperated trapper laments, "We can't just keep developing wetlands for homes and shopping centres and then wonder why we are up to our ears in alligators." I don't know about you, but, every time an alligator is closing in tight for a nibble on the old earlobes, I inevitably find myself wondering, "why am I up to my ears in alligators?"
And, only lethal to my sense of cynicism: hamster tongues.
(Link)
The first wild grizzly bear/polar bear hybrid is found in Canada. Any word yet on the gorilla-shark mutant of the Discovery Channel's dreams?
(Link)
Alligators killed three women in Florida this week; previously, there had only been seventeen confirmed deadly gator attacks in the state since 1948.
(Link)
A British website's report on the same story features the headline "Florida rocked by alligator attacks." This could also work as a perfect lead-in for a review of a really kick-ass Cajun music festival. In this article, an exasperated trapper laments, "We can't just keep developing wetlands for homes and shopping centres and then wonder why we are up to our ears in alligators." I don't know about you, but, every time an alligator is closing in tight for a nibble on the old earlobes, I inevitably find myself wondering, "why am I up to my ears in alligators?"
And, only lethal to my sense of cynicism: hamster tongues.
Monday, May 15, 2006
I'm Getting Tired Of...The Banjo
"When you are listening to a rock & roll song the way you listen to 'Jumping Jack Flash,' or something similar, that's the way you should really spend your whole life. That's how you should be all the time: just grooving to something simple, something basically good, something effective and something not too big. That's what life is. Rock & roll is one of the keys of the many, many keys to a very complex life. Don't get fucked up with all the many keys. Groove to rock & roll and then you'll probably find one of the best keys of all." --Pete Townshend
I grew up reading Rolling Stone thanks to my father's general addiction to periodicals and inability to throw anything away, and, though its cultural relevance is only a cold, pale shadow of what it once was, I recently opted to receive a few free issues through a special deal that came with my subscription to Salon. Lucky me, I was just in time to receive the big 1000th issue, which you may or may not have seen screaming at you on newsstands in lurid, holographic 3D. I feared that its bulk and overly glossy packaging would make me want to puke with its self-importance and self-referentiality, but it's actually really stellar. I spent a good portion of the weekend devouring it. There are the predictable contributions from Jann Wenner, Cameron Crowe, and Greil Marcus (who cites the above Pete Townshend quote from the eighteenth issue of the magazine in 1968 in his longish piece on RS's early years), but there's also some extremely enjoyable guest essays, perhaps my favorite of which is Bret Easton Ellis's meditation on Tom Cruise's appearance on the cover in 1990 (Days of Thunder era). Referencing the scene in American Psycho when Patrick Bateman shares an elevator ride with Cruise, Ellis writes, hilariously, "I keep thinking about that scene in the elevator in American Psycho and how different it would be played today. Would Bateman, the man also obsessed with appearances, either see a kindred soul or--after witnessing the couch-jumping, the hectoring on the Today show, Scientology, the thing called Vanilla Sky--quietly back away and hope to go unnoticed?"
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a beautiful essay about the famous photograph of John and Yoko taken on the day of his death (writer Scott Spencer ruminates, "Remembering Lennon's boyish boast about the Beatles' being more popular than Jesus, and seeing again the profound artistic sympathy with which Leibovitz composed this last portrait of him, we realize: Here is our Pietà ") and many in-their-prime photos of some of the sexiest motherfuckers ever to have worked in popular music. I'm thinking here specifically of this shot of Mick & Keith and this shot of Bowie paying intentional homage to James Dean. Yes, yes. As Giddy once famously said of me, in jest (somewhat), on her Friendster page, I like magazines.
In Eddie Izzard voice: We've got suits of babies! We've got babies on suits!
Did everybody read the Fork's looong interview with Sufjan today? I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that part about his "small obsession with birds" ("I think I might have gone a little overboard, because I have three field guides, I'm saving up for a pair of binoculars, and I want to buy the elephant folio book of Audubon prints of birds of North America. So I've probably invested a little too much time in this"). Sure, sure, on the surface it looks like it can just be chalked up to all the research he did to write the "Lord God Bird" song for NPR, but the Wrestling Entropy family knows better--there must have been some weird voodoo going on with the avian-themed packaging Chris conceived for my 2005 year-end mix and the inclusion of "Chicago" thereon. (Just like when Ben Folds and Neil Hannon went on tour together a few years ago, and CTLA claimed I magically made it happen by rubbing their albums together in my big CD binder.)
And a big ol' happy birthday to BAK today!!
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Baby, You've Got to Be More Discerning
"When somebody's like 'I'm going to get a rock band, and there's going to be eight people in it and there's going to be a violin and a cello and an accordion' then I'm kinda like, it's got to be f*cking mind-blowing because I'm not going to have the patience for your process because your process is kind of obvious. But when somebody says 'I'm going to only use broken instruments to try to arrange a beautiful symphony' then if there's even one moment of beautiful clarity then I'm totally satisfied."
So says Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) in conversation with You Ain't No Picasso (via), and so splits my own brain in two. There's the part of me that's cheering along with the truth of locating the one moment of beauty in the big mess of artistic honesty, and there's the other part of me that instinctively bristles at the snobby insiderness of statements like that. The whole broken instruments aesthetic can be just as obvious as the kind of indie band with precious orchestration he's maligning. (And, ahem, isn't the Arcade Fire, with whom he's most famously worked, pretty much the very definition of obvious and boring indie band with strings and accordion? I mean, even if you're the Arcade Fire's biggest fan and grant that their process is one of the "fucking mind-blowing" exceptions, it's nevertheless gotta be pretty difficult to deny.) I fall down a little bit harder on the side of bristling in this particular instance, mostly because he has the temerity to talk trash about Bjork's string arrangements in the same interview. This guy is clearly way too smart for his own good, but whether that turns out to be too smart for our own good still remains to be seen. For what it's worth, his cover of Bloc Party's This Modern Love is so gorgeous it nearly brought me to tears. Final Fantasy's much-blogged about He Poos Clouds is being released this summer, though I haven't been able to successfully determine if it's May 9 or June 13 (I've seen both dates listed variously around the intarweb).
Did anyone have any luck scoring Radiohead tickets this weekend? I felt pretty rotten about striking out until I read that even the proprietor of Stereogum got screwed.
Other music news and downloady goodness:
*Check out the jangly adrenaline rush of Fire Island, AK, a leaked track from the new Long Winters album (via)
*Neil Hannon's lush orchestrations and tea-dappled melodies sound more effortless than ever on these two leaked Divine Comedy tunes, "To Die a Virgin" and "Lady Diva," both from his forthcoming album. It's also good to hear him get back to using, in "To Die a Virgin," one of those archly British dialogue samples from some obscure English movie (provenance unknown) over the song's introductory notes
*Yeah, Beirut's Postcards from Italy really is that good
*If the Rappers Delight Club (via) doesn't string a crooked and twinkling smile across your face like a strand of dollar-store lights on a snow-encrusted Christmas tree, then you've probably grown up a little too much
Happy birthday to Mikow (5-5), my sister (5-6), and Nick (today!). Wish y'all could have made it out to celebrate with me and my little choir of amber-colored prescription bottles this weekend.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Next Time, Look It Up in Your Gut
[UPDATE: The link to Colbert's speech has been updated to reflect the fact that it got yanked from YouTube and subsequently reposted on Google Video. Why the censorship? BoingBoing has the scoop.]
I know these clips have been bouncing around the internet for the past day or two, but, seriously, Stephen Colbert is amazing here at the White House Correspondents' dinner this weekend. I mean, yeah, we all loved when Stewart gave it to Carlson and Begala up the pooper, but to do this shtick fifteen feet away from Dubya himself? Le sigh. He had me at "somebody shoot me in the face." Salon salutes him and his masterful use of irony here.
Ah, springtime in Bloomington. I really do miss it sometimes. The flowers are sprouting on campus, the Little Fivers are racing their hearts out, the fast food goes digital...
Lists to make you smarterer: Alex Ross posts his list of 100 key pieces of music from the twentieth century, and Ebert gives some space on his site for Jim Emerson's list of 102 movies you should see if you want to consider yourself "movie-literate" (via).
I know these clips have been bouncing around the internet for the past day or two, but, seriously, Stephen Colbert is amazing here at the White House Correspondents' dinner this weekend. I mean, yeah, we all loved when Stewart gave it to Carlson and Begala up the pooper, but to do this shtick fifteen feet away from Dubya himself? Le sigh. He had me at "somebody shoot me in the face." Salon salutes him and his masterful use of irony here.
Ah, springtime in Bloomington. I really do miss it sometimes. The flowers are sprouting on campus, the Little Fivers are racing their hearts out, the fast food goes digital...
Lists to make you smarterer: Alex Ross posts his list of 100 key pieces of music from the twentieth century, and Ebert gives some space on his site for Jim Emerson's list of 102 movies you should see if you want to consider yourself "movie-literate" (via).
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