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.