In Other Pie-in-the-Sky News

Don't forget tickets for Bjork's Chicago show at the Auditorium Theater in May go on sale tonight at 5. Godspeed, kittens.

Update: I actually managed to snag one! Sososo excited.

Neutral Milk News?

Update: Hahaha, motherfuckers. April Fools.

Um, WTF, is this for real? Is Neutral Milk Hotel really reuniting for a one-off festival gig this summer in Minneapolis sponsored by Tiny Mix Tapes? Or is TMT just fucking with us? Perhaps I should make a call to my peeps up north just in case. If it is true, damn, Pitchfork, you got treated!

LCD Hexagonsystem

Space boner alert! Have you guys heard about this hexagon thing the Cassini-Huygens mission has photographed on Saturn's North Pole? Peep dis (snip):

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region....

A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.

"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." "Whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack." Fucking rad, right?! Be sure to click through to the article itself to see the ridiculously cool pictures.

My music-listening habits can get so hermetic, what with the headphones and all, that sometimes it prohibits me from enjoying what I'm hearing. I'd been kind of knee-jerk with the meh about the new LCD Soundsystem, just because it's been so hyped lately (a full 90 on Metacritic; thx for the link, Richard). But then I heard "Get Innocuous!" out at the bar last night, and it was like someone had opened all the windows and doors and let a rush of cool spring night air in. It was just what my appreciation of the song needed. Revisiting it this morning, even with my headphones on the train, just confirmed the awesomeness. When those sharp, hard strings come in sounding like a traffic jam at the end and then get pulled way up in the mix to fully reveal themselves as a string section...wow. That's some of the most exciting stuff I've heard recently.

Chicagoans, have you been out to see the Bound Stems yet? I caught them opening for the Long Winters last weekend (OMG, another fucking mind-blower of a show), and they totally come off, in the best way possible, like Chicago's answer to the New Pornographers. They seem like a bunch of genuinely nice people having fun making music together, with an adorable, hooky tunefulness that's married to their own version of the stereotypical Chicago post-rock aesthetic. I'm just starting to spend some time with Appreciation Night, and I dig it so far. (Be sure to also check out the interview and free songs from their Daytrotter session last fall.)

Amy Winehouse and More

Not that the interweb needs another post of this nature right now, but Amy Winehouse's Back to Black is still very much making my head explode with its heavily righteous holy-fucking-shit amazingness. I mean, I liked the groovy throwback quality of "Ain't No Other Man" as much as the next person, but kittens, this is how an album's worth of blindingly white-hot retro-infused contemporary R&B/soul is done. Hell, she's even inspired me to revisit Ghostface's Fishscale, thanks to the ridiculously exciting verse he spits on the alternate take of "You Know I'm No Good" (which also appeared late last year on his More Fish). What kind of fuckery is this, indeed. Highly recommended.

Finally got around to checking out The Last King of Scotland this weekend; it's much better than I thought it would be. As my previous snarky remark about The Devil Wears Prada would indicate, I generally don't go in for descent-into-madness films, but this one worked for me for some reason. There's some infelicitous editing/imagery in one of the inevitable "oh god, what have I done??" sequences (voices and images literally swirling around a despondent and drunk James McAvoy's head), and I couldn't shake the creepy feeling at the end that, before I realized what had happened, I was suddenly watching just another action movie where the African men are scary and menacing and attemping, with great relish, to physically harm the anerable little white man who will inevitably escape to the bosom of freedom in the West after his little Dark Continental adventure. But, for the most part, it does some nice stuff with narrativizing the shifting dynamics of power plays between countries, cultures, sexes, political parties, families of origin vs. families of choice, and urban vs. rural lifestyles. And, not that all descent-into-madness films need be compared to Training Day, but as with Ethan Hawke in that movie, I think much of the reason Forest Whitaker ended up with the Oscar is because of the work McAvoy is doing opposite him, making him look good. He's much more than just a blank slate waiting to absorb the corruption around him; his own spiky little agenda locks into the jagged edges of power and hedonism that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by, and he deftly inhabits some of the more repugnant stereotypes of the Westerner visiting an African country in a way that they come off as both specific character traits and broader archetypes. I was definitely impressed.

Less impressive, though enjoyable in its own way, was The Namesake. I've never read the novel and don't know as much of Mira Nair's work as I wish I did, but the evocative preview totally suckered me in. The film, though, is strangely linear. It seems it would have been natural to play with time a bit, just to goose that sense of history repeating itself with significant variations along the way, as well as to give the narrative some extra (and much needed) dramatic heft. The plot (as such) meanders in a way that keeps it from achieving the coveted "the more specific, the more universal" quality that it was definitely aiming for. Like, the big reveal about why Nikolai Gogol was chosen as "the namesake" turns out to be...hold your breath...a train crash. Just a train crash. No Nazis aboard the train, no terrorists laying explosives down along the tracks, no cherubic urchins accidentally stumbling into the path of the engine's headlight. I kept waiting for the father's speech to crescendo loud enough that we could hear some subtext folded in there, but there was nothing. The accident wasn't doing any additional dramatic work in the context of the story. Sure sometimes a train crash really is just a train crash, but then it's just a sad thing that happened to somebody and not an intellectually or emotionally engaging inciting incident that's the supposed raison d'etre of a major novel or movie. Shrug. At any rate, Irfan Khan is subtly charistmatic and slyly, magnetically sexy as the Ganguli patriarch, and, though Kal Penn struggles a bit with the heavier emotions, he's still really cute and really fun to watch. His body language in the scenes while he's still a teenager totally gives away his background in broad physical comedy; he's effortlessly funny with just one exasperated roll of his eyes.

Oh, yeah, and Daydream Nation this summer, anyone?

Two Great Tastes, Etc.

Eagle-eyed (and -eared) FoWE (Friend of Wrestling Entropy) Benji Kelnardo recently alerted me to the fact that Beyonce and Shakira have collaborated on a song, and its attendant video, called "Beautiful Liar," which will appear on the forthcoming deluxe edition of B'Day.

As many of you know, I have deeply mixed feelings about both these artists, but may I hazard here a "holy shit"??? What perfectly crazy motherfucking genius came up with this idea? This is why we follow pop culture, kittens. I think I had five orgasms when I watched this for the first time:



People, we can achieve world peace with this video. Please spread the word.

RIP Richard Jeni

RIP Richard Jeni. Wow, that's a shitty thing to hear about first thing on a rainy Monday morning. One of my greatest pleasures during summer vacation as a smallish child and middle schooler was being able to stay up late on weeknights to watch A&E's Evening at the Improv. This was just as the art of American stand-up comedy was cresting the peak of its 1980s heyday and beginning its subsequent decline into endless "stand-up gets a lackluster sitcom loosely based around his/her material" territory. And, like any impressionable youngster in a foreign country, I subconsciously absorbed the cadences of their speech and the "what is the deal with [pop culture artifact of your choice]?" sensibility. (OMG, there's a reason the Saturday Night Live sketch "Stand Up and Win" is one of my favorite segments of television ever.) I fondly remember many of Jeni's routines, esp. the bit about the football referee abusing the power of his microphone to voice some personal concerns best left to his therapist's couch, and am saddened to know one of the mainstays of that comedy epoch is gone.

(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)

New Music Geekery

"The record collector/taper/blogger mentality is really close to Catholicism in many people. Collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography. Show me an altar boy and I'll show you a potential record geek."
OK, the fantastic three-part Fluxblog interview with Rob Sheffield from this week totally just made me order Love Is a Mix Tape from Amazon. I was kind of casually interested in checking it out before, but dude comes off as so smart and funny, now I'm actively looking forward to spending 240 pages with him.

Prepare ye the way of the Bjork: Medulla follow-up Volta finally comes out in May.

"I don't know how much we've evolved if we still freak out before and after every show. Some shows are great, and some shows suck. And it's usually all us; it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's a big or small crowd. Sometimes we have things click for us, and sometimes we kind of fall apart. But that's part of the excitement of it, too."
You guys are probably going to get sick of me linking to stuff hyping the release of the National's Boxer, but, oh well, get used to it. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, check out the P4K interview with Matt Berninger.

2007 is seriously going to rule for new music. We've got the two mentioned above, and news comes down through both Stereogum and the Fork this week that we've got new Laura Veirs to look forward to this spring too.

On the First of March, On the Holiday

I haven't listened to Illinois in ages, but for whatever reason decided put it on my Nano this morning and ended up listening to the first half of it on the train on the way home tonight. I was just stepping off the platform in my neighborhood when I had one of those moments iPods were made for: in the chilly twilight, Sufjan was whispering in my ear "on the first of March, on the holiday."

Casimir Pulaski Day.

I know it's very popular to hate on Soof these days, but I just live for moments of synchronicity like that. The delicate melacholy of the music brought me back to the day, and the (relative) relief of leaving the misery of February behind brought me back to the music I'd temporarily forgotten I loved. I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd found myself leading a parade of bunnies and friendly foxes down the street to my front door.