Here we find ourselves at the conclusion of another year that I feel ill-equipped to summarize as far as movies go. I saw stuff, and I enjoyed stuff, though not nearly as much as I'd hoped (on both counts) at the beginning of '08. Nevertheless, I didn't want list-making season to pass without a chance to comment on a few things.
My favorite movie of the year, without a doubt, was Rachel Getting Married. No question. It's stuck with me the longest, and the most vividly, and it's the film I'm most keen on revisiting. I can understand why it annoyed other people, but the melodrama touched me deeply, as did the joy, the humor, the music, the beauty, and finally, the love. Decidedly the right movie at the right time for me.
Contrary to what knocked me out most about Snow Angels when I first saw it, the image from the film that's haunted me for months now is that final shot of Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale together in the woods. The creepy-crawly combination of rage, delusion, a diseased kind of love/familiarity, and suffocating self-hatred is absolutely devastating.
I know I'm not alone in thinking so, but several months after its release, the very fact of Wall-E's existence still seems like something of a minor miracle.
I went on my customary year-end movie binge this past weekend since I have several days off work and not much else going on right now. I may or may not get around to writing about the lion's share here later, esp. the ones that I could do some serious carping about, but the two that hit me hardest (at least initially--who's to say how long they'll linger?) were Happy-Go-Lucky and The Wrestler. The thing that seems most awesome about Happy-Go-Lucky is the fact that it's just such an improbable subject for a movie that nevertheless feels as taut and irreducible as the most ingeniously plotted caper film. A girl with an eternally sunny disposition gets her bike stolen and so decides to take driving lessons? That's it? That's the movie? And yet of course it's so much more--about what it is to be a true teacher, about how our subjective view of the world is indistinguishable from our experience of the world and colors our interactions with other people, about family of birth and family of choice, about being open to the strangeness of the Other and the greater ramifications of your relative willingness or unwillingness to be so. Beautiful stuff. And The Wrestler, unless I'm way off the mark, seems like the perfect companion piece to There Will Be Blood with which to bookend 2008, another anguished meditation on American bullshittery, pride, failure, and redemption. The use of the term of endearment "brother" throughout endlessly delighted me, and the fact that Marisa Tomei's character makes a Passion of the Christ reference was so inspired it nearly left me breathless with both laughter and brain-tickling wonder. You can read a billion other reviews that'll tell you all about how good Mickey Rourke is--and they're probably all right. One of those performance-of-a-lifetime kinda deals; we're talking some Norma Desmond shit up in here.
As long as we're making lists, I might as well make final mention of a few other things that have been important to me this year.
Books: the Scott Pilgrim series (initial impressions here), Suketu Mehta's Maximum City (my review here), May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, and Dainin Katagiri's Each Moment Is the Universe.
Concerts: Radiohead at Lollapalooza, and, as mentioned in my year-end musical summary, Caribou at the Empty Bottle and the Tomorrow Never Knows festival at Schuba's. Also, on quite the other end of the spectrum, Scott Weiland headlining Q101's big Twisted Christmas finale show at the House of Blues, for being one of the most impressively awful shows I've ever seen.
Food: I had amazing dinners at the Green Zebra here in Chicago this spring and Grezzo in Boston over Labor Day weekend. Also, I didn't eat solid food from mid-June to mid-July while I was on a 30-day "juice feast." One of the most difficult and most rewarding things I've ever done, and I'm pretty sure it's the primary reason why my doctor was finally able to take me off my high blood pressure medication.
People: I went to a bunch of weddings. I went on a bunch of dates. I became casually friendly with a handful of genuine rock stars. I read a bunch of smart stuff on the internet written by both friends and complete strangers, much of it via weird and difficult-to-explain (to the uninitiated, at least) new media like Tumblr and Twitter. I voted for some skinny biracial dude from Chicago who's gearing up to become the leader of the free world on January 20.
All in all, it was a singularly weird year. But a memorable and important one. Have fun tonight, kittens, and I'll see you back 'round these parts in 2009.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Best Music of 2008
My darlings. It's that time again, time to share with you some thoughts about some songs that sorta define my year in music. If you need a reminder of where we've been, you may also be interested in referring to years 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. For those of you who are waiting for copies of this mix to be delivered to you, in person or in the mail, I'll ask you to sit tight for another week or two. I'm having the liner notes professionally printed, and it's just going to take a while to finish up with production.
For reasons that will probably be clear as you read on, my number-one album this year is Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago.
It's always a pleasure to get to share my thoughts with you. Thanks as always for coming along for the ride.
And herewith, my notes on my favorite music in 2008. I've called the comp In Some Small Way We're All Traitors to Our Own Cause. Enjoy.
*
My year-end mixes are always baldly autobiographical/sentimental of course, but this time it feels moreso somehow. I'm enormously pleased with how it turned out and feel it's as even-handedly representative of my musical year as these things ever are/can be, yet when I look at the track listing, I flush a little to myself, feeling like I'm standing in front of the class in my underpants, trying to give a straight-faced book report on The Red Badge of Courage despite my goods being on display for all the world to see.
Truthfully, and probably tellingly, I resisted the prospect of choosing tracks for this comp when the time came around to do so. It was difficult for me to nail down a definitive listing, and I was constantly swapping in and out songs that seemed sexier or more like they "should" be on the mix. When I eventually settled on these 17, I was happy with the overall vibe and flow, yet felt like most of these songs were interchangeable with a handful of others that got seemingly arbitrarily jettisoned.
Yet the more I lived with the track list, the more I realized this batch solidified the way it did because all the songs feel intimately tied to very specific points along the continuum of this emotionally turbulent year for me. They may not be the hippest bangers off their respective albums, and their association with my life may be more cerebral than temporal/experiential, but a deep and definite connection is there for me nonetheless.
As I was beginning work on these notes, I transcribed into my notebook, as a kind of inspiration, guiding light, mantra, and gentle reminder, a quote from Carl Wilson's magnificent 33 1/3 offering Let's Talk About Love:
But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors--to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare.
I'll do my best to uphold the noblest parts of that sentiment for you now. And if I fall short, at least there's the music--there's always the music.
*
1.) My Favorite Year--Destroyer
Once you break the surface of a Destroyer song, to say nothing of a Destroyer album, there's this wide open expanse on the other side, and you can just keep traveling deeper and farther into it if you choose to do so. The songs morph and twist and bend, becoming oracles, holy writ, pratfalls, piss-takes, and all of these simultaneously sometimes. It's this both/and quality in the music that I find so terribly appealing--Dan Bejar is both utterly serious and full of shit, and, on Trouble in Dreams especially, exposing the dark heart of the world while providing an ultimately illuminating aesthetic experience. The tension is irresistible, and, in this year that's seen so much fall apart, with the potential for so much redemption within our grasp, invigorating and instructive.
I listen to this song and hear within it, like peering into some kind of aural snowglobe, a collapsing of past and present as well as a strain toward growth that, despite best efforts and intentions, can't help but loop back on itself, wandering, homeless, vamping ad nauseum without progress or resolution. It's familiar but unsettling, rotted through at its core but all the more beautiful for the rift cleaved into its heart. Of course it also contains my favorite line in perhaps the whole of Destroyer's output, certainly my favorite line from any song this year, the line that gives this comp its name.
The whole point of everything may be the moving on, but I kept obsessively returning to this song. Some patterns you choose to repeat.
2.) Fools--The Dodos
I can still smell the damp, achy spring thaw hanging like misty condensation around the vibrations of the guitar strings in this song. I can still feel the dull thud of pavement in the soles of my feet with every floor tom beat down. I can still feel a confused and desperate romantic pinch in my heart with every one of Meric Long's ferocious yelps. What else can I say--the Dodos' Visiter was a singular soundtrack to my long walks around and through my city this spring. The album is a bit too long and betrays a still-young band's self-indulgence, but the sexy tribal heave of "Fools" does everything just right.
3.) After Hours—Caribou
I've, historically, not been known among close friends as a crier. So, one of the most unexpected, and, in some ways, welcome, developments of '08 was my transformation into, well, something of a basket case, frankly. Name an event, and chances are I've sobbed through it this year: movies, concerts, sex, meditation, and, in Caribou's case, laundry. Yep, Caribou made me cry doing laundry. It was the morning after their transcendent springtime concert, and as I sat watching my clothes tumble dry, I got to mulling, and then tearing up, over the previous night's events: the pastel wonderland the normally dark and scuzzy Empty Bottle became under the magical influence of the band's psychedelic projected backdrop and what a warm, welcome, enveloping setting it was, if only for a few hours, after an exaggeratedly pain-in-the-ass winter in Chicago; the musicians' genial ferocity as they tore through an inspired selection of songs from Andorra and The Milk of Human Kindness; and how thankful I was to be there to witness the phenomenal brilliance of the propulsive double drum attacks between sit-in drummer Ahmed Gallab and the polymusically gifted Dan Snaith. The exotic, weirdly circular drum pattern here always brings me back to that gray Saturday morning in April when I was overcome by the beauty of the remembrance of what had just passed and the sweet yet forlorn sadness that came with knowing I couldn't share my enthusiasm about it with one of the few people who ever would have truly understood and appreciated it.
4.) Cotillion Blues--White Rabbits
One of the most important things I did, both musically and creatively, this year was cover four of the five nights of the annual Tomorrow Never Knows festival for Daytrotter. It was my first time ever being on a guest list at the door (it's the little thrills, kittens) and it introduced me to a lot of the music that would come to define my 2008. I wasn't exactly bowled over by the White Rabbits' performance that weekend, but at least it led me to this track, which has brought me months of pleasure. Aside from the excitement of the slightly unhinged vocal performance, the sleazy/drunken horns, and the burlesque bounce of the drums (yes, I was a whore for beats this year, even more than usual), the thing that thrills me most about this song is the way it always makes me feel perhaps irrationally wistful for the days when everybody did the Stroll at weddings and other formal dances instead of the Electric Slide.
5.) Right as Rain--Adele
In some ways--OK, many ways--it's a bit embarrassing to be closing in on one's thirties and yet still be so acutely affected by an album called 19 because that's how old the singer was when she wrote the songs. And yet I found myself repeatedly drawn to Adele's debut this year, as much for the chance it gave me to wallow for a bit in its moony emotional landscape as for her tastefully dewy blue-eyed-soul crooning. Plus, despite her age, I really appreciated the remarkably insightful observation in this song that sometimes it's so much easier and more comfortable and even more exciting to embrace the feeling that you're totally alone and that the world's against you than it is to wait for the fleeting moments when everything's going right.
6.) Gardenia--Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Two minutes and 53 seconds of jangly indie rock perfection from one of the inventors of the genre. I just can't find anything not to love about this song, which in some ways is the flower pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack, etc., etc., of Real Emotional Trash--a tiny, unexpected burst of color preserved with care and not a little poignancy in the midst of all the lengthy, discursive rockers.
7.) Cuddle Fuddle--Passion Pit
And sometimes, contra Adele, everything does go right in your life for a few brief moments. It's fall in the city, you're happy and having fun, and things are good. When I first heard this song, I described it as feeling like roller skating on the best acid trip ever. But no, it's walking, just walking, one foot in front of the other, but with a bounce in your step and your head in the clouds and a smile in your heart. When that last layer of bass finally kicks in at 2:03, it's sublime.
8.) Mess Your Hair Up--White Denim
Another Tomorrow Never Knows band. The American version (Exposion) of their first full-length finally came out at the end of this year, but, truthfully, I had so much more fun combing the internet for stray MP3s all spring after I nearly wore a hole in their 2007 EP Let's Talk About It. Equal parts goofy and snotty, this band yields itchy post-punk pleasure that surprises and delights me every moment that it doesn't just completely fall apart.
9.) Ramblin' (Wo)man--Cat Power
This is a slick, dusky, red-eye, cross-country flight of a song. It's somehow both otherworldly and supremely tactile, confident and apologetic, East Coast and West Coast, male and female, cover and original--name a duality and this track is stuck somewhere in the middle of it. This unsolvable/unresolvable quality is a large part of what, ultimately, left me cold on the album as a whole, but it's also probably what kept me coming back to this cut repeatedly all year. Sexy and lonely, chilled out and anxious . . .
10.) While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear
I've never been the biggest Grizzly Bear fan, despite all the ways that their sound and sensibility seem tailor-made to appeal to me, but I find this song pretty captivating. I think it's something to do with the chord progressions leaning a little more toward '70s AM radio sunshine and Dan Rossen's vocals leaning a little bit away from the queer aesthete's languor that usually dominates Ed Droste's contributions. But, perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay this song is the fact that it's actually weirdly difficult for me to pay attention to it, regardless of how many times I've listened to it. I constantly find myself getting lost in all that space, blissed out in some kind of four-and-a-half-minute meditative state. I hear the lyrics and the grand cymbal crashes and the warm blankets of woah-oh harmony, sure, yet I don't internalize them. They float past, leaving a pleasant bit of residue behind, but not much else. It's pop song as conduit for pure presence, less waiting for the others than it is waiting for Godot.
11.) Grapevine Fires--Death Cab for Cutie
This isn't the most immediately attention-grabbing or flashy song off DCFC's severely slept-upon and underrated Narrow Stairs, but its deceptive simplicity is the very thing that endeared it to me. Just listen to how ridiculously finely honed and efficient the songwriting is. Gibbard's got all these different strands woven together: the majestic terror of West Coast wildfires, a new and ambiguous relationship, and the kind of ephemeral sense of hope and peace that's usually impossible, and pointless, to try to articulate. As each detail is carefully unpacked, the song becomes like a tiny studio apartment, where every piece of furniture serves at least two or three separate functions with a beautifully seamless sense of minimalism. Much like profoundly deep love or natural disaster, hearing a gifted artist operating near the top of his game, like Gibbard is here, provokes a certain uncanny surrender to something that's simultaneously completely natural and existentially terrifying. The mind boggles.
12.) Doo Right--Man Man
Every time I think I know what my favorite line in this song is, I invariably find myself writing out all the lyrics to the whole damn thing. The hysterical romantic desperation here is deeply funny (think John Cusack howling "Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let's work it out!" in High Fidelity, but with less misogyny) and deeply touching. Man Man may be best known for their crazy circus arrangements and onstage antics, and lord knows I'd never change that about them now that I've seen how powerful their performances can be, but it's good to be reminded every once in a while what's always at the center of it: a man at the piano, exposing his voice and his wit and his heart for all the world to see.
13.) Cheap and Cheerful--The Kills
Now this is a pep squad rallying cry I can get behind. For me, when Alison Mosshart sings about being crazy or mean, it's really not about endorsing petty or hurtful behavior; it's a black-leather-pants way of saying "be true to yourself, even if it's ugly." I'm sure we've all had the experience of being with a person when she lets her mask slip a little bit. And it's glorious, isn't it? Finally hearing someone's true voice and not her cheap cheerfulness? Life's too short for bullshit, our time together too brief to waste on meaningless pleasantries and empty generalities.
14.) Golden Age--TV on the Radio
For all my bitching about how overrated I think Dear Science is, I haven't really given myself room to talk about how much I actually like the album and genuinely enjoy listening to it. It's full of many muscular and velveteen pleasures, rounded valleys and craggy edges and midnight blue depths giving way to occasional pastel washes of pulsing illumination. And "Golden Age" seems fairly emblematic of all these things, the warm beating heart of optimism in an otherwise angry and even cynical album. Plus, in my mind, I'll always think of it as "the Obama song," so it's hard for me not to feel incredibly enthused every time I hear it.
15.) Green Light--Jamie Lidell
When I find myself in moments of internal emotional crisis, especially when they're precipitated by my own lack of mental clarity rather than any genuine external stimulus, it's often helpful to step back and give myself permission to fall apart or be a little bad or follow some weird obsession or fixation to its logical conclusion if it speaks to a deeper part of my soul. Maybe it's lame and new agey, but as a kind of sister sentiment to the theme of "Cheap and Cheerful," this kind of "green light" can be a powerful tool to stop myself from continuing to lie to myself or trying to be something I'm not. Amusingly enough, this dramatic arc played itself out in miniature as I was trying to decide which Jamie Lidell song to feature on this mix. For months I was convinced it would be the Son Lux remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good" (aka "Just the Sound of Your Voice")--it was fun and funky and witty and would have provided a nice burst of energy. But when I started dragging and dropping tracks into a new "best of '08" playlist, my cursor instinctively reached for "Green Light." And that was that. There just wasn't any point in denying that, yes, this was the song I'd want to listen to on repeat for years to come. Between the emotional tenor of the lyrics and Jamie's sweet and soulful delivery of them--when something's right, it's just right.
16.) San Bernadino--The Mountain Goats
This song became something of a running joke in my own head this year: could I ever listen, I mean, truly listen, to it all the way through without crying? To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. And it's not like there's one line that reliably triggers me every time (though "I pulled petals from my pocket / I loved you so much just then" usually can do the trick)--the story is just so well painted and evocative and powerfully performed that it's essentially capable of doing a control-alt-delete on whatever else may be happening around me at the time when it's playing, leaving me all alone with John's voice and Erik Friedlander's ridiculous cello and a quiver in my chin.
And speaking of John's voice, that may be the most startling talking point around Heretic Pride and the Satanic Messiah EP, if anyone were actually talking about it: it's old news by now to rave about his lyrics, but who'd ever have anticipated, post-Get Lonely, his transformation into such a warm, controlled, yet still heartbreakingly emotive vocalist?
17.) Re: Stacks--Bon Iver
Have you ever had to forgive yourself? Not for some dumbass thing you may have said or done while you were drunk or distracted, but for not having had enough compassion for the pain in your own heart? Bon Iver made a bridge for me with his music this year between a winter of darkness and a summertime of healing, and, standing in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, listening to him play most of For Emma, Forever Ago at dusk, I was able to forgive myself in a way I don't think I've ever truly experienced before. Catharsis isn't even the word for it. I think it was actually something closer to the essence of what he means when he sings "your love will be safe with me," one of the most beautiful benedictions I could hope to leave you with. It's my sincere wish that you find an occasion to say that to someone, be it yourself or someone else dear to you, in 2009.
*
Honorable mention this year goes to the Walkmen's You and Me (esp. "Donde Esta la Playa"), Shearwater's Rook, Fuck Buttons' Street Horrrsing, the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely, Estelle's "American Boy," King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner," the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm, Juana Molina's Un Dia, and Blitzen Trapper's Furr, not to mention the exciting new stuff put out by my local faves Aleks and the Drummer, Jeff Harms, Bound Stems, Baby Teeth, and King Sparrow.
For reasons that will probably be clear as you read on, my number-one album this year is Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago.
It's always a pleasure to get to share my thoughts with you. Thanks as always for coming along for the ride.
And herewith, my notes on my favorite music in 2008. I've called the comp In Some Small Way We're All Traitors to Our Own Cause. Enjoy.
*
My year-end mixes are always baldly autobiographical/sentimental of course, but this time it feels moreso somehow. I'm enormously pleased with how it turned out and feel it's as even-handedly representative of my musical year as these things ever are/can be, yet when I look at the track listing, I flush a little to myself, feeling like I'm standing in front of the class in my underpants, trying to give a straight-faced book report on The Red Badge of Courage despite my goods being on display for all the world to see.
Truthfully, and probably tellingly, I resisted the prospect of choosing tracks for this comp when the time came around to do so. It was difficult for me to nail down a definitive listing, and I was constantly swapping in and out songs that seemed sexier or more like they "should" be on the mix. When I eventually settled on these 17, I was happy with the overall vibe and flow, yet felt like most of these songs were interchangeable with a handful of others that got seemingly arbitrarily jettisoned.
Yet the more I lived with the track list, the more I realized this batch solidified the way it did because all the songs feel intimately tied to very specific points along the continuum of this emotionally turbulent year for me. They may not be the hippest bangers off their respective albums, and their association with my life may be more cerebral than temporal/experiential, but a deep and definite connection is there for me nonetheless.
As I was beginning work on these notes, I transcribed into my notebook, as a kind of inspiration, guiding light, mantra, and gentle reminder, a quote from Carl Wilson's magnificent 33 1/3 offering Let's Talk About Love:
I'll do my best to uphold the noblest parts of that sentiment for you now. And if I fall short, at least there's the music--there's always the music.
*
1.) My Favorite Year--Destroyer
Once you break the surface of a Destroyer song, to say nothing of a Destroyer album, there's this wide open expanse on the other side, and you can just keep traveling deeper and farther into it if you choose to do so. The songs morph and twist and bend, becoming oracles, holy writ, pratfalls, piss-takes, and all of these simultaneously sometimes. It's this both/and quality in the music that I find so terribly appealing--Dan Bejar is both utterly serious and full of shit, and, on Trouble in Dreams especially, exposing the dark heart of the world while providing an ultimately illuminating aesthetic experience. The tension is irresistible, and, in this year that's seen so much fall apart, with the potential for so much redemption within our grasp, invigorating and instructive.
I listen to this song and hear within it, like peering into some kind of aural snowglobe, a collapsing of past and present as well as a strain toward growth that, despite best efforts and intentions, can't help but loop back on itself, wandering, homeless, vamping ad nauseum without progress or resolution. It's familiar but unsettling, rotted through at its core but all the more beautiful for the rift cleaved into its heart. Of course it also contains my favorite line in perhaps the whole of Destroyer's output, certainly my favorite line from any song this year, the line that gives this comp its name.
The whole point of everything may be the moving on, but I kept obsessively returning to this song. Some patterns you choose to repeat.
2.) Fools--The Dodos
I can still smell the damp, achy spring thaw hanging like misty condensation around the vibrations of the guitar strings in this song. I can still feel the dull thud of pavement in the soles of my feet with every floor tom beat down. I can still feel a confused and desperate romantic pinch in my heart with every one of Meric Long's ferocious yelps. What else can I say--the Dodos' Visiter was a singular soundtrack to my long walks around and through my city this spring. The album is a bit too long and betrays a still-young band's self-indulgence, but the sexy tribal heave of "Fools" does everything just right.
3.) After Hours—Caribou
I've, historically, not been known among close friends as a crier. So, one of the most unexpected, and, in some ways, welcome, developments of '08 was my transformation into, well, something of a basket case, frankly. Name an event, and chances are I've sobbed through it this year: movies, concerts, sex, meditation, and, in Caribou's case, laundry. Yep, Caribou made me cry doing laundry. It was the morning after their transcendent springtime concert, and as I sat watching my clothes tumble dry, I got to mulling, and then tearing up, over the previous night's events: the pastel wonderland the normally dark and scuzzy Empty Bottle became under the magical influence of the band's psychedelic projected backdrop and what a warm, welcome, enveloping setting it was, if only for a few hours, after an exaggeratedly pain-in-the-ass winter in Chicago; the musicians' genial ferocity as they tore through an inspired selection of songs from Andorra and The Milk of Human Kindness; and how thankful I was to be there to witness the phenomenal brilliance of the propulsive double drum attacks between sit-in drummer Ahmed Gallab and the polymusically gifted Dan Snaith. The exotic, weirdly circular drum pattern here always brings me back to that gray Saturday morning in April when I was overcome by the beauty of the remembrance of what had just passed and the sweet yet forlorn sadness that came with knowing I couldn't share my enthusiasm about it with one of the few people who ever would have truly understood and appreciated it.
4.) Cotillion Blues--White Rabbits
One of the most important things I did, both musically and creatively, this year was cover four of the five nights of the annual Tomorrow Never Knows festival for Daytrotter. It was my first time ever being on a guest list at the door (it's the little thrills, kittens) and it introduced me to a lot of the music that would come to define my 2008. I wasn't exactly bowled over by the White Rabbits' performance that weekend, but at least it led me to this track, which has brought me months of pleasure. Aside from the excitement of the slightly unhinged vocal performance, the sleazy/drunken horns, and the burlesque bounce of the drums (yes, I was a whore for beats this year, even more than usual), the thing that thrills me most about this song is the way it always makes me feel perhaps irrationally wistful for the days when everybody did the Stroll at weddings and other formal dances instead of the Electric Slide.
5.) Right as Rain--Adele
In some ways--OK, many ways--it's a bit embarrassing to be closing in on one's thirties and yet still be so acutely affected by an album called 19 because that's how old the singer was when she wrote the songs. And yet I found myself repeatedly drawn to Adele's debut this year, as much for the chance it gave me to wallow for a bit in its moony emotional landscape as for her tastefully dewy blue-eyed-soul crooning. Plus, despite her age, I really appreciated the remarkably insightful observation in this song that sometimes it's so much easier and more comfortable and even more exciting to embrace the feeling that you're totally alone and that the world's against you than it is to wait for the fleeting moments when everything's going right.
6.) Gardenia--Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Two minutes and 53 seconds of jangly indie rock perfection from one of the inventors of the genre. I just can't find anything not to love about this song, which in some ways is the flower pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack, etc., etc., of Real Emotional Trash--a tiny, unexpected burst of color preserved with care and not a little poignancy in the midst of all the lengthy, discursive rockers.
7.) Cuddle Fuddle--Passion Pit
And sometimes, contra Adele, everything does go right in your life for a few brief moments. It's fall in the city, you're happy and having fun, and things are good. When I first heard this song, I described it as feeling like roller skating on the best acid trip ever. But no, it's walking, just walking, one foot in front of the other, but with a bounce in your step and your head in the clouds and a smile in your heart. When that last layer of bass finally kicks in at 2:03, it's sublime.
8.) Mess Your Hair Up--White Denim
Another Tomorrow Never Knows band. The American version (Exposion) of their first full-length finally came out at the end of this year, but, truthfully, I had so much more fun combing the internet for stray MP3s all spring after I nearly wore a hole in their 2007 EP Let's Talk About It. Equal parts goofy and snotty, this band yields itchy post-punk pleasure that surprises and delights me every moment that it doesn't just completely fall apart.
9.) Ramblin' (Wo)man--Cat Power
This is a slick, dusky, red-eye, cross-country flight of a song. It's somehow both otherworldly and supremely tactile, confident and apologetic, East Coast and West Coast, male and female, cover and original--name a duality and this track is stuck somewhere in the middle of it. This unsolvable/unresolvable quality is a large part of what, ultimately, left me cold on the album as a whole, but it's also probably what kept me coming back to this cut repeatedly all year. Sexy and lonely, chilled out and anxious . . .
10.) While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear
I've never been the biggest Grizzly Bear fan, despite all the ways that their sound and sensibility seem tailor-made to appeal to me, but I find this song pretty captivating. I think it's something to do with the chord progressions leaning a little more toward '70s AM radio sunshine and Dan Rossen's vocals leaning a little bit away from the queer aesthete's languor that usually dominates Ed Droste's contributions. But, perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay this song is the fact that it's actually weirdly difficult for me to pay attention to it, regardless of how many times I've listened to it. I constantly find myself getting lost in all that space, blissed out in some kind of four-and-a-half-minute meditative state. I hear the lyrics and the grand cymbal crashes and the warm blankets of woah-oh harmony, sure, yet I don't internalize them. They float past, leaving a pleasant bit of residue behind, but not much else. It's pop song as conduit for pure presence, less waiting for the others than it is waiting for Godot.
11.) Grapevine Fires--Death Cab for Cutie
This isn't the most immediately attention-grabbing or flashy song off DCFC's severely slept-upon and underrated Narrow Stairs, but its deceptive simplicity is the very thing that endeared it to me. Just listen to how ridiculously finely honed and efficient the songwriting is. Gibbard's got all these different strands woven together: the majestic terror of West Coast wildfires, a new and ambiguous relationship, and the kind of ephemeral sense of hope and peace that's usually impossible, and pointless, to try to articulate. As each detail is carefully unpacked, the song becomes like a tiny studio apartment, where every piece of furniture serves at least two or three separate functions with a beautifully seamless sense of minimalism. Much like profoundly deep love or natural disaster, hearing a gifted artist operating near the top of his game, like Gibbard is here, provokes a certain uncanny surrender to something that's simultaneously completely natural and existentially terrifying. The mind boggles.
12.) Doo Right--Man Man
Every time I think I know what my favorite line in this song is, I invariably find myself writing out all the lyrics to the whole damn thing. The hysterical romantic desperation here is deeply funny (think John Cusack howling "Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let's work it out!" in High Fidelity, but with less misogyny) and deeply touching. Man Man may be best known for their crazy circus arrangements and onstage antics, and lord knows I'd never change that about them now that I've seen how powerful their performances can be, but it's good to be reminded every once in a while what's always at the center of it: a man at the piano, exposing his voice and his wit and his heart for all the world to see.
13.) Cheap and Cheerful--The Kills
Now this is a pep squad rallying cry I can get behind. For me, when Alison Mosshart sings about being crazy or mean, it's really not about endorsing petty or hurtful behavior; it's a black-leather-pants way of saying "be true to yourself, even if it's ugly." I'm sure we've all had the experience of being with a person when she lets her mask slip a little bit. And it's glorious, isn't it? Finally hearing someone's true voice and not her cheap cheerfulness? Life's too short for bullshit, our time together too brief to waste on meaningless pleasantries and empty generalities.
14.) Golden Age--TV on the Radio
For all my bitching about how overrated I think Dear Science is, I haven't really given myself room to talk about how much I actually like the album and genuinely enjoy listening to it. It's full of many muscular and velveteen pleasures, rounded valleys and craggy edges and midnight blue depths giving way to occasional pastel washes of pulsing illumination. And "Golden Age" seems fairly emblematic of all these things, the warm beating heart of optimism in an otherwise angry and even cynical album. Plus, in my mind, I'll always think of it as "the Obama song," so it's hard for me not to feel incredibly enthused every time I hear it.
15.) Green Light--Jamie Lidell
When I find myself in moments of internal emotional crisis, especially when they're precipitated by my own lack of mental clarity rather than any genuine external stimulus, it's often helpful to step back and give myself permission to fall apart or be a little bad or follow some weird obsession or fixation to its logical conclusion if it speaks to a deeper part of my soul. Maybe it's lame and new agey, but as a kind of sister sentiment to the theme of "Cheap and Cheerful," this kind of "green light" can be a powerful tool to stop myself from continuing to lie to myself or trying to be something I'm not. Amusingly enough, this dramatic arc played itself out in miniature as I was trying to decide which Jamie Lidell song to feature on this mix. For months I was convinced it would be the Son Lux remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good" (aka "Just the Sound of Your Voice")--it was fun and funky and witty and would have provided a nice burst of energy. But when I started dragging and dropping tracks into a new "best of '08" playlist, my cursor instinctively reached for "Green Light." And that was that. There just wasn't any point in denying that, yes, this was the song I'd want to listen to on repeat for years to come. Between the emotional tenor of the lyrics and Jamie's sweet and soulful delivery of them--when something's right, it's just right.
16.) San Bernadino--The Mountain Goats
This song became something of a running joke in my own head this year: could I ever listen, I mean, truly listen, to it all the way through without crying? To the best of my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. And it's not like there's one line that reliably triggers me every time (though "I pulled petals from my pocket / I loved you so much just then" usually can do the trick)--the story is just so well painted and evocative and powerfully performed that it's essentially capable of doing a control-alt-delete on whatever else may be happening around me at the time when it's playing, leaving me all alone with John's voice and Erik Friedlander's ridiculous cello and a quiver in my chin.
And speaking of John's voice, that may be the most startling talking point around Heretic Pride and the Satanic Messiah EP, if anyone were actually talking about it: it's old news by now to rave about his lyrics, but who'd ever have anticipated, post-Get Lonely, his transformation into such a warm, controlled, yet still heartbreakingly emotive vocalist?
17.) Re: Stacks--Bon Iver
Have you ever had to forgive yourself? Not for some dumbass thing you may have said or done while you were drunk or distracted, but for not having had enough compassion for the pain in your own heart? Bon Iver made a bridge for me with his music this year between a winter of darkness and a summertime of healing, and, standing in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, listening to him play most of For Emma, Forever Ago at dusk, I was able to forgive myself in a way I don't think I've ever truly experienced before. Catharsis isn't even the word for it. I think it was actually something closer to the essence of what he means when he sings "your love will be safe with me," one of the most beautiful benedictions I could hope to leave you with. It's my sincere wish that you find an occasion to say that to someone, be it yourself or someone else dear to you, in 2009.
*
Honorable mention this year goes to the Walkmen's You and Me (esp. "Donde Esta la Playa"), Shearwater's Rook, Fuck Buttons' Street Horrrsing, the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely, Estelle's "American Boy," King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner," the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm, Juana Molina's Un Dia, and Blitzen Trapper's Furr, not to mention the exciting new stuff put out by my local faves Aleks and the Drummer, Jeff Harms, Bound Stems, Baby Teeth, and King Sparrow.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
King Sparrow, Tonight at Bottom Lounge
This just in: my boys King Sparrow will be playing the Q101 Twisted Christmas/Eagles of Death Metal afterparty at the Bottom Lounge tonight. Details here. I'm actually, hilariously, going to the Q101 Twisted Christmas show at the House of Blues (Cold War Kids, Eagles of Death Metal, and Scott Weiland headlining--yup, I'm 17), so this is just extra geekily exciting icing on the cake. Chicagoans, this should be a good way to warm your hearts and loins on this cold, cold December night. Check it out!
(Also, confidential to Jakob: happy birthday! I wanted to e-mail or send a text, but couldn't find any of your info. Hugs!!)
(Also, confidential to Jakob: happy birthday! I wanted to e-mail or send a text, but couldn't find any of your info. Hugs!!)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Twilight
Wait, what?
No, I mean: seriously? This is the pop culture phenomenon everybody's going bozo over?
Not sure exactly what compelled me to, but I took in a matinee showing of Twilight today. (Despite even my own active skepticism about the thing.) It's...I don't even know where to start. This is a singularly bizarre movie. I sort of loved and despised it in equal measure. OK, "loved," maybe not. But...found curiously appealing? Begrudgingly respected for the way it succeeded in what it was trying to do? Was intrigued by some of the more salient features that have, evidently, made so many other people love it? And despised it in equal measure.
About a quarter of the way into the movie, I couldn't help but think of this bit from High Fidelity: "People worry about kids playing with guns or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" I think the same goes for the effect on girls' psyches of utterly poisonous movie love stories like this.
I don't know how he comes across in the book (and I don't plan to find out), but there is nothing, I repeat nothing, appealing about the Edward Cullen character, except the fact that he's played by the oddly attractive Robert Pattinson. I understand that this is a story about vampires and that vampires brood. I also understand that this is a story about teenagers and that teenagers brood. I also understand that this is a story about first love and that first love is often an experience filled with brooding. Clearly, the Venn diagram where all these things overlap is very, very broody indeed. But still? Ack. Why do we continue to romanticize this hunky, tortured archetype? I am as big a sucker for teenage romances as they come, and my burgeoning status as a cougar-in-training knows no shame when it comes to objectifying delectable young morsels, so I was absolutely primed to go all swoony-moony for this guy. But instead, I just kind of wanted to punch him. People, this guy's a dick! For rizz! His mood swings and emotional abusiveness and control issues/possessiveness appalled me. It'd be one thing if I felt like the movie was trying to make some comment about the emotional truth of what being young and in love for the first time feels like--that it can be all-consuming and exciting even when it's stupid and reckless and otherwise not a "good" idea, literalizing the metaphor in the great way that Buffy always did--but I feel like we're really supposed to go unironically, uncritically ga-ga for this love story. Sure, he's just the next in a long, grand tradition of wrong-side-of-the-tracks lust objects, and it's a continually irresistable fantasy for a girl to be "the one" to penetrate the cold, cold heart of a guy like this, so I guess I'm willing to concede the film's success in using these tropes effectively and accurately. But, I suppose what I'm getting at is this: that's a completely fucking damaging fantasy. (And I say this as one who has indulged in it in her own life.) I know that, just because I'm bitching about it, Hollywood's not going to all of a sudden start giving us viable romantic alternatives to rebels with a heart of gold on one hand and schlubby, lovable losers (a la Apatow's boys) on the other, but...c'mon already! A huge part of what I loved so much about the teenage love story subplot of Snow Angels was the fact that the kid felt so real, like the kind of young dude a girl could actually meet in real life and convincingly fall for. Aside from Edward's sexy danger, and the fact that he was all flatteringly hot and heavy for her, I really, honestly didn't understand why a girl who seemed as smart as Bella would go so bonkers for a guy like that. It's like a way dumber version of the Rory/Jess arc in Gilmore Girls.
And yet............
There's something kind of special about the feel of this movie. Every time I'd get my nose up about the most disgusting aspects of Edward and Bella's "relationship," I'd somehow find myself reeled back in by the very somber, dead-serious tone. It's another way of doing what Brick did so well, as far as respecting the intensity of teenage emotion without making light of it or implying "oh, but they'll grow out of it; we all did, didn't we?" Adults get to have stuff like In the Bedroom that wins scads of awards and critical praise, so why shouldn't teenagers be entitled to the same, on their own playing field?
I've missed the last few Harry Potters (mostly because, well, you know), so this is, as far as I'm concerned, Pattinson's debut. Folks have been falling all over themselves to compare him, in this role at least, to James Dean. The comparison's slightly off, though not wholly inaccurate. The comparison people are actually looking for, I think, on a surface level, is Brando in The Wild One: sexy, dangerous, volatile, still kind of out of nowhere. There's a sensitivity in Dean's style, especially in Rebel Without a Cause, that doesn't get acknowledged as often as it should. (I think people get distracted by the word "rebel" and then let our general pop cultural shorthand for what "James Dean" signifies take over from there.) But. I only bring this up in order to say...Pattinson's performance here is really reminiscent of James Dean. By which I mean, it's nothing like what I expected it to be, and there's this nervous, Method jitteriness inside it that's almost more interesting for what it says about the actor than what it says about the character, which, in turn, gave my experience of the movie this weirdly enjoyable other dimension. So much of anyone's experience of this movie, at least right now, is necessarily going to be informed by the media juggernaut surrounding it, and so bringing this sort of king-making extra-cinematic narrative to bear on my initial impressions of his performance was almost literally the only thing that made me sympathetic in any way to his character.
Another thing I wasn't expecting out of this movie was how fucking nice all the minor characters were! It's almost funny to think about, especially when you know that Stephanie Meyer is (or at least was raised) Mormon. But, I really, genuinely enjoyed the time we, as viewers, spend with all the kids that Bella goes to school with, as well as the various townspeople.
And, far more than any aspect of the love story, or even the family drama with Bella and her father (which should have really gotten to me), the thing that made my heart ache most was the Pacific Northwest setting. Ohhhh, kittens, you know I'm a city girl and you know I love Chicago, but something about that area of the world really calls to me.
Most of the soundtrack was kind of whatever, but I thought the use of Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" over the last scene was (say it with me) unexpected and very nice, and hearing Radiohead's "15 Step" explode over the ending credits was a great trick that hearkened back to the use of Yorke's "Analyze" after the final blackout of The Prestige.
(Plus, and this is totally stupid and barely worth mentioning, but my friend SB works at a doggy daycare, and his coworker owns a chihuahua named Bella that they let roam around the office, so whenever anyone in the movie said her name aloud, I couldn't stop cackling to myself thinking of the stories he used to tell me of Bella hopping up on the desk to help him check his e-mail. "Bell-uh! Bell-uh!")
So, for those of you who've been wondering "what is the deal with Twilight?" I'm more than happy to have taken one for the team here. It was a diverting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, both for the pure experience of watching the film and for the stew of "she's my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter!" ambivalence that it brought up in me afterward.
No, I mean: seriously? This is the pop culture phenomenon everybody's going bozo over?
Not sure exactly what compelled me to, but I took in a matinee showing of Twilight today. (Despite even my own active skepticism about the thing.) It's...I don't even know where to start. This is a singularly bizarre movie. I sort of loved and despised it in equal measure. OK, "loved," maybe not. But...found curiously appealing? Begrudgingly respected for the way it succeeded in what it was trying to do? Was intrigued by some of the more salient features that have, evidently, made so many other people love it? And despised it in equal measure.
About a quarter of the way into the movie, I couldn't help but think of this bit from High Fidelity: "People worry about kids playing with guns or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" I think the same goes for the effect on girls' psyches of utterly poisonous movie love stories like this.
I don't know how he comes across in the book (and I don't plan to find out), but there is nothing, I repeat nothing, appealing about the Edward Cullen character, except the fact that he's played by the oddly attractive Robert Pattinson. I understand that this is a story about vampires and that vampires brood. I also understand that this is a story about teenagers and that teenagers brood. I also understand that this is a story about first love and that first love is often an experience filled with brooding. Clearly, the Venn diagram where all these things overlap is very, very broody indeed. But still? Ack. Why do we continue to romanticize this hunky, tortured archetype? I am as big a sucker for teenage romances as they come, and my burgeoning status as a cougar-in-training knows no shame when it comes to objectifying delectable young morsels, so I was absolutely primed to go all swoony-moony for this guy. But instead, I just kind of wanted to punch him. People, this guy's a dick! For rizz! His mood swings and emotional abusiveness and control issues/possessiveness appalled me. It'd be one thing if I felt like the movie was trying to make some comment about the emotional truth of what being young and in love for the first time feels like--that it can be all-consuming and exciting even when it's stupid and reckless and otherwise not a "good" idea, literalizing the metaphor in the great way that Buffy always did--but I feel like we're really supposed to go unironically, uncritically ga-ga for this love story. Sure, he's just the next in a long, grand tradition of wrong-side-of-the-tracks lust objects, and it's a continually irresistable fantasy for a girl to be "the one" to penetrate the cold, cold heart of a guy like this, so I guess I'm willing to concede the film's success in using these tropes effectively and accurately. But, I suppose what I'm getting at is this: that's a completely fucking damaging fantasy. (And I say this as one who has indulged in it in her own life.) I know that, just because I'm bitching about it, Hollywood's not going to all of a sudden start giving us viable romantic alternatives to rebels with a heart of gold on one hand and schlubby, lovable losers (a la Apatow's boys) on the other, but...c'mon already! A huge part of what I loved so much about the teenage love story subplot of Snow Angels was the fact that the kid felt so real, like the kind of young dude a girl could actually meet in real life and convincingly fall for. Aside from Edward's sexy danger, and the fact that he was all flatteringly hot and heavy for her, I really, honestly didn't understand why a girl who seemed as smart as Bella would go so bonkers for a guy like that. It's like a way dumber version of the Rory/Jess arc in Gilmore Girls.
And yet............
There's something kind of special about the feel of this movie. Every time I'd get my nose up about the most disgusting aspects of Edward and Bella's "relationship," I'd somehow find myself reeled back in by the very somber, dead-serious tone. It's another way of doing what Brick did so well, as far as respecting the intensity of teenage emotion without making light of it or implying "oh, but they'll grow out of it; we all did, didn't we?" Adults get to have stuff like In the Bedroom that wins scads of awards and critical praise, so why shouldn't teenagers be entitled to the same, on their own playing field?
I've missed the last few Harry Potters (mostly because, well, you know), so this is, as far as I'm concerned, Pattinson's debut. Folks have been falling all over themselves to compare him, in this role at least, to James Dean. The comparison's slightly off, though not wholly inaccurate. The comparison people are actually looking for, I think, on a surface level, is Brando in The Wild One: sexy, dangerous, volatile, still kind of out of nowhere. There's a sensitivity in Dean's style, especially in Rebel Without a Cause, that doesn't get acknowledged as often as it should. (I think people get distracted by the word "rebel" and then let our general pop cultural shorthand for what "James Dean" signifies take over from there.) But. I only bring this up in order to say...Pattinson's performance here is really reminiscent of James Dean. By which I mean, it's nothing like what I expected it to be, and there's this nervous, Method jitteriness inside it that's almost more interesting for what it says about the actor than what it says about the character, which, in turn, gave my experience of the movie this weirdly enjoyable other dimension. So much of anyone's experience of this movie, at least right now, is necessarily going to be informed by the media juggernaut surrounding it, and so bringing this sort of king-making extra-cinematic narrative to bear on my initial impressions of his performance was almost literally the only thing that made me sympathetic in any way to his character.
Another thing I wasn't expecting out of this movie was how fucking nice all the minor characters were! It's almost funny to think about, especially when you know that Stephanie Meyer is (or at least was raised) Mormon. But, I really, genuinely enjoyed the time we, as viewers, spend with all the kids that Bella goes to school with, as well as the various townspeople.
And, far more than any aspect of the love story, or even the family drama with Bella and her father (which should have really gotten to me), the thing that made my heart ache most was the Pacific Northwest setting. Ohhhh, kittens, you know I'm a city girl and you know I love Chicago, but something about that area of the world really calls to me.
Most of the soundtrack was kind of whatever, but I thought the use of Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" over the last scene was (say it with me) unexpected and very nice, and hearing Radiohead's "15 Step" explode over the ending credits was a great trick that hearkened back to the use of Yorke's "Analyze" after the final blackout of The Prestige.
(Plus, and this is totally stupid and barely worth mentioning, but my friend SB works at a doggy daycare, and his coworker owns a chihuahua named Bella that they let roam around the office, so whenever anyone in the movie said her name aloud, I couldn't stop cackling to myself thinking of the stories he used to tell me of Bella hopping up on the desk to help him check his e-mail. "Bell-uh! Bell-uh!")
So, for those of you who've been wondering "what is the deal with Twilight?" I'm more than happy to have taken one for the team here. It was a diverting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, both for the pure experience of watching the film and for the stew of "she's my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter!" ambivalence that it brought up in me afterward.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Confession
I confess to feeling less than inspired about the current round of year-end pontification over 2008's music (not to mention books, film, and what have you). Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty posted insightfully about the lack of trust surrounding this year's best-of lists, and I'm so wishy-washy I can't even trust my lack of trust. Feh. Oh sure, I'm still making my annual mix CD (e-mail now to reserve yours! esp. if'n you think I might not have you on the list or if your mailing address has changed in the past year), and I'll post some thoughts about it here soon enough. But mostly I'm feeling quiet and not particularly eloquent or reflective about, well, anything right now. As such, take everything that follows with the proverbial grain of salt.
I visited Austin for the first time over Thanksgiving, and, while I was there, Bren and I caught Blitzen Trapper at the Mohawk (pics from the show, if you're interested, are here). Despite all the blowed-up hype surrounding them, mostly thanks to P-fork's raves, last year, I'd managed stay ignorant of them and their music until that day, so was pleasantly surprised by their performance. Their sound, approach, and aesthetic are throwbacky, sure, but they commit to it fully and do it well and make it work. Furr has been on nearly continual repeat since then. The title track contains several of the most satisfying melodic/lyrical turns of phrase I've heard this year.
While in town, Brendon and Catharine also made sure to take me to the famed Alamo Drafthouse for some food, booze, and film, where we saw Australia. I'll go to the mat for Moulin Rouge! any day of the week and think that Luhrmann is way smarter and more in control of what he's doing than most people give him credit for, but Australia left me a bit cold. It has its moments, I guess--most of which involve the camera's male-gaze fetishizing of Hugh Jackman's body instead of Nicole Kidman's--but trying to shoehorn his signature sentimentality about love and destiny, etc., etc., into a story involving national identity and the Stolen Generations (not to mention World War II) felt a bit overly naive (plus also maybe a bit unintentionally racist?). It's epic, sweeping, romantic, and paced exactly like a Luhrmann movie (goofy comedy that segues into flushed-cheek love story that segues into searing tragedy), but still, for all that, and its inflated running time, it seemed to be lacking that special something.
Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand is 100% delightful, so much so that I'm willing to forgive Boyle his missteps with Sunshine, if that's what he needed to do to get to the point where he could make this film. Aside from the fact that the movie itself is sweet and touching and scary and melodramtic in all the right ways, I cannot overstate how lucky I felt to have just finished reading Maximum City before I saw it. The context that it gave me about the slums, religious tension, gangs, police interrogation techniques, and dreams of the people (both singularly and, as various groups, collectively) in Mumbai enriched my enjoyment of the film immeasurably. It feels like a Danny Boyle film in all the best ways, with the happy addition that, as he did in Millions, he demonstrated again that he can be a gifted director of children. Plus the Bollywood dance sequence at the end is fucking golden; it was so perfect yet so unexpected that it probably made me cry more than anything else in the rest of the movie. Highly recommended, kittens.
I caught the Bound Stems at a late-night show at the Empty Bottle last weekend. I'm happy to say that The Family Afloat has grown on me tremendously, as I suspected it would, since October--so much so that I had trouble, in my sleepy and slightly tipsy state, distinguishing which songs appear on that album from which appear on Appreciation Night. Given how much I adore Appreciation Night, that's high praise indeed coming from me. Pics from the show posted here.
And speaking of fave-rave Chicago bands, I hope you've had a chance to check out Baby Teeth's second Daytrotter session. I've been listening to "I Hope She Won't Let Me" obsessively since downloading the tracks. I heard them play it when they opened for Jamie Lidell in early October and it absolutely knocked me out. I can't wait to have an official studio version in my grubby little paws. From what I understand, it should be on the forthcoming-in-'09 release Hustle Beach. Get excited.
Also! Chicagoans, you should get excited about THE RETURN OF THE DOLLAR STORE! Maestro Jonathan Messinger announced it on his blog the other day, and I've been convulsing with glee ever since. You can bet your ass I'll be at the Hideout on January 9, nerding out in style.
I visited Austin for the first time over Thanksgiving, and, while I was there, Bren and I caught Blitzen Trapper at the Mohawk (pics from the show, if you're interested, are here). Despite all the blowed-up hype surrounding them, mostly thanks to P-fork's raves, last year, I'd managed stay ignorant of them and their music until that day, so was pleasantly surprised by their performance. Their sound, approach, and aesthetic are throwbacky, sure, but they commit to it fully and do it well and make it work. Furr has been on nearly continual repeat since then. The title track contains several of the most satisfying melodic/lyrical turns of phrase I've heard this year.
While in town, Brendon and Catharine also made sure to take me to the famed Alamo Drafthouse for some food, booze, and film, where we saw Australia. I'll go to the mat for Moulin Rouge! any day of the week and think that Luhrmann is way smarter and more in control of what he's doing than most people give him credit for, but Australia left me a bit cold. It has its moments, I guess--most of which involve the camera's male-gaze fetishizing of Hugh Jackman's body instead of Nicole Kidman's--but trying to shoehorn his signature sentimentality about love and destiny, etc., etc., into a story involving national identity and the Stolen Generations (not to mention World War II) felt a bit overly naive (plus also maybe a bit unintentionally racist?). It's epic, sweeping, romantic, and paced exactly like a Luhrmann movie (goofy comedy that segues into flushed-cheek love story that segues into searing tragedy), but still, for all that, and its inflated running time, it seemed to be lacking that special something.
Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand is 100% delightful, so much so that I'm willing to forgive Boyle his missteps with Sunshine, if that's what he needed to do to get to the point where he could make this film. Aside from the fact that the movie itself is sweet and touching and scary and melodramtic in all the right ways, I cannot overstate how lucky I felt to have just finished reading Maximum City before I saw it. The context that it gave me about the slums, religious tension, gangs, police interrogation techniques, and dreams of the people (both singularly and, as various groups, collectively) in Mumbai enriched my enjoyment of the film immeasurably. It feels like a Danny Boyle film in all the best ways, with the happy addition that, as he did in Millions, he demonstrated again that he can be a gifted director of children. Plus the Bollywood dance sequence at the end is fucking golden; it was so perfect yet so unexpected that it probably made me cry more than anything else in the rest of the movie. Highly recommended, kittens.
I caught the Bound Stems at a late-night show at the Empty Bottle last weekend. I'm happy to say that The Family Afloat has grown on me tremendously, as I suspected it would, since October--so much so that I had trouble, in my sleepy and slightly tipsy state, distinguishing which songs appear on that album from which appear on Appreciation Night. Given how much I adore Appreciation Night, that's high praise indeed coming from me. Pics from the show posted here.
And speaking of fave-rave Chicago bands, I hope you've had a chance to check out Baby Teeth's second Daytrotter session. I've been listening to "I Hope She Won't Let Me" obsessively since downloading the tracks. I heard them play it when they opened for Jamie Lidell in early October and it absolutely knocked me out. I can't wait to have an official studio version in my grubby little paws. From what I understand, it should be on the forthcoming-in-'09 release Hustle Beach. Get excited.
Also! Chicagoans, you should get excited about THE RETURN OF THE DOLLAR STORE! Maestro Jonathan Messinger announced it on his blog the other day, and I've been convulsing with glee ever since. You can bet your ass I'll be at the Hideout on January 9, nerding out in style.
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