Best Music of 2007

Allrightallrightallrightallright. I've made you wait for this long, so let's just get straight to the good stuff, eh? Below I give you notes on my 2007 year-end mix, which I'm calling Minus the Drama and the Fraud. As it was in 2004, 2005, and 2006, the CD version is a gift, and the list version is a simplified but fairly accurate summary of my year in music.

Oh, and number one album: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (After the Pitchfork Music Festival, is it any surprise?)

*

Minus the Drama and the Fraud

1.) Unless It's Kicks--Okkervil River
I love this song. True, I would still mostly prefer reading interviews with Will Sheff to listening to Okkervil River's albums, but this has absolutely got to be one of the most perfect songs I heard all year. I think it's the strain in it that really gets me--there's a hyper-jubilance there that's so intent on embracing and celebrating and affirming life that it almost becomes abrasively defiant, like a wild-eyed street-corner prophet who has seen the truth, man! The drum work, in its intelligence, is right up there with what Jim Eno's doing all over Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (dig the way the rhythms layer themselves across those first few verses), and Sheff's lyrics about the girl in the stands with her heart in her hands unexpectedly speaks to a question about fandom I've been wrestling with for years, namely: where does that love go when I experience a particularly strong reaction to a book or a movie or a piece of music? "I wanna tell her 'your love isn't lost'." I'd have to be a tone-deaf moron not to believe him when he proclaims it like that.

2.) Chores--Animal Collective
Ah, the epic decision of 2007's mix-making endeavors: run a cut from Strawberry Jam or from Person Pitch? Ultimately, I tried to split the difference by going with one of Panda Bear's songs off the Animal Collective album. All the different movement in this song has somehow become associated in my mind with riding the El around the Loop, especially at night, especially across the river (as Panda puts it: "At the end of the day, when there's no one watching"). The sense of peace and release after the frantic, tribal intensity of the first half of the song feels warm and liquid and mature.

3.) Fumes--Aesop Rock
As Aesop Rock friend and collaborator John Darnielle wrote of a similarly cinematic hip-hop track last year, "I spent much of the summer listening to this over the headphones trying to see if the narrative ever ran out of new developments. Not yet!" This cut freaks me out a little bit with how good it is. Sure, it was probably my nerd attack when I first heard that crackly recording of Newton's first last of motion being used as the hook that first attracted me to this cut, specifically, out of all the equally dense tracks on None Shall Pass. But the more I listened to it, the more I thrilled to the pitch-perfect storytelling on display here. These are about the five most rich and rewarding minutes of music I've encountered in recent memory.

4.) Boyz--M.I.A.
I get sort of irrationally annoyed when I hear or read older, overeducated white men raving about M.I.A. and Kala. Something about it just rankles, like their praise is somehow attempting to give her permission to be as good as she is. This is not to say I have some sort of special access to a deeper or, heaven forbid, more "pure" enjoyment of her music, of course; my not-insignificant whiteness and middle-classness are certainly factors in it, probably over and above my femaleness. But still, I do love the way the schoolyard taunts of "Boyz" throw that permission back in all of our faces with a punishingly funky wall of drums, a cheering crowd, and calculatedly casual disses to not just gender but financial solvency and war-mongering impulses as well.

5.) Middlenight--The Sea and Cake
If I'm going to get nostalgic about any time period of my life, I generally lean more toward high school than I do college, but for some reason I found myself thinking a lot about my IU days over the course of this year, and no music triggered those thoughts more dependably than the Sea and Cake's excellent Everybody. I'm sure a large part of it is that I first encountered their albums (along with Archer Prewitt's solo stuff) during the years I volunteered at the student-run radio station, but it's also due in part to the emotional jumble of the songs themselves. Like here in "Middlenight"--when taken together, that elegant, afro-pop-tinged guitar, that low, breathy flute line that's so moist it almost sounds like a Rhodes piano, and of course that devastatingly sexy shrug in Sam Prekop's voice all carry a conflicted kind of insouciance that's just as full of clear-eyed hope as it is bullheaded confidence.

6.) Don't You Evah--Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is another predictably immaculate album from Spoon, full of career-defining corkers like "The Underdog" and "Black Like Me." But somehow "Don't You Evah" comes across as one of the Spooniest songs of the bunch--and Britt didn't even write it. Much has been made of the "Jim, can you record the talk-back?" meta playfulness here, but, for my money, their familiar sonic palette of guitar, snare, bass, tambourine and shaker, and Britt's hoarse yelp becomes its own kind of self-referentiality as they continually find ways to whittle those elements down to even finer, cleaner points. That drum snap that pops about a sixteenth of a beat before you'd anticipate it in the brief instrumental bridge blows my mind with how effectively it both teases and educates you: rather than delaying a harmonic resolution the way a melismatic trill might, the rhythmic pattern is actually giving you what you want before you're expecting it. It gratifies you before you've properly braced yourself for the pleasure of its fulfillment, thereby only fueling and even heightening your craving for the next go-round. It's teaching you how to listen to these songs, laying bare their discrete elements as if to say, "see, there's no magic here; we're working with the same ingredients everyone else has access to." Which, of course, is what makes the magic truly magical. This is why we listen to pop music, kittens.

7.) Shake a Fist--Hot Chip
The nuttiness of the vocal breakdown and "sounds of the studio" bleepy freakout in the middle section are entertaining as hell, to be sure, but also wouldn't mean a thing without the epically beguiling bookends on either side of it. The deep bass bats you around like a cat toy between its massive, fuzzy paws, and the archly coy vocal goes straight for the trick that never fails to work on me: the nearly chromatic melody line. (No matter if it's ascending or descending--and even better if the bass plays it too--it's one of those things I just can't resist in a song. You can hear it, for example, in Radiohead's "Optimistic" and I think I once traced the origins of this fetish back to my lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ Superstar, but regardless: there it is and there it shall remain.) In a year full of vibrant, sensual, and emotionally affecting dance music, this cut instantly stood out for me upon downloading for its wiliness and its willingness to be simultaneously dead-serious about its appeal to your ass and utterly full of shit as it tickles your ears. I'm also rather amused by the way the spoken segment sounds a little bit like Owen Wilson talking directly to the camera in the best music video Wes Anderson hasn't made (yet).

8.) Innocence--Bjork
Smarter people (and bigger fans) than I have gone to the mat during this end-of-year list-making season defending Wilco's Sky Blue Sky against its various and sundry detractors, but I've yet to encounter anyone who's done the same, at length, for Bjork's Volta. (Though, I do have to give a hale-n-hearty "fuck yeah" to Owen Pallett's deliciously snotty bon mot on Pitchfork aimed at the "asshats" who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't appreciate the album: "You just want her to be digestible. I want to hear her make an all foghorn and ocean record." I wish I'd said it first!) Which is a shame because, well, damn--listen to this track: that fat, barking cough in the beat, the squidgy keyboard bit, and some of Bjork's best, most direct lyrics in her career-spanning sub-catalog of personal accountability songs. In a weird way, Volta feels similar to last year's Divine Comedy album Victory for the Comic Muse in that they both pick up bits and pieces of sounds and themes and lyrical conceits from all different corners of their respective careers, almost daring us to make sniffly comparisons to their earlier work. The comparisons are inevitable, of course: it's just that they're actually favorable and colored by the recognition that, oh, this is what precocious artists sound like when they grow up and into their talent and learn to really luxuriate in it.

9.) Someone Great--LCD Soundsystem
Why, yes, I do tend to think an awful lot about loss. Why do you ask? Recipients of last year's mix will remember M. Ward's "Requiem" giving us a joyful, boozy, fingerpickin' tribute to the memory of a good man, where, with this track, James Murphy gives us a more stunned and mellow and eventually resigned take on trying to swallow the enormity of a dear companion's passing away, whether by death or other irrevocable circumstance. And, come to find out, once swallowed, it tastes almost insultingly like a decent cup of coffee. Such is the brilliance of this brilliant song on a most brilliant album: the nearly revolutionary simplicity of the hard-won truth that it keeps coming and it keeps coming and it keeps coming til the day it stops.

10.) Plasticities--Andrew Bird
I'm a city person. I love living in a city, I love traveling to new cities, I love pouring over the peculiarities that give cities their own unique style and vibe. I love them the way I love books--just being around them is often good enough, and when you get to know a few of them really well, it can be downright magical, though in lieu of quality, quantity can often make for an extremely satisfying substitute. And so Bird's inclusion of "dying cities" in his binary attached to music halls as a unit that must be defended touches me deeply. I've praised this album elsewhere for the way it so beautifully dramatizes the collision of the Self with the Empire, and I think it's a sensitive and sophisticated and nuanced point that he's making here, that it's our neural walls Big Brother is after now. The city walls really belong to us, the people contained within them, and they're ours to do with as we see fit. We'll fight, we'll fight.

11.) Just Friends--Amy Winehouse
I feel a little lame and/or bad for gravitating to this one sorta reggae-tinged track on an album most celebrated for its Motown revivalism. I'm going to make it even worse for some of you by admitting that I think part of the reason I love it is because it sounds like it could have appeared on the Jackie Brown soundtrack, which I adore tremendously. But, gah, it's just so nice and warm and easy with its sparkling electric piano, sultry horns, and spacious woodblock accents. It's got a pleasantly fuzzy Sunday morning feel to it, and everybody needs a little Sunday morning sometimes. Especially Amy herself these days, it seems. (Yeah, I went there.)

12.) Weird Fishes/Arpeggi--Radiohead
Both Bjork and Radiohead tracks on my year-end best-of mix? What decade am I in? Thom is in downright incredible form here, as are the rest of the boys. The whole song, in fact, sounds like a dream, like exactly the kind of track I might have hoped Radiohead would come back with after their three-year absence from recording, if only I could have figured out how to articulate what I was looking for. And, for me, with my well-documented and often joked-about fear of/fascination with the ocean and its creatures, the imagery of the sublimity of the deep is, really, the only proper context in which to present a lyric as devastating as "everybody leaves, if they get the chance / and this is my chance." Which, in turn, is almost literally buoyed by the closing lines (that I'm sure Kevin Barnes is kicking himself for not having written this year): "I hit the bottom and escape."

13.) Apartment Story--The National
I don't know how many times I must have listened to Boxer before this song slowly started revealing itself to me as one of my favorites on the disk. But the more I listened to it, the more I felt a twitchiness rise up through the bottoms of my feet and a smirkiness pull at the corners of my mouth; I think we used to call it having bugs in our bones, that spazzed out inability to sit still, the compusion to wiggle around in your chair and maybe throw paperclips or some other small objects at someone you love until they either get fed up and leave the room or start throwing the shit back. Really, it's the sound of cabin fever--"stay inside til somebody finds us," "sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave." It may be a romanticized, movie montage version of cabin fever, but I'll gladly take the fictional romance of Berninger's warm vocal burr and the Dessner brothers' churning guitars and Bryan Devendorf's steady, radiator-clang drum work over my own small, hateful, crabby, late-winter desperation any day.

14.) Gronlandic Edit--Of Montreal
Or I suppose I could take Of Montreal's grandiose, florid, and completely unhinged version of internalized, pent-up despair. Man oh man, I just never saw Hissing Fauna coming this year, until it had completely wrapped itself around me like the sparkliest, most sexually ambiguous and unrelenting boa constrictor out of some sort of Jan Svankmajer jungle. I love everything about this track--the plainspoken yet archly self-critical lyrics that feel like so much familiar internal monologue, the longing for religious deliverance tossed out to fend for itself among the most hedonistic booty-shaking bass grooves, and especially the way Barnes's vocals are layered on top of themselves to harmonize in a kind of aural equivalent of a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley nightmare dance sequence where all that cheerful precision becomes its own kind of horror.

15.) She's Fantastic--Sondre Lerche
I've been a pretty ardent fan of Sondre Lerche for the past few years (now's when you cue up my mix from '04 and go, "ah, yes, 'Stupid Memory,' with the kick drum and the theremin, right, I remember"), but after the minor disappointment of the trad jazz drag of Duper Sessions (which mighty cheeseball Robbie Williams did better with Swing When You're Winning a few years back anyway), Phantom Punch really blew me away in the early part of '07. It's no secret that I'm something of a pop classicist or purist or formalist or whatever you want to call it--if given the choice, I'm generally going to gravitate to virtuosity and "chops" over experimentation or "challenging" music most days of the week--and so it should be no surprise that I'd be reduced to barely restrained swooning by the sophistication of Lerche's songwriting. I don't want to bore anyone by repeating myself, so, for the sake of them what's interested, I'll hastily point you in the direction of a feature-length gush I wrote about the album as a whole, while I spend just a few more moments getting rapturous about this one song in particular. Just . . . just listen to how in the pocket everything falls in these two minutes and twenty-three seconds. The precision is exceedingly tasteful without ever feeling cold or polite. The vocals and the drum fills and the guitar lines all interlock so snugly, they kind of vibrate in your ears the way houndstooth or seersucker vibrates in front of your eyes. And . . . and when that six-note pattern gets repeated in the breakdown at 1:40, it's . . . it's like some Cole Porter shit up in here. It's phenomenal. Where else in indie rock are you, basically, going to get a little soft shoe routine? And don't even get me started on the Hitchcock references. Aside from, uh, some easily extrapolated personal reasons, I called this comp (and the above-linked review) Minus the Drama and the Fraud very intentionally--it's raising a glass to the idea that great art and great beauty doesn't necessarily have to be tethered to an equal amount of angst.

16.) Landmines--St. Vincent
I like Feist and The Reminder just fine, but Annie Clark gets my vote for the best honey sweet, playfully soulful, and quirkily gorgeous female vocalist of the year. Marry Me was an absurdly assured debut. I know I've said it before, and I know the comparison probably doesn't mean much to that many people aside from myself and my family and my friends I've forced to listen to Time and Love over the years, but she sounds, to my ears, like nothing so much as our demographic's Jackie Cain. I was instantly drawn to this song with its dreamy vibe, which feels oddly evocative of WWI (which is, OMG, like totes my fave war), and those gut-punching lyrics. I challenged myself to do a lot of dating throughout the second half of this year, and I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I found myself identifying with the lines, "I'm crawling through landmines / I know 'cause I planted them." Ouch.

17.) Heatherwood--Deerhunter
It was really difficult to decide on one song to highlight off Cryptograms; it just works so well as an album taken as a whole. I'm still not really sure what made me pull the trigger on "Heatherwood" specifically, other than it simply fits really nicely in the flow of the tracklist here. I never would have predicted I'd like Deerhunter as much as I do. I guess I'm still surprised as how, pardon the term, accessible even their noisiest and most violent stuff is.

18.) The Waking--Kurt Elling
Yes, it's the Roethke poem. Elling's albums can really be all over the place, between pretentiousness so stultifying it makes Joanna Newsom sound like Andrew W.K. and corn-laden gimmickry that would give even the most middlebrow of easy-listeners cause to sneer, "really, isn't that a bit much?", and this year's Nightmoves was no exception. But sometimes, as here, he just fucking nails it. His vocal is sweet and deeply felt, and Rob Amster's bass only confirms my estimation that he's absolutely one of the best young jazz guys out there right now. Taken as a whole, no other song I listened to repeatedly over the course of this year allowed me as much perspective on, well, on how OK I'm really and truly doing after all.

Other musics I enjoyed this year: the Shins' Wincing the Night Away (fuck y'all hataz--Mercer's still got it), Laura Veirs's Saltbreakers (Laura + Tucker Martine = 4evah!), Kings of Leon's Because of the Times (it was a late-breaking discovery, but wow, what a doozy), Baby Teeth's The Simp, Caribou's Andorra (both likewise late-year discoveries that certainly would have squeezed something onto this mix if I'd had enough time to digest them), Panda Bear's Person Pitch (of course; it killed me not to be able to use "Take Pills" or "Good Girl/Carrots" on here), Field Music's Tones of Town, and Les Savy Fav's Let's Stay Friends.

(Also, RIP Oscar Peterson, a true legend and giant of both his instrument and the genre.)

Project 365

Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

And there was much rejoicing in the land.

I've succeeded in taking at least one picture every day for the past 365 days.

Cold?

Then keep yourself warm with some of these essays; jane dark's sugarhigh! has been particularly en fuego of late.

· On Britney

· On Hannah Montana and Taylor Swift

· On Gossip Girl

Hey! I Only Posted Twice Previously in November!

Here's a bunch of stuff, mostly from Pitchfork, I've found interesting, amusing, and diverting lately.

"But, I think that there's this middle that I'm pushing with this record. Because, as I said earlier, it's endings and beginnings, you know, those are the addictions. That's all that people can see or hear or want to read about or see in films. And the middle is where the responsibility lies." --Kevin Drew

A Stephen Malkmus double-dactyl:

Heaven Is a Jick

Chanted-in, slanted-in
Malkmus the Pavorite:
Beautiful spokestud for
Slackers and 'tards.

Lucky for him I'm so
Heteronormative;
Mystery rendezvous
Out of the cards.

Amanda Petrusich is seemingly unstoppable. First these wonderful, excellent, smart interviews with Lou Reed and PJ Harvey, and now this lovely, quiet, thoughtful post for Powell's on Joan Didion and the myth of California (via).

Want.

Here's a video of Peter Moren (of Peter Bjorn and John) and Carl Newman covering the Association's "Never My Love" at some dude's wedding. It's very ad hoc, but I could listen to cover versions of this song for days on end.

The Mountain Goats, Live at the Empty Bottle (Again)

Let's just put it this way: I'm never unhappy when I'm at a Mountain Goats show.

On Thursday night we got a new song or two, recent classics from The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely, detours into All Hail West Texas (yes, incl. "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton" as one of THREE encores), and a pleasantly buffed up sound thanks to the touring presence of Jon Wurster on drums. They even looked fuckin' sharp as hell in their nicely tailored suits. (Swearta god: Peter Hughes, handsomest man in indie rock. Check out this ridiculous picture from last weekend's show in St. Louis.) Going out to see and hear music played live is one of the best things I do in my life, and it pretty much always yields some measure of joy, but there is just some sort of qualitative difference in the way I feel during and after I hear John Darnielle play some songs. People (including myself) have talked about the revival tent feeling of their gigs, and...yeah. Count me gladly among the faithful, the converted, the reverent. It's hard to know how much to gush without repeating myself, but it's also hard not to gush. This guy's the real deal, kittens.

Dear Movies

Dear Movies:

Please stop sucking.

Love,
allison

I dunno, guys. Has 2007 actually been shite for movies, or is it just me? Have I been too crabby? Or have I just not seen enough? Or have I not seen enough because there's not much of worth to be seen? It's getting to be time for end-of-the-year summing up, and I can't think of anything that really blew me away like Inland Empire did all the way back in January. Nothing else has really stuck with me. (OK, maybe when Rosario Dawson says "did you just hit a boat?" in Grindhouse.) And does Inland Empire even count? Is it even fair to try to stack anything up against Lynch? It is a ponderable to be pondered.

I couldn't have been more bored by American Gangster. It was just like...all these guys and their guns and their drugs and their money and their tempers and their integrity and their problems? Sigh. Again, maybe it's just my cranky feminist filter, but I just didn't give a shit. Am I supposed to feel some sort of tsk-tsking import as the various plot points get contextualized with archival news footage of Vietnam? Whatevs. I've already written, like, fifteen term papers about this movie. And am I supposed to be impressed that those two guys can act? Well, of course they can act. (Though, I did really like the first time that Russell Crowe encounters Josh Brolin's corrupt cop character on the street. He just kind of nervously spazzes out and looks like an idiot. It was a nice little touch.) I did like the supporting cast, though--quite a bit, actually. Since this blog has, apparently, become an unofficial Deadwood fan site, I'm legally required to mention that--yay!--John Hawkes has a bit part as one of the good guys. I'm always happy to watch Chiwetel Ejiofor do anything, it was great to see Common and RZA (whose Wu-Tang ink on his bicep is clearly visible in one of his first scenes) getting some (more prominent) film work, and at least Ruby Dee brought some genuine gravitas to the screen. The last, lingering shot of Denzel's character leaving prison at the end of his term in the early 90s is kinda nice. But otherwise: snooze.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead at least held my attention. All the stuff based in and around the middle class milieu was nicely done; the mise en scene and the characters' striving and desperation and even the adultery felt truly sad and banal and peppered with a "this is really my life?" angst without coming off as condescending at all. When it started shifting more toward the overt noir trappings (the lower class criminal element and the upper class drug fantasias, not to mention all the bloodshed), I got a leetle bored waiting for the inevitable climactic whatever to happen, but not too bored. It pretty genuinely earns the tension it achieves both through the performances (this is some of Ethan Hawke's best work in years, outside a Linklater film at least) and through the nonlinear storytelling. I do wish Marisa Tomei would have been given more to do than just run around like a floozy; she's got so much spark, she and her career really deserve better. Even if it was a chance to work with Sidney Lumet.

I've never read the book, so perhaps that allowed me more room to actually enjoy Into the Wild. I really give Sean Penn credit for just swinging for the fences here, as far as wanting to dramatize those huge, bold, "what does it mean to be human" kinds of questions. Sure, it can come off a little square, a little corny, and more than a little self-serious, but also somehow endearing for risking all that. The sense of adventure is infectious, as it should be, and all the lovingly framed shots of the Great American Landscape are predictably gorgeous. (Being a confirmed urbanite, I take a tiny bit of issue with the way The City was portrayed as so seedy and sad and dangerous and ugly, but that's in keeping with the story that was being told, so I couldn't be too bothered by it.) Casting-wise, that Emile Hirsch kid is actually really good; his beautiful, wide-open face lent itself well to that key combination of devil-may-care charisma and pernicious youthful idealism. I wish William Hurt could do a suburban dad role where he's not just the cold, stentorian disciplinarian who's disappointed in every move you make, but, meh, a job's a job, I guess, and an actor's gotta play to his strengths. I completely adore Jena Malone, and I love that you get so much of her in voice-over, but I actually think she was kind of miscast. Her presence is so sexy and spunky that it was hard to buy her as "just" somebody's sister; that role kind of needed someone who could more easily disappear into the background, and she's really too much of a force to do that. And, it's really all worth it for the scenes with Hal Holbrook as the kindly old desert-dwelling widower who takes McCandless in for a while. There's a breathlessly beautiful, wordless moment when the two of them just look at each other with these serene, knowing smiles as they ride a cable car up the side of a mountain; it's really enough to bring a person to tears. I could have done without all the Eddie Vedder on the soundtrack, but I know that really is just me and my prejudices getting in the way.

For those who care and may not have heard, here's the info on the new show Joss Whedon is developing with/for Eliza Dushku. As far as comebacks go, let's just hope this doesn't go the way of Studio 60, eh?

Gone Baby Gone and Last Week's Minor Web Detritus

Gone Baby Gone is a pretty decent directorial debut for Ben Affleck, but my threshold for Bleak really hasn't gotten any higher with age; I can still only stand so much before I want to stab myself in the face. Seriously. I was in an incredibly crappy mood for the rest of the night after I left the theater, and I think it was just because, well, bleah: child abuse and molestation and corruption and The Downtrodden. I mean, yeah, I was curious to see the flick, but, in a more cosmic sense, remind me why I paid cash money to have my brain filled with stories of some of the worst aspects of humanity, stories that only confirm the shit that I know exists in the world without helping me understand it any better than, say, a nightly newscast? And, what's even worse, you're supposed to feel somehow ennobled by thinking deep thoughts about these topics after the movie lets out. Like some sort of freshman year ethics course, the movie very clearly wants to incite you to really dig into the flash-point debates it's built around, such as What's Best for the Child? and Is the True to Be Valued Above the Good? Oh good lord, do I just not have the emotional energy for those kinds of discussions. And, while, obviously, children need to be protected and taken care of in the face of all manner of grown up nastiness, there's this hysterical pitch of "OMG, but the chilllldrennn!!" that basically forms the core of the film and seems not necessarily shrill and not necessarily disingenuous, but like it's really a stand-in for something else. Of course, this nearly operatic level of keening isn't exclusive to this movie, nor is it exclusive to the subject of the Sanctity of Childhood (the whole Ellen DeGeneres dog adoption debacle is basically pointing at the same thing), but all the energy expended in the service of hammering home the point that children are these precious little angels, they give our lives meaning, they deserve better, etc., etc. struck me as really kind of protesting too much. Again, I know I sound like kind of an asshole right now, and it's not at all that I don't agree that kids don't deserve the abuse that too many of them so often get, but...isn't that kind of the point? That who, aside from the worst sociopaths, is going to disagree? Some portion of that excess of righteous fury seems like it would be better directed at, say, the atrocities of war currently being perpetrated by the United States government, and I think that fact is actually key: in a time of "outrage fatigue," we're having trouble finding a more or less safe outlet for our mourning and our compassion. The facts of the war (and Darfur and the environment and) can get so fraught with bitter, often needlessly divisive political associations that, on the whole, it's become incredibly difficult to find a safe place to put all our devastated, gut-churning, heart-heavy sadness. And, not just a place to put it, but a place where others can really hear it and empathize with it with equal fervor. So, it busts out wherever it can. It busts out around children and pets and breast cancer and other basically uncontroversial issues that, again, while obviously important, become these cultural totems for an idea of caring, an idea of justifiable fist-shaking at the often indiscriminate cruelty of the universe. Which is actually an incredibly hopeful thing to realize right now; that our impulse toward compassion is so strong that it needs an outlet, a pressure valve, even if has to coagulate somewhere it's ultimately not even doing that much good.

Anyway. Crab, crab, crab. Like I say, it's decently directed, even though, like you'd expect of an amateur director, he has trouble trusting the camera to represent mental states and temporal shifts (he does a rather cheesy color-faded, echo chamber effect on conversations that happened in the past; longtime readers will remember this is similar to one of the problems I had with The Last King of Scotland). The plot resolution is also somewhat unsatisfying, relying as it does on an elaborate conspiracy. As we all know, a movie with a trick ending needs to be satisfying even without its trick ending, and the gotcha in this one, while coherent enough to tie up a fair amount of loose ends, kind of just makes you go "oh." The knowing should have felt just as complex as the not-knowing. Performances are good on the whole. I will have no truck with the critics who think Casey Affleck was miscast and/or cast only because of nepotism. He does a stunning job of keeping his babyface cuteness balanced with an underdog's hunger to prove himself to/against the entrenched power structure and a naturally gifted but young man's arrogance that his intelligence and the purity of his intentions make him all but infallible. Dude is very clearly having a moment. Amy Ryan is 100 percent as good as all the reviews have said she is (the phrase "hell for leather" comes up a lot about her performance), and it's great to see Titus Welliver, long one of my favorite actors on Deadwood, use that great quality he has of coming off as a fundamentally well-meaning guy who's simply caught up in circumstances that are just a shade beyond him.

Here's Catbirdseat's now apparently annual Music Blogger Best of 2007 Cheat Sheet. Um, yup, pretty much. (For extra Catbirdseat fun, I have no idea how old this is, but OMG funny: Guide to Indie Rock Hair Styles. It's a different kind of sarcastic than what you're expecting, I promise. And Malkmus jokes? Somehow always hilarious.)

It's so ridiculous as to almost be embarrassing how much I enjoy the many variations on the whole lolcats meme. I've recently been introduced to lolsecretz; here's my fave so far. (Thanks, MS.)

Zach Galifianakis gives us a reasoned and trenchant analysis of contemporary physical comedy in just a few short minutes (via).

I'm sure everyone saw this long, fantastic piece on David Simon and The Wire in The New Yorker back whenever it was first posted (or whenever Kottke first linked it), but I just got around to reading it within the last week or so. Stunning. Yes, I'm officially the biggest fan of The Wire who's never actually seen a single episode. (Thanks again, JA.)

Better late than never, I guess: here we have videographical proof that Clipse indeed provided one of the best sets of the weekend at this year's Pitchfork Music Festival.

If I'd had any idea that both Neko Case AND Dan Bejar would be touring with the New Pornographers this fall, I certainly would not have skipped out on their show(s) at the Metro earlier this month. I only discovered this fact while scrolling through Kirstiecat's predictably stunning pics and nearly slammed my head against my keyboard when I saw the full band lineup. Challengers has really been growing on me and the two of them (esp. Bejar) play out with the band so incredibly rarely, so...bummer, man.

Bushman on Baba

Quoth Bushman, who's been listening to the Who a lot lately: "If anyone tells you that they felt the influence of classical minimalism because of the synthesizer part in Baba O'Riley, you have my full and utter permission to KICK THEM IN THE HEAD. A repetitive ostinato over COMPLETELY FUNCTIONAL POP HARMONIES does not minimalism make. :) Yes, I know the title is supposedly in reference to Terry Riley, and as such the band claims such influence. I'm just saying, the concept lost something- oh wait, EVERYTHING in the translation. Great, they used a bloody synthesizer and looped it- but its usage has no position of importance in the development of the song, and even gets transposed around to go with the riffs. Awesome tune? Certainly. Great texture? Truly. Minimal? For fucks sake, it's THE WHO. Everyone is tearing it up, and you end with a time change and a fade to a needless (but fun) violin solo."

I love having friends who know more about stuff than I do.

Spoon, Live at the Riv (I Also Saw Some Movies)

Hit the Spoon show at the Riv on Friday night. It was so great to finally see them live in a theater, where all the propulsive energy they unleashed could be contained and harnessed and manipulated more acutely. Spoon's expert minimalism is such an easy talking point by now, but it's still such a thing of beauty to behold, especially to my ears, which are so accustomed to orchestral bombast and wall of sound. Their songs are these little miracles, walking around and beating people up despite the fact that they have no skeletons! Or, if skeletons they do have, they're the hollowed-out, bird skeleton kind. Fragile and delicate and uniquely adapted to flight in their particular environments. My one sort of major-ish complaint about the evening is that it really sped by. And I don't think it was just that I was enjoying myself so much; all the grooves felt a couple clicks too fast. "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" seemed most glaringly up-tempo, when it should have lingered malevolently in the air as a kind of slow, ballsy stomper. They also, curiously, arranged their setlist chronologically, many of the songs in album order, too. I dunno; if I were in a more cynical mood about it, I probably would have found it annoying or pandering, but I actually think it was kind of genius. The night wasn't paced like a typical rock show, where there's a big explosion when they first start playing, then a mellow-out while they whip through the older songs for the more hardcore fans, and then another explosion for the set-ending barn-burner, before the requisite encore. The setlist, in actuality, at least from where I was sitting, allowed for an effective crescendo up to the newest songs (songs that pretty much everyone was guaranteed to know). It gave the audience a reason to keep blowing up, repeatedly, to suspend their excitement throughout the show, so that by the time we made it to "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," "The Underdog," and "Black Like Me" (not to mention "Chicago at Night"), the place was in veritable rock and roll ecstasy. Oh, Spoonsters--you Zen masters, you! Using minimum effort for maximum results. (In the conservation of energy sense; no one would ever dare call these dudes lazy. They just work, and play, smarter.) Also, I kind of wouldn't be surprised if the next album, whenever it comes out, is full of songs like "The Ghost of You Lingers." I don't think I'd ever really heard what an exquisitely fine song it is, but live, its strongest points absolutely could not be denied. Thrilling. Pictures from the night are here.

Finally had a chance to catch up with The Darjeeling Limited late last week. I have no real reading of the piece yet; I need to sit with it some more, and see it again soon. I know I'm usually queen of the knee-jerk, but past experience has taught me that Anderson's films don't start revealing their true essence until at least the third viewing, so I'm withholding judgment for now. But, overall, on a fairly shallow level, I liked it. I liked when Adrien Brody says "I liked how mean you are" to Schwartzman about his autobiographical short story near the end. I liked the way they used Schwartzman as the one who gets all the tail; it supports the theory I started formulating, circa Shopgirl, that, post-Cusack, he's the thinking girl's pin-up boy for this decade. I liked that the scene(s) in the convent were, as far as the mise-en-scene goes anyway, almost direct homage to Black Narcissus. I'm also totally fascinated by the way that Anderson, as a director, has, in one way or another, abused Owen Wilson in every movie they've done together, and by the fact that it's only gotten more intense the more famous Wilson has gotten. I don't mean to be indulging in any tabloid schadenfreude here, but come on--he's wrapped in bandages throughout Darjeeling, the casually cruel yet oblivious, bossy oldest brother/surrogate father figure who can't, despite his best (?) efforts, hold any of his relationships together, much less his own body. This, of course, comes on the heels of the delectable meta-punishment of The Life Aquatic, where Esteban, the fictional director Zissou's best friend, gets eaten by a shark only a few minutes into the movie, and Wilson, as an actor, is forced to subsume his most valuable asset as a Hollywoodized commodity, his wry, wily charm, to play an incredibly wide-eyed naif who also dies a violent, watery death. Um, all of this would seem to me to be the sound of Anderson working out some, uh, issues. And detractors accuse him of being twee. Anyway, additional thoughts on the film to come when I least expect it, I'm sure.

Lust, Caution is apparently Ang Lee's best attempt at a Wong Kar-Wai impression. (He even steals Tony Leung Chiu Wai for the male lead.) Yawn. It's a nice, safe middlebrow examination of loyalty and sexuality and torpid self-seriousness in times of war. I guess. It's not overly gorgeous visually, merely serviceable, and the sex (whether real or simply realistic) doesn't do much to enrich the politics of the piece, or vice-versa. I was all set to get up on my high horse about how the only way the sex scenes would have been interesting was if the Mr. Yee character, instead of revealing himself to be (surprise!) the sadist in the relationship, would have showed up for his first assignation with Wong Chia Chi/Mak Tai Tai with a desire to get tied up or flagellated or something. But then I realized that that plot twist would have annoyed me just as much. ("Of course they'd go to the easy plot point of showing that the political hardass who's collaborating with the Japanese deep down just wants to be spanked," etc., etc.) So, I'm not sure what would have redeemed the film for me. Other than it just being better. In summation: BROKBAK KITTEH WISHES HE CUD KWIT U.

Sasha Frere-Jones throws it down in this week's New Yorker. I don't have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge at my fingertips to be able to effectively enter the ring in the debate, but I do admit that any exceptions I've been able to come up with (like Beck) kind of seem to just reinforce the point rather than modify or challenge it. Which is as it should be, probably. Also, be sure not to miss the follow-up post on his own blog with the extra-strength linking action to the fantabulous Lester Bangs piece from approx. thirty years earlier covering pretty much the exact same issues ("nothing short of a hydrogen bomb," indeed).

Jesse James and Of Montreal

The Great Benji Kelnardo (no relation to The Late B.P. Helium) had an assignment for one of his business of film classes to see a movie in its first weekend of release, so I tagged along with him to catch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on Saturday night. I liked that it was moody and stylish (helped in large part by the stunning Nick Cave/Warren Ellis score), but I don't think it quite accomplishes as much as it thinks it does. It's overly long, and overly ponderous, and doesn't really achieve the kind of stretched taut tension you need in a two-hour-forty-minute movie in order to pull off all those scenes of characters breaking into waves of alternately nervous and hysterical laughter and all those deathly long silences while dust motes float in the air. It just rings a little hollow. (Also, post-Gladiator can we please put a stop on scenes of tough guys walking through windswept wheat fields already? That was, like, almost literally the only thing I liked about Gladiator and the more I see that visual trope used elsewhere, the more it smacks of really uninspired gesturing toward suppressed sensitivity or spirituality or sensuality or whatever. Bleah.) The film's also very clearly supposed to be some kind of commentary on celebrity culture in America, the dance of flattery and cannibalism between outsized public personalities and their worshipful fans, but I'm not sure it's really actually doing anything with that theme, other than congratulating itself for the supposedly ingenious casting of Brad Pitt as Jesse James. As Dana Stevens points out at Slate, "There's one thing Pitt and James don't have in common. Pitt is not, to all appearances, a barking lunatic," which makes it slightly difficult to know where one's sympathies are supposed to lie. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for moral ambiguity, but some sort of coherent worldview has got to be driving this boat, and instead I felt like I was just left drifting while Pitt and Casey Affleck made goo-goo eyes at each other for nearly three hours.

That said, Casey Affleck has a veritable symphony of goo-goo eyes going on in this movie. He's fantastic. Absolutely steals the piece. I think he's turning into our generation's Chris Penn (no small praise, that), the younger brother of the more alpha-mainstream star who skulks around the edges of the industry doing (to steal a few phrases from the eminent Cintra) "red-faced humiliation....The hyper-vulnerable, exposed weakness of the bed-wetter, the fuckup, the sad sack, the hapless loser, the beta male" with subtly beautiful aplomb. The rest of the casting--with the exception of Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel being utterly Wasted with a capital What the Fuck--is really quite good as well. Paul Schneider is spot-on with his southern charm and sly wit as a backwoods Casanova surrounded by hapless rubes, and it's great to see Garret Dillahunt getting film work (um, even if it is in other westerns) after his dual roles as Jack McCall and Francis Wolcott on Deadwood. I wish someone would tell me what kind of career Sam Rockwell is supposed to be having; he's wonderful as ever here, if not exactly going above and beyond the call of duty, but it seems like this second-banana role should have been filled by a less-established actor. I think he's great, and charming as hell, and I just keep waiting for him to really break out as a leading man the way he was supposed to after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. And, as for Pitt...well, I'm not exactly sure what he was doing that earned him the best actor at the Venice Film Festival this year, but it's nice to see him get back to using some of that caged volatility that's gotten buried underneath his family man persona these days. Plus, along with Nicole Kidman, he's got to be one of the great on-screen criers in contemporary cinema. Few actors can do that kind of sudden cloud-burst of emotion coupled with the "gimme a minute" breakdown as well as he does.

Of Montreal continues to impress live. RTW and I caught their Sunday-night show at the Metro, and they just rocked it the fuck out. They've got a hell of an impressive stage setup (this YouTube clip from a recent show in Knoxville [via] should give you the general sense of what they're doing as far as lighting and multiple levels), and there's just no denying the cataclysmic awesomeness of the tunes from Hissing Fauna. Simply put, they just sound more expansive and sophisticated than any of the stuff they played from their earlier albums. They also tried out a few new ones that are supposed to appear on the next full-length, including a funky as hell, self-described "slow jam" that comes off as what Midnite Vultures would probably sound like to me if I actually wanted to have sex with Beck. Given the fact that I've basically decided to take a pass on any kind of fanship or affection for Arcade Fire, I'm glad to have borderline obsessively embraced the one other band this year that's really putting a lot of effort into their stage spectacle and backing it up with songs that show no sign of wearing out their welcome. As ever, pics are up on Flickr.

Speaking of bands I've given up trying to like, I think I'm done with Beirut. Zach Condon just bugs me.

Indie Rock Covers and the Demise of Deadwood

It's been a great week so far for indie rock covers. Early this week we were treated to the Streets' awesomely earnest take on Elton John's "Your Song" (that totally crap-ass plastic beat that comes in at 1:52 just destroys me; I love it). And then yesterday saw the posting of Stereogum's follow-up to their tribute to OK Computer with a tribute to Automatic for the People. After a very cursory listen, I'm digging Rogue Wave's inventive cover of "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight," the Meat Puppets' brilliant taking-the-piss version of "Everybody Hurts" (think more the scene from Felicity when Noel is singing it while laying in the dark on the couch after he and Felicity don't have sex, and less its iconic use in My So-Called Life), and Sara Quin's (of Tegan & Sara) duet with Kaki King on "Sweetness Follows." Be sure to check out Matthew Fluxblog's contextualizing essay as well.

A good week for indie rockers is a bad week for TV watchers, unfortunately. Kottke brings us news that Deadwood won't, in fact, culminate with the two two-hour movies that were promised to substitute for a fourth season. Boo! This news is especially bittersweet for LK and myself who are currently making our way through the third season on DVD. I literally can't help myself from shrieking with delight at the end of each episode, no matter how emotionally gut-wrenching; it's just that fucking good, cocksuckers.

The Onion AV Club lists 24 Great Films Too Painful to Watch Twice. It's a fairly decent list, and one to which I would enthusiastically add Miguel Arteta's Chuck and Buck. It's not as graphically violent or disturbing as Irreversible or Requiem for a Dream, but the emotions are so complicated and awkward and trenchant, I don't think I could bring myself to watch it again even five years after I first saw it.

Extremely interesting interview with David Allen, author of the omnipresent (at least by intarweb standards) Getting Things Done, wherein it is revealed that the creator of a productivity system that inspires such cult-like devotion...is actually a member of a cult himself!

As many of you know, I'm a psycho super-fan of Adam Gopnik and I've previously quoted reverently from "Death of a Fish," the first of his New Yorker essays I ever read. I remember searching for the piece online so I could link directly to the full text, but couldn't find it anywhere at the time. I was pleasantly surprised to discover yesterday, though, completely accidentally, that The Observer ran the same essay, in its entirety, two years ago under a different title, "Pet theories." Read and enjoy, my kittens! Now if I can just find a digital copy of "The Last of the Metrozoids," I won't have to keep photocopying it out of Through the Children's Gate every time I want to turn somebody on to his stuff.

(Incidentally, this is apparently my 400th post on Blogger. I don't really put much stock in milestones of this nature, but...damn. Thanks, as always, for sticking around, my bebes.)

Thumbs

Thumbs up: the new Iron and Wine and Les Savy Fav albums.

Thumbs down: the new Kanye album. (Srsly. How is it possible for this album to be boring? YET IT IS.)

Thumbs tucked ponderously under chin in contemplation: the new New Pornographers album. (I need to sit with it some more. Bejar's tracks are clear early highlights for me, though, esp. "Entering White Cecilia" and, of course, "Myriad Harbour.")

Thumbs raised in exultation to the deity of your choice: good news re: the soon-to-come new Radiohead album, In Rainbows (first via, but also). (You heard me. I said NEW. RADIOHEAD. ALBUM.)

The National, Live at the Vic

Man, I don't know what it is about the Vic, maybe just precedent set with the tremendously emotionally satisfying Rufus Wainwright concert I saw with CTLA way back in 2002, but now it seems like every time I catch a show there, I just want to weep tears of joy through the whole thing. It's a great feeling to have. (I also wouldn't discount the all-important seats-in-the-balcony factor. Yes, at times I can be the laziest woman alive who just can't be arsed to stand through a show, but the stress of being so short that one person's shoulder can ruin a sight line for the whole night is also a huge part of my concertgoing life, and so, being able to sit often makes up in true engagement with the performance what it loses in physically rocking out. All those overwhelming emotions tend to come out a little more readily when I'm not actively irritated by, y'know, other humans.)

Anyway. The National were fantastic on Saturday night. True, I was in a vastly better mood than I was when I saw them earlier this June, but they've also been touring behind Boxer for the better part of four months now, and it's clearly paying dividends at this point. They're playing those songs more confidently, the way they play the ones from Alligator. Their crashing waves of crescendo at the end of stuff like "Mistaken for Strangers" and "Start a War" feel earned and organic now, not just "might as well" to get off the merry-go-round, and their ability to change up the feel and stylistic groove of something like "Racing Like a Pro" (which they cranked down about two notches into this shuffling Pink Panther slinkiness that just about stopped my heart with its gorgeousness) is respectful of the audience's expectations while providing just enough variation to thrill. And--beware the rockist/classicist that lives in me now--I always forget that these guys are musicians. It reads even in something as deceptively simple as their stage postures. Except for Matt, roaming around like a mental patient, and Padma Newsome, occasionally, rightfully, taking his place center stage when he gets on a particularly good tear with his violin, there isn't much visible interaction between these guys. They're not getting up in each other's faces or doing scissor kicks or whatever. They're mostly just hunched over and isolated on the little islands near their monitors. But, there's something in the quality of their hunched over postures--you can tell they're listening. They're almost like old jazz guys in that way. They're listening to the space their instruments are taking up in relation to everyone else's, and they're confident that, as individuals, if they really fucking bring it on any given end-of-song build, the rest of the guys can be trusted to do the same, to spectacular effect. "Start a War," the last song before the encore, was so epic, in fact, that Matt, with nothing else to do once he was done singing the final chorus, picked up a drum stick and started beating the shit out of one of Bryan's cymbals as the outro was really cresting into a fabulous wall of noise. It was almost like, in that moment, he was the number-one fan of his own band and had to do something to express it. I mean, can you blame him?

A bit more on Matt, and his on-stage awkwardness: it's key. I know some people find his spazziness faked or disingenuous or merely irritating or whatever, but I feel like, if he came out and took the mic looking the way he does (about 17 different kinds of beautiful), in front of a band sounding the way they sound, crooning these devastatingly pretty love songs, and was all smoothy smooth in his presence and banter on top of that, he'd be, I dunno, the guy from Maroon 5 or something, which is to say, a bit gross. (No disrespect meant to Maroon 5, of course. The origins of this blog were effectively built on my affection for "This Love," and I very recently embarrassed myself in front of a sales rep at work by loudly declaring to RTW on the way into the building in the morning that if I ever had to make some extra money as a stripper, I would do so to "Makes Me Wonder." But, would I want Adam Levine to touch me with a ten-foot pole? No.) Anyway, even if the tortured sensitive guy thing is just another brand of shtick, I buy it. It just helps balance the band out a bit more for me, keeps them off-kilter in an interesting way.

For those of you who are interested in such things, I've transcribed the setlist here. You'll note that, with the exception of "About Today" from the Cherry Tree EP, which I'm so glad they've been working into their sets recently, the whole night was pulled from just Boxer and Alligator. Which makes sense, I guess, given the broader success that those albums have brought them, but why not encourage people to look into their back catalog with a little "Murder Me, Rachael" or "Patterns of Fairytales" action? But, when it comes down to it, I'd gladly give that up for the ecstatic, transcendent singalong that happened during "Apartment Story." Probably my favorite cut from the new album, and an easy contender for my 2007 year-end mix, I think it was the only song of the night that had every band member singing the chorus, and the crowd lifted their voices joyously as well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I was nearly brought to tears when you've got a whole roomful of people shouting "so worry not / all things are well / we'll be all right" into the early fall night air. Pics from the show are up on Flickr.

You know what album's great (not that it should be any surprise)? The Sea and Cake's new one from this year, Everybody. I probably would have damned it with faint praise about a month ago by calling it good cooking music, which it still is, but it's one of those growers, as the kids are wont to call them these days, with a melodic sophistication that only reveals itself in unhurried increments. Recommended.

Gah! Hurry up and grab this Hot Chip song before Matthew takes it down! It's so good you'll kind of need to lie down in a darkened room for a while after you listen to it a couple times.

LMAO? LMAO.

UPDATE: Remember the awesome video of the little pink-haired girl dancing to Les Savy Fav I posted here? Well, according to Pitchfork, she won whatever contest it had been originally posted to YouTube for. Congrats to Bunny! She rocks harder now than most of us ever will.

Eastern Promises

Ah. Remember when Jude Law used to be a really interesting actor? Remind yourself of those bygone days and that squandered promise with Vincent Cassel's gloriously live-wire performance in Cronenberg's new one, Eastern Promises. He's charismatic and unlikable and almost offensively gorgeous in a completely skeeved out kind of way. Plus, I'm always a sucker for the hot-and-cold interplay he has going on as an actor with Viggo Mortensen (sex on wheels, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise). The more subdued and stoic and minimal Mortensen gets, the more dangerously high Cassel lets his flame rise, pacing like a rabid hyena, skidding out of control like a gorgeous European sportscar on an icy road in the middle of the night. He does spoiled and bratty and wrathful with a Russian accent just as well as he did it with one arm tied behind his back. Inspired casting. Mega bonus round extra credit points for all those awesomely homoerotic embraces. I didn't love the film as much as I did A History of Violence--though maybe it will grow on me with time--but, regardless, Cronenberg is maturing with such ease as a filmmaker that it's a delight simply to sit there and allow yourself to be taken where he wants you to go. There's an ever-so-slight archness in the tone of the performances that I'm not sure what to make of yet. It's not quite humor and it's not quite camp; "winking" is definitely not right, and even "aware" is wrong. It doesn't even seem pronounced enough to serve as some sort of commentary on the gangster movie genre. I think the closest it gets is to the deliberateness of a song, which would work well in the world of this movie where the violence and florid emotions swirling around stereotypical ideas of Russian masculinity and familial honor seem only matched by the power of music and food and other day-to-day rituals and ceremonies to unite an immigrant community almost irrationally sentimental for a mostly brutal homeland. Also, I'm totally done with Naomi Watts these days.

Michael Haneke is apparently remaking his own film Funny Games in English with Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Michael Pitt. Filmies, is there any word on the street yet if this is going to be awesome or unfortunate? The trailer made me roll my eyes until I saw Haneke's name attached to it. I'm cautiously curious.

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8

"I have been listening to [Elvis Costello's] Trust over and over for two days. Why did people continue making albums after this was released? Emotionally, I get it, but really." --S/FJ

Work pal MS and I have decided that, based on the fact that we could do nothing but barf rainbows for hours after seeing this picture, the phrase "monkey hug" is now an appropriate and perfectly acceptable thing to say to people. Try it, for instance, when signing off an e-mail. I believe you'll find it a quite satisfactory substitute for "thank you" or "cheers."

Hideout Block Party 2007

A few thoughts on this year's Hideout Block Party:

There was a lot I missed this weekend, for a number of reasons, which is both kind of a bummer and kind of a great thing about the overwhelming casualness that the Hideout engenders in a person.

It's a super-huge pain in the ass for me to get to the Hideout without a car, but, that being said, it's always kind of great to be down there in such a grittily urban area of the city, with the warehouses and whatnot. It makes me love Chicago in a different way.

Another thing that makes me love Chicago: all our fucking kick-ass local bands. Scotland Yard Gospel Choir! The Changes! The 1900s! Had I but world enough and time, I would become a psycho groupie stalker for them all, for it is such a gift to have such awesome music being made right in one's own backyard.

Speaking of groupies, Cynthia Plaster Caster was on hand to introduce the 1900s' set with great giggliness and affection. It was adorable. Also, of course she loves the 1900s; as CJN put it, "they're like to Fleetwood Mac what the Muppet Babies are to the Muppets."

This is the second time I've seen Bloc Party as headliners in a festival setting, and this is the second time they've completely blown me away live. I'm still trying to reconcile the thing in me that fights against their albums so hard (as I've said before, it took me forever to warm up to Silent Alarm and I'm still struggling to get into A Weekend in the City lo these many months after its release this year) with the borderline transcendent experiences I've had seeing them in concert. I'm beginning to formulate a lame and half-assed theory that there's something kind of insular and locked off in their albums, that they're all about Kele's self-loathing and self-righteousness, which makes them kind of inwardly focused and impenetrable. But then live on stage, the band is nothing so much as a grandly florid, outwardly blooming flower. They just give, give, give to the audience, without any gimmicks or affectations of cultivated "showmanship" or whatever. I think they said this is their seventh (seventh!) American tour, and yet they really retain an exuberance in performance that makes them come off as the happiest kids in school who are just totally geeked to have an audience to play for. And, it bears repeating: the melodies, my God, the melodies. I nearly got choked up a couple times; they're that stunningly beautiful. And speaking of beautiful: Kele Okereke for indie rock pin-up boy of the year! Sososo cute.

I'm seriously fucking pissed off at the CTA (not you, Dr. Andrews) for making me so late on Saturday that I missed Art Brut's set. Grr.

The Frames were all Irish delightful, as one would expect them to be. Hansard's just got that thing in his voice, where it shreds a little bit when he's really going for the note, that's totally appealing. (After their set, I heard some girl behind me in the beer line saying that she never thought she'd hear another vocalist who affects her the same way that Kurt Cobain did, and I can kind of see her point.) He's also quite the raconteur, as one would expect him to be. A lot of his introductions to the songs, mostly about all-consuming young love and its attendant silly extremes of behavior and emotion, were more interesting than the songs (or at least the lyrics) themselves. In contrast to Bloc Party, they did go a bit gimmicky with their set (getting the audience to sing along multiple times, bringing two girls up on stage to sing the harmony part from "Falling Slowly," and closing out with a cover of "Where Is My Mind" complete with The Blue Ribbon Glee Club doing the "OOH-OOH!" bit), but I guess that's appropriate for a band like that playing a biggish festival show like that. I did think it was extremely classy, though, that they didn't mention the movie at all. Just came out and played the gig like a regular band, with no "you may recognize me from..." self-promotion.

Andrew Bird was, naturally, fantastic. I don't quite know what was going on with his unfortunate all-denim ensemble, but I ended up listening to most of the show with my eyes closed anyway, so it hardly mattered. He played a great mix of stuff from The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Armchair Apocrypha; there was a particularly inspired segue from a truncated version of his Dr. Stringz ditty into the full-frontal attack of "Fake Palindromes." The band was tight, tight, tight; Martin Dosh was doing some shit on the drums (I'm thinking here particularly of "Dark Matter," not to mention, of course, his Radiohead-esque composition "Simple X") that's just so gorgeous and musical and exciting and smart, and noticeably so, without being too in-your-face about it. It's always great to hear Bird and his band play, especially after releasing one of my favorite albums of 2007.

Superbad

I didn't go in to Superbad intending to watch it with my cranky feminist filter on, but, well...if the shoe fits. Look. A good crisis-of-masculinity story, at any age, is usually always going to appeal to me, and I'm generally a pretty easy target for some boys-will-be-boys silliness, but not when it's at the expense of saying some really shitty things about women. And, I wish that shitty were a less appropriate word in this instance, but this movie is seriously reinforcing some borderline medieval notions of vile womanhood here (the weaker/leaky vessel and all that). For all their effusively praised hotness and do-ability, the women in this movie seem constantly overwhelmed/personified by their own bodily fluids, doing nothing but menstruating all over the place, getting "so wet," and projectile vomiting. Even Evan's mom's rack is praised not just for its general lusciousness, but for how lucky baby Evan was to suck on it. And, need we even mention Seth's assertion that a vagina "all by itself" (ie, without a penis in it or at least nearby) is "not for him"? Ooh-kay. I guess, maybe, the argument can be made that these characterizations only reflect the adolescent male's confusion and ignorance about the opposite sex, but that confusion and ignorance seriously didn't have to be tinged with such disgust. Evan's line about how he wants to live in a world where girls weren't weirded out by boners and really wanted to see them was fantastically funny (helped by Michael Cera's typically impeccable delivery), but his feeling slighted by having to hide that one thing seems really petty in light of all the things girls have to hide (period blood and its accoutrements, body hair, and an aggressive sex drive, to name but a few) for fear of becoming undesirable in some dude's eyes.

I dunno. I mean, if the movie wants us to buy Evan as being genuinely respectful of women--and I think it really does, with the best of misguided intentions--then the authorial voice needed to be a little more consistently respectful, too. I know the screenplay was written when Rogen and Goldberg weren't much more than teenagers themselves (not that that's really any excuse), but I seriously don't believe Apatow or the director didn't step in to tone it down a little. Especially the menstrual blood bit. I kind of can't get over it. The situation itself was just so over-the-top and unbelievable, and then the characters' reactions to it were even worse. Of course no one wants to be bled on by a stranger at a party, but there was no such freak-out when that random guy got the bottle smashed over his head during the fight and started spurting blood everywhere. I know that gross-out humor is intrinsic to these kinds of raunchy high school comedies and that this is primarily a movie by dudes for dudes, but...doesn't that just kind of compound the problem? Do we need to be validating the average guy's secret (or not so secret) fears that women's bodies are actually kinda nasty by reflecting them on the big screen? I get that it's a slippery slope for a mainstream movie to feel true to the average person's experience but goose the situations for humor while hopefully not just catering to the lowest common denominator. But, this is the same problem I had last year with Talladega Nights trying to riff on homophobia in a movie aimed at NASCAR fans and frat boys, not the most historically (or, yes, stereotypically) tolerant people on earth. I'm all for going to unspeakable places for the sake of the laugh (I do love Borat, after all), but I just wish these movies could be a little more responsible with their power. Especially considering there's no way that Superbad was number one at the American box office for two weekends in a row thanks exclusively to XY chromosomes. Guys were assuredly bringing dates, girlfriends, and wives along with them to the theater, and it just breaks my heart to think of an insecure teenage girl going to see this movie and being expected to sit through and perhaps even laugh at all the ways her body probably makes her boyfriend or crush recoil.

Is this movie very funny at points? Yes. I definitely laughed a lot. Like I say, Cera is just an unimpeachably brilliant comic actor and I would probably watch him read the proverbial phone book. Jonah Hill's filthy foulmouthed dialogue was like nothing so much as Cartman brought to life (though Dana Stevens brings up a very, very good point in Slate's review of the movie re: the way Seth enacts a very dubious moral code even in respect to his male friends), and there cannot be enough fulsome praise for Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the instantly iconic Fogell/McLovin. And, the fact that this is actually a love story about two best friends was indeed sweet. (Though the faux-morning after scene at the end just reuses the same joke from the more winkingly homoerotic Hot Fuzz.) I just wish a lot of these sex problems (in all biological senses of the term) weren't clouding the good times. Hell, at least give us a female character one half as offbeat and memorable as Charlyne Yi as Jodi in Knocked Up!

My summer of movies set in Paris continued this weekend with Dans Paris. Diminishing returns, my bebes, diminishing returns. Though kind of sexy in places and infinitely easy on the eyes with its blindingly attractive cast, its totally unearned tortured tone, aimlessness, and arty pretensions are pretty much exactly what give "foreign film" a bad name.

Indie rock fatigue seems to set in most acutely for me during the late summer, so, in an effort to distance myself for a little while from sad boys and girls with guitars, lately I've been feasting on M.I.A.'s new one, Kala, and Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass, both of which are rich, rich, rich and totally appealing in their onslaught of noise and lyric and gauntlet-throwing.

Speaking of indie rock fatigue: "the indie rock world is too polite and likable and I feel it needs the drunken uncle to show up, uninvited, to the birthday party and vomit on the couch. Not every year of course, but at least once in a while." --Kevin Barnes (via)

And, while I'm at it: "Lil Wayne. Believe the hype and then multiply it by ten. You are going to feel dumb if you realize in five years that you were too cool to enjoy the dataflow." --Sasha Frere-Jones (via Sasha Frere-Jones)

Raw Oreos

Raw Oreos
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

I know I don't talk much about personal stuff here usually, but raw food has kind of consumed my life lately, so my idle moments are spent dreaming up crap like ways to re-create Oreo cookies by modding preexisting recipes. Ah, what a way to kick off a three-day weekend!

The Men Don't Know, but the Little Girls Understand

If rock and roll doesn't make you feel like this on a fairly regular basis, you're doing it wrong.



(Via Pitchfork. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure it's the same kid from this picture.)

Beyonce, Live at the United Center

Kittens, I can't remember the last time I did something so mainstream and loved it so much. The Beyonce Experience (yes, this concert tour is actually, literally called "The Beyonce Experience") was everything I could have possibly wanted it to be (right down to and including the over-the-top pompousness of the name). Bright, colorful, loud, eager to please, equal parts dance party and inspiration-fest--this was a show for people who want/expect/need a little show in their shows. It was such a relief just to be able to sit back, let the circus do its job, and be entertained. They did all the work so I didn't have to.

I've ungenerously and flippantly referred previously to my "mixed feelings" about Beyonce, when I should've clarified that I'm actually completely fascinated by her as a performer and a leading figure in pop culture. (I can't believe she's been around for about 10 years now. Girl's clearly doing something right, and I don't think she's planning on going anywhere. Unless it's up, up, up.) She's so baldly hungry for power and glory--and that's OK. The great ones have to be, don't they? I'm getting a little sick of the "they're just like us" golden handcuffs we put on our actors and musicians. I mean, the odiousness of celebrities behaving badly is clearly appalling, but I also don't want to be lied to by artists who feel the need to reassure me they "haven't changed" and are "still the same person" they were before they got famous. Um, no, Beyonce's not just like me. Why on earth would it be necessary to my enjoyment of her music or her persona to think that we share some sort of common bond as people? She's a hugely successful, hugely talented pop star living a life completely unimaginable and undesirable to me. And I'm cool with that. Why shouldn't she be a bit of a megalomaniac? Anyway. There was something almost dorky in the abandon with which she was plainly reveling in being the center of so much attention. Yeah, she was quite obviously having fun on stage, but underneath the joy, you could also see the bossy little girl shrieking "mine! mine! mine! all mine!" in her smiles and twirls. She loved sharing the spotlight with her dancers and her foxy female band members because it was her spotlight to share. And hell, when you look at the enormity of the operation she's responsible for--the stage set-up, the crew, the musicians, and all the necessary logistics along the way--you kind of can't begrudge her the pleasure of the spotlight because that's a major load to be carrying, emotionally and financially, on one's shoulders.

And let us not overlook the not insignificant fact that she's eminently worthy of said spotlight because she's really, really fucking good at what she does. On the level of endurance alone, what she's doing is impressive, with the singing and dancing and costume changing and keeping the crowd fired up for two hours straight. And her voice. was. impeccable. All the melisma and showboating might get tiresome after a while, sure, but I was completely blown away (and willing to be blown away) that night by her powerhouse instrument. Because, when it comes down to it, that's really what we all paid all that money for--that voice and those songs and what that voice can do to those songs. The most stunning example of this was probably her performance of "Flaws and All" from the deluxe edition of B-Day. It's one of those "I don't know why you love me, but I love you because you do" songs (in fact, I think those might actually be some of the lyrics), and people went bananas for the fact that she had herself in tears by the end of it. I can't decide whether I feel slightly dirty about this or not, whether there's a tinge of whorishness in the way she contrived to work herself up into this fever pitch of emotion for our viewing/listening pleasure. (I'm just sayin'...it can't have been coincidence or simply good timing that the camera operator for the jumbotron knew to stay focused on her face for a tight closeup during the whole thing; I don't think there was a cutaway to a single full-length or torso shot until the end...when she was embraced by one of her obscenely--and I do mean obscenely--ripped male dancers who descended the staircase behind her wearing angel wings.) But, I also think she could never have found so much success as a singer without her ability to emote like that--to be both the mouthpiece for her audience's insufficiently/ineloquently expressed emotions and a sacrificial lamb, going through those tears night after night in order to bring us to some kind of point of catharsis.

This is all not to mention the big "Irreplaceable" singalong that just about closed the night. Talk about music doing work in people's lives. Of course, people probably would have been singing along regardless, and the organic nature of a spontaneous eruption of group song would have been infinitely more powerful, but B's control freakiness couldn't possibly leave something like that to chance, so it was that faux-graciousness again, not letting us forget that she was granting us permission to belt it out en masse while she looked on approvingly. But, it worked. This anthem of individual agency and self-sufficiency in the face of attempted displacement from the spotlight of one's own life hit its mark and got everyone, in accordance with B's whole musical project concerning "the dynamics of heterosexual relationships in the context of late capitalism" (as Matthew Fluxblog so brilliantly once put it), feeling better about their reasserted emotional net worth as individuals.

After the astonishingly average opening set of paint-by-numbers white boy R&B grooves from Robin Thicke (yes, son of Alan), I was sooo ready to sink my ears into some music with some actual substance, and it felt really good to have it (re)affirmed for me that, yeah, I ignore or discount Beyonce at my own peril and detriment. All in all, an incredibly fun night. Big love to my concertgoing companion Nick for taking those hairpin turns from snark to fan-girl freakout and back again with me without blinking an eye.

(Happy birthday, DS! Miss ya like hell, buddy.)