How Much Joy Can the Heart Handle Before It Explodes?

Beautiful things from this past weekend:

~LK and I finished watching the first season of The Wire, and gah. I have nothing critical or intelligent to say about it; I'm just completely awestruck. And from what I understand, it only gets better. How is this even possible?

~Man on Wire on DVD. Yeah, I know it won big at the Oscars on Sunday (missed 'em again this year, more on which soon), but watching it on Saturday afternoon, curled up on my couch while the snow fell and the wind blew like a maniac outside, I was utterly transfixed, captivated. I was also loving its parallels to, of all things, Chappelle's Block Party: there's the New York setting on a superficial level, of course, but also the charismatic Pied Piper that sets everything in motion and keeps everyone inspired, the rag-tag, ad-libbed nature of it all, and the fact that they spent so much time and effort to create a moment of fleeting beauty that can never be repeated or recaptured. I was totally dissolved in tears by the end of it. Such a magical little film. I loved its philosophical/existential Frenchness and its very intentional heist film structure--with the "heist" being benevolent mischief and a contemplation of the ineffable. It would be like if, at the climax of Soderbergh's Out of Sight, after all the goofiness and flashbacks, there were no uncut diamonds in the fish tank, just fish. And rather than it being a big letdown (for both the characters and the audience), it was actually a solemn moment of meditation on the sublime, on the mysteries of the sea and the ephemeral nature of the fishes' lives and how that relates to our own mortality. And then everybody goes home and never speaks to each other again. (Thought of in this way, I guess it's almost like the emotional obverse of The Limey, actually, with speechless joy and delight standing in for slowly dawning horror and the full weight of homicidal complicity.) Check it out before Philippe Petit gets annoying and overexposed.

~Juana Molina live at the Morse Theatre on Sunday night. (Yes, instead of the Oscars. It was an infinitely more rewarding way to spend the evening.) It's rare that a concert is so good that it actually makes me want to be a better person, but I left the show completely in awe of how balanced she seems to be as a person (at least on stage) and wishing I could find a way to integrate all the weird, misshapen quirks of my own personality into a similarly satisfying whole. She was really relaxed, really focused, really funny, really serious, really talented, really committed to her art--I kept waiting for her to shed her skin, revealing this glowing orb of harmony and perfection. But instead, she's just this tiny lady with perfect pitch and an army of looping pedals. Her fixation on her guitar being in tune actually read less as an obsessive diva thing than as a literalization of what her main project as a musician seems to be--working really hard to hit that razor-thin sweet spot where an intricate confluence of factors joins together to appear inevitable and effortless. (She also told a musical "joke" at one point when she started playing her guitar, then singing slightly flat; no one even picked up on it until she started cracking herself up and exclaimed, "if I were totally out of tune, no one would care!") But, of course, what she's doing is nowhere near effortless; it's demonstrably effort-ful. All it took was a slight tempo shift, and one of her songs nearly catapulted into chaos. She shot a look full of lasers at her bassist and drummer, and then they careened off into a wild improvised section built around the weird distortion in the time signature before segueing gently back into the original song. The audience cheered like she'd just landed a plane in the Hudson River.

I'm so deeply grateful to have first been introduced to Molina through the brief interview in the June/July 2006 music issue of The Believer because it's really informed the way I approach her music. Her discussion of being both a talented mimic as well as a really good listener helps me pay better attention to all the tiny sounds folded into her songs, above and beyond just the pleasantness of her melodies and grooves. In a broader sense, though, she also plays right into the thing in me that responds so much to Joanna Newsom, Laura Veirs, and even the author Annie Dillard. They all share a beguiling combination of power, femininity, reverence for the natural world, and an oddball sensibility that they're completely comfortable with, almost oblivious to. I really wish I would have had more time to live with Un Dia before I made my 2008 year-end mix; surely something from that album would have found its way on there.

~Birthday, birthday, birthday! That's right, kittens, I turned 30 last week and was lucky enough to be able to celebrate the event with a huge cross-section of my very favorite people in Chicago. Big, big thanks to all of you who were able to make it; you've warmed this February for me immeasurably.

Dave Chappelle's Block Party

As suspected, Dave Chappelle's Block Party was a brilliant and delightful little film. Before watching it, I'd just read The Believer's interview with director David Levine (fascinating and highly recommended), so my brain was very much attuned to ideas of performance. Where does it start, where does it end (both in terms of duration as well as the boundaries around the performer's "job" and his/her private life), where does it belong (on stage, on film, in a gallery, on the street, a little of all of them), who is it for, how is it financed--and all these things are hit on, totally organically, in the film.

Watching Chappelle play the street like an instrument was such a beautiful thing. Although he is very funny throughout, I'm not sure he should even be called a comedian, at least not in the context of this film. Nor is he an actor or, of course, a director. He really is some sort of performance artist--in a way, what he's doing is kind of similar to Andy Goldsworthy, except instead of working with the ephemerality of nature, he's using the materials of the city (its sounds, its scenery, its people) to create something equally beautiful yet fleeting. It's almost like the long dinner party scene in To the Lighthouse (a scene I think about fondly, and often), with one supremely magnetic personality gathering a huge group of people in one specific space to create not any one "thing" as such, but a tender moment of vivid, exuberant togetherness. Time and fellow feeling become his project.

Gondry, as a director, obviously understood this aspect of the proceedings in an extremely sensitive and reflective way, which I'm sure is why there's so much focus on the couple living in the Broken Angel house. Aside from just being, y'know, catnip for a documentary film crew (real crazy people! living in a crazy cool location! that we just stumbled upon! and can film basically to our heart's content!), there's a parallel sense of visual and emotional poetry in their story, where two people who are marching to the beat of their own drummer have constructed something illogical and patchwork and uniquely their own out of random chunks of material and then live inside it. The main difference between them and Chappelle, though, is at least they're unapologetic about it, whereas Chappelle's art, in the context of this film, seems performed almost as an act of penance for the collective weight of his relatively recent fame and success. I'm sure Gondry was also responding to this undercurrent of hesitancy or insecurity in his persona, in much the same way that he sought to pull that little-boy-lost quality in Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine.

For all that, though, the film is also just a flat-out good time. I was absolutely filled with delight for the entire hour and forty-five minutes. It's so rangy and charming and relaxed and easy-breezy. Nothing really happens, of course, but it's just nice to spend time with these people. There's no part of me that isn't completely fascinated by ?uestlove, and something in my soul positively shuddered (in a good way) every time Erykah Badu was onscreen. Plus, it made me really, really fucking ridiculously excited for my upcoming trip to New York.

Also recommended in this month's issue of The Believer: Todd Pruzan's essay "Mental Chickens," nominally about a late-90s movie soundtrack from New Zealand, but really about friendship and living in cities and growing old and people disappearing from your life. There's a paragraph near the end of the piece where he talks about an old photograph of a friend that all but made me spontaneously burst into tears.

"Everthing Ricky Gervais has done has made me hate him. Everything. He seems utterly devoid of humanity."

I confess, though I like it on a surface level, I'm having trouble getting more deeply into Noble Beast. I agree with Scott Pretty Goes with Pretty that it sure does seem like a looong album, especially in that opening stretch--and then again in the back half, too. But, I would disagree that Armchair Apocrypha is "upbeat" and would also disagree that Dosh's electronic programming on "Not a Robot but a Ghost" doesn't serve Bird well. In fact, I think that's why Apocrypha is my favorite Bird album to date and why the one-two punch of "Not a Robot but a Ghost" leading into "Anonanimal" is my favorite part of Noble Beast at this point: there's a sonic darkness to them both that heightens the ooky-spookiness that's always lurking in his lyrics. His folksy/pastoral violin excursions are great and all, but I think he could stand to get darker. I want more plaintive keening. I want his emo album.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart

My darlings! What's been keeping you warm this cold, snowy winter? (That is, other than living in AZ/LA/Austin, you motherfuckers.) As for me:

~Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lollipops. Bushman evangelized it to me over Thanksgiving, but it wasn't until I listened to it a few times while I was sick in bed earlier in January that the old familiar Felusian obsession started to kick in. There's so much melody in the way this guy uses language. Just listen to the pacing and cadence in his words and delivery. It's really no coincidence that he's on Sub Pop, right? With that pitch-perfect, instantly ingratiating combination of sweetness and bite that the best bands on their roster are known for? It actually doesn't phase me in the slightest if one of his bits pops up when I'm listening to my iPod on shuffle--which is really saying something coming from me, since I'm usually weirdly sensitive about listening to speech through headphones (as a rule, I can't handle podcasts for this very reason). It's just absurdly elegant stuff. Highly recommended.

~Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion. I AM NOT MADE OF STONE, PEOPLE! RTW and I were discussing the album a few days after it (officially!) came out, and he said that the album didn't "surprise" him the way Strawberry Jam did. I think that's well said, and squares with my own experience of them both. But, once MPP finally clicked for me, it clicked hard. I also quite enjoyed Nick Sylvester's post (via) on all the Hipster Runoff-inspired backlash.

~Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper, Jessica Hopper.

~Baby Teeth live at the Empty Bottle, celebrating the release of their "Hustle Beach" single. They were unfortunately beset by some technical difficulties and other mishaps (Jim's amp blew up about a quarter of the way into the set, something got bobbled after the long, dramatic intro to "The Birds Are Crying" and they had to start the song over again, they began "Looking for a Road" in the wrong key and had to start that one over again too), but it's still always a treat to see them, no matter the circumstances. Plus, Abraham played guitar on the final song of the set, which had to rival Rufus Wainwright's guitar playing for sheer awkward wonderfulness. I nearly died laughing when he started tuning up and proclaimed, "we're going to play the Satriani song that Coldplay ripped off."

~JT & the Clouds. Before Baby Teeth went on, the crowd was treated to a bloody fantastic set by Chicago-based band JT & the Clouds. These guys have apparently been around for a few years, and I want to punch myself back in time for only discovering them now. Imagine Lyle Lovett fronting an Americana-inflected soul band, and you're maybe 40 percent of the way to conceptualizing their appeal. Lead singer Jeremy Lindsay makes beautiful art out of his young-David-Byrne-esque awkwardness (as far as being an "uptight white guy trying to stumble into grace," as Jim White once described Byrne in The Believer), riding a line similar to the one Dan Bejar has mastered where there are quotation marks around quotation marks (around quotation marks?) around his whole performance. There's an underlying sense of humor to the proceedings that's so bizarre and so winning and so integral to the success of what's happening on stage. It's like someone put all these guys' brains in backward. The other part of their success can be chalked up to the fact that the guys in the band are flat-out incredible musicians. They're casually tossing off four-part harmonies over strutting soul grooves like they came up in an era when those virtues were expected of gigging musicians and not exceptional. I just stood there with a huge, stupid grin plastered to my face the entire time. I don't think I've been this surprised and excited by a previously unknown-to-me opening act since we were first introduced to Polly Paulusma before the Divine Comedy's show at Schubas in '04. (I mean, at least I'd heard of the Cold War Kids before they first grabbed my attention in '06.) Chicagoans, please be sure to check these guys out the next time they're playing around town. You won't be disappointed, I promise. The rest of you should check out their most recent album The City's Hot Yeah the City's Hot and enjoy all the semi-obscure Chicago geographical references.

~More local music! What Wrestling Entropy post would be complete these days without a pimp for King Sparrow? Catch 'em tomorrow night at the Subterranean.