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.)

Great Writing by Other People

Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker (via).

James Green Pea-ness on why the Nintendo DS game Elite Beat Agents is a stunning piece of interactive pop criticism.

And, though only an excerpt is available online, Nick Hornby's interview with David Simon in the August '07 issue of The Believer is so good it's just unreal. Luckily, the bit that is available on the web is absolutely one of the high points of the whole exchange ("Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions"). Do yourself a favor and seek out the issue for the full thing.

Women in Music and Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Is it just me or have the past two years been really outstanding for music made by women? In 2006 we had insanely great albums from Regina Spektor, Camille, My Brightest Diamond, Kaki King, Christine Fellows, CSS, Joanna Newsom, and Neko Case (not to mention Cat Power, the Pipettes, and Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife), and this year has already (already? the year's like more than half over, AF--ed.) brought new stuff from Bjork, Laura Veirs, Amy Winehouse, Lucky Soul (featuring the chirpily powerhouse vocals of Ali Howard), the Long Blondes, Tracey Thorn, Feist, Polly Paulusma, and St. Vincent (who comes the closest I've ever heard in contemporary indie rock to emulating/channeling/updating the great Jackie Cain's playful yet mournful yet musically sophisticated singing style). I have no hypothesis or commentary about this or anything, I'm just sayin'. It's awesome. (Alt: "I'm just saying it's awesome!")

One-liner of the week month year decade? Be sure to explore his site for a bit while you're clicked through, especially the running tally of films seen in '07. I couldn't agree more on the point that the pleasures of Ocean's 13 (and 11 as well, I suppose; 12 remains dead to me) are largely tangled up with ideas of work. Of course, sexiness and silliness abound in these trifles, but it's also nice to get lost in a place where people are really good at what they do, confident in their abilities, eventually rewarded for their effort, and surrounded by equally talented and supportive associates. I mean, Vegas and Brad Pitt's bone structure to one side, this is the dream, right? This is what we're all looking for in one way or another?

Finally had a chance to catch Sunshine this weekend (the new one on the spaceship, not the older one with Ralph Fiennes's soapy D). Despite my affection for Danny Boyle, or maybe because of it, I'm willing to concede it was a swing-and-a-miss. It was ambitious as hell, which not enough movies are anymore (at least intellectually), and I have a feeling a lot of the visuals are going to stick with me for a while (esp. the many times we see the wonderful Cliff Curtis standing in the observation room, silhouetted against the glowing mass of the sun). But, the plot was giving me a serious case of the "huh?"s (and not in the good way), especially toward the "climactic" ending, and the script was laden with way too much dumbed-down exposition, a fact which was not helped by the bafflingly miscast crew. Now, my feelings about Cillian Murphy perhaps need not be stated, but come on--he's the one you're going to choose as your shipboard physicist on your suicide mission to the sun? Please. Likewise the rest of the beefy, generically handsome dudes, especially Chris Evans with his almost comically needless and situationally inappropriate perpetual huffiness. Michelle Yeoh gets a pass because, well, she's Michelle Yeoh, but the role was a joke and she was clearly doing everything she could to redeem it, and Rose Byrne was essentially doing a pale imitation of the genuinely sweet, smart strength of Jewel Staite as Kaylee in Serenity/Firefly. I'm sure most of these actors have their charms, but, on the whole, everyone was just too damn good looking. I longed for the sight of a few of those gloriously lumpy Scottish mugs in Trainspotting, or Brendan Gleeson from 28 Days Later. And while a years-long mission through the solar system with a tiny crew in constant contact and constant awareness of their own mortality should have been a perfect vehicle to examine Danny Boyle's usual interest in the ways that social groups break down under the weight of their own entropy, there was nothing about the degradation of the crew's relationships that seemed earned or organic. From the start, they were nothing more than walking representations of the most sophomoric ideas of character conflict, and without any lingering past affection established between them at all (Yeoh's deep connection to the plants in the greenhouse being the one possible exception; Murphy and Byrne's sleepytime discussion of their surface-of-the-sun nightmares decidedly not), there was no room to move within the realm of cynicism and distrust. The rot had already infected everything on screen, and not in an interesting or nuanced way, and so the only stakes left seemed to be vague, lofty ideals about their duty to the rest of the human race. Reverse those two, and then maybe you have a movie worth caring about and not an inadvertent dramatization of our current administration's rhetoric. Anyway, there's no way I'm giving up on Danny Boyle; I criticize because I care!