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.)
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
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."
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."
Sunday, September 09, 2007
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.
Monday, September 03, 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)
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)
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