wrestling entropy

Aaaand SCENE

2010-06-21T10:00:00.003-05:00

Hello, my darlings.

You've noticed; I've noticed; we've all noticed. My heart's just not in this anymore.

I'm enormously proud of the writing I've done here and feel nothing but gratitude for the opportunities and connections this blog has afforded me over the past six years. But the energy has been on the wane for a while now, and I think it's best to take a final bow and draw the curtain on Wrestling Entropy at this point, formally, rather than just letting it linger untended into an indefinite future. There are few things worse than lack of closure.

While I take some time away to rest and rejuvenate my writing muscles and attend to other projects, the archives will stay up until our robot overlords cut Blogger off at the knees, and if and when I have something exciting to share, I may throw a new posting up here, just in case you keep this RSS feed active in your various online readers. Until such point as I do, though, you're welcome to visit me in my slightly less serious guises on Tumblr and Twitter; I also expect to keep posting on a highly erratic schedule over at my Divine Comedy oeuvreblog, Songs of Love, as I poke my way through Neil Hannon's gorgeous back catalog, and my Flickr photostream usually stays pretty fresh, too. IRL Allison can be found, among other times and places, on the third Thursday of every month at Lizard's Liquid Lounge with my band, Tiny Magnets. (For future reference, most of these same links are available in one bundle over at Flavors.me for one-stop shopping.)

Exuberant and heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been part of the extended family of commenters and lurkers here at Wrestling Entropy. Special thanks goes to giant-among-bloggers Matthew Perpetua for linking me in his esteemed FluxBlogroll; his seal of approval brought me much more attention among a much larger readership than I would have been capable of generating on my own.

Take care of yourselves, and each other, kittens. I'll be around.

King Sparrow, Live at the Empty Bottle

2010-04-02T15:22:00.001-05:00

Whoa, somebody let the big dogs out of the gate. Wow. I hadn't seen King Sparrow live for longer than I'd realized, and watching them grow as a band in real time has been thrilling. Where, as a young band, their show started out tight and precise then relaxed into a sense of casual mastery, now they've turned yet another corner into an explosive, physical ferocity. I don't know if it's just that they've been cooped up in the studio for the past little while and were ready to reconnect with the energy of a club crowd again or what, but last night at the Empty Bottle they seemed hungrier, and thus more energetic, than I've maybe ever seen them. Old faves from the Derailer EP were present and accounted for ("Forest" just keeps opening up with secret byways and melodic turns every time I hear it), but goosed by the addition of the new tunes they've been working up for their debut long-player, even these familiar songs seemed to vibrate with new intensity.

Eric is steadily pushing his own boundaries as a vocalist, much to the songs' benefit. A few perfectly calibrated, well-placed howls here and there provided a nice little pinch of danger to offset their immaculate chops as musicians. He and Sean (the band's secret weapon) also seemed to be interacting more on stage than I've ever seen them. Watching the way musicians watch each other while they're playing is always one of my favorite things about seeing a band in concert. Then, of course, John's drumming always seems somewhere on the verge of full-scale detonation, in the best way possible. Even though he's one of my favorite local drummers, I always forget how ferocious he can be, the way I forget what the exciting warm springtime feels like after a winter full of ice and snow.

I know I'm not going to convince anyone that already hasn't been convinced at this point that they need to pay attention to these guys. It just makes me stupidly happy to live in a city where I can take the bus a few miles south on a random Thursday night and hear some soul-explodingly good music for less than I would pay for a sushi dinner. Go find 'em on MySpace or Twitter or Facebook (or in my frustratingly blurry pics), and revel in the joy of good, local, live music.

W. E. Street Team Update

2010-03-30T10:54:00.000-05:00

Kittens! Spring is springing here in Chicago and there's so much fun to be had in the next few weeks. Get out yr calendars:

King Sparrow will be playing this Thursday, April 1, at the Empty Bottle. Eric tells me there will be new songs + old faves, so basically, what more could you ask for? I'm forgoing the Spoon show at the Aragon that night to support my hometown boys, so you know that means it's gonna be epic. (No pressure, guys.) Also, if you haven't watched the video tour of the studio where they've been recording their new album yet, check it out here and get ready for LOLs.

JT and the Clouds will be celebrating the release of their new album Caledonia on Friday, April 16, also at the Bottle. I'm so excited for this I could just burst. I've basically been looking forward to this show since early December. They've been touring the East Coast and Canada the past few weeks and will soon be heading out for a lengthy jaunt through Europe, so it'll be nice to remind them how much they're loved here at home while we have the chance.

Tiny Magnets will be back at Lizard's Liquid Lounge later this month, on Thursday, April 22. Seriously, if you haven't been out to the bar yet, you must. It's the perfect combination of cozy and cool. In other Tiny Magnets news, we've been busily recording and have some nicer sounding tracks up on our MySpace page. We also have a new presence on Facebook; we'd invite you to become a fan of ours there if you're so inclined!

Fat February

2010-02-21T22:29:00.005-06:00

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, kittens: this is the best time of year. Oh sure, the weather is bullshit and the winter weight gain is in full effect, but: the early darkness! the implicit permission to avoid social engagements in favor of reading books on your couch and going out to movies alone! It's easy to bitch about the craptacular nature of February--and I do, often--but really, I'm having a blast. A quiet, sleepy, fat blast.

FILM

Again, it'd be all too easy to complain about how many shitty movies I've seen recently (my brain tends to hold on to the details and negative emotions elicited by the bad ones in far greater proportion than the good ones, skewing my internal control group), but, as I've often said, the simple act of watching a movie is just inherently pleasurable to me, so even a bad movie is preferable to no movie at all. A quick rundown of what I've caught recently.

Pineapple Express. It's obviously Franco's movie, of course, but when David Gordon Green recontextualizes the whole thing as a metaphor for Vietnam, I was like, ohhhh, well played, sir, well played. Kevin Corrigan was also extremely well used here.

In the Valley of Elah. Given Paul Haggis's involvement, I was a little dubious about the film, but it's way more artfully done than I thought it would be. We recently published a nonfiction book, Murder in Baker Company, about the true story that inspired the movie, and I had the opportunity to talk to Lanny Davis, the inspiration for the Tommy Lee Jones character, on the phone last year not long before he died. Unfailingly polite and eager to see us do his son's story justice, he called me ma'am once or twice during our short conversation. There's a scene in the movie when Jones's character does the same for a waitress in a bar, and I nearly crumpled. This isn't a feel-good movie by any stretch, but I'm surprised by how heartily I'd recommend it.

The Dreamers. Wait, wha--? I thought this movie was supposed to be sexy. Gawd, it was just pretentious and confusing and the worst example of a self-conscious, self-serious art film. Clearly a metaphor for American/European politics in the late '60s moreso than any kind of interesting or coherent story, this totally failed for me both as erotica and as the proverbial love letter to cinema.

The White Ribbon. Haneke, that magnificent bastard, nails it yet again. Tonally, it reminded me, in a weird way, of Cronenberg's Spider, in the way that Haneke, as a director, knows by now what his audiences are expecting out of a Haneke movie, so he deliberately rides that tension for all it's worth, until the audience is squirming for release, forcing us to acknowledge that seeing something really fucked up happen onscreen would actually make us more comfortable than being patient with all the ambiguity. Sure, there are some zingers that get revealed, but mostly what has stuck with me is the velvety black and white cinematography, the scene where the farmer sits with his wife's recently bathed corpse just out of frame for that nice long take, and the way that the voice-over provides a meta-commentary on the act of discussing the narrative slipperiness of a Haneke plotline when it describes the way the townsfolk attempted to impose some kind of logic on the disappearance of two of the main characters.

The Young Victoria. Total candy. Excellent scenery chewing from Mark Strong as Sir John Conroy (he's also the baddie in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes). I always forget, too, how much I like Paul Bettany.

Crazy Heart. There is no way that Jeff Bridges, talented and likable as he demonstrably is, gives anything other than a competent performance here. Also, I'm so mad at Maggie Gyllenhaal for perpetuating the older man/younger woman thing here, especially given that her performance is also fairly by-the-numbers. You know the movie is really all over the place when Colin Farrell gives the most interesting and memorable performance. (Jesus fuck, can we talk about that hair?)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In many ways, I sincerely hope somebody takes this movie to their bosom and reclaims its bat-shit-craziness, turning it into a so-bad-it's-good cult classic because there's something weirdly appealing about it. Tom Tykwer's direction maybe? Maybe something in the source material? Anyway, I basically rented it because of Ben Whishaw, and, while he's clearly throwing everything he's got as an actor at the wall, it was the wrong kind of effort and didn't really do anything to help the film. An exceedingly miscast Dustin Hoffman mercifully dies early on, and Alan Rickman does his Alan Rickman thing somewhere in the back half of the movie (not complaining about this in the least).

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. OK, unlike Perfume, this movie isn't even charmingly bad enough to be campy. Actually, I think it would love to consider itself campy, but it fails painfully, on just about every level. I really always try to find something redeeming about a movie, but this one made me so actively angry with its crappiness, I really can't think of a damn thing. (The scene when they go to the dominatrix's apartment, maybe? Robert Downey Jr.'s shoulders?) It's just a complete train wreck from the first frame--which explains, via painfully literal intertitle, what it means when it calls itself "an imaginary portrait"--to the last.

Fish Tank. Bleak as all hell, but really, really great. The creepy interplay of absent-daddy issues and a young girl's burgeoning sexuality is handled really nicely, helped of course by Michael Fassbender's exceedingly charming and manipulative (in a good way) performance.

The Piano Teacher. Obviously, The White Ribbon got me on a Haneke kick. This is basically a perfect encapsulation of everything I want out of a film: French and German subtitles, gorgeous music, a steely, inscrutable female protagonist, and horribly twisted sex. The Walter Klemmer character is a bit too unrealistically convenient/contrived to be believable, but I didn't mind too much because of where he allows the story to go and for what he allows Isabelle Huppert to reveal about her own character. Uncomfortable and mesmerizing.

MUSIC

I've basically had Spoon's Transference on constant repeat since its release in January. "The Mystery Zone" is instantly one of Britt Daniel's best-ever songs, but I find new things to love on the album every time I listen to it. This week I've got major love for "Trouble Comes Running."

When I feel the need to give Transference a break for a while, I've been having my mind unexpectedly blown by Chris Whitley's Dirt Floor. I'd never even heard of this dude before one of my Tiny Magnets bandmates mentioned that I'd probably like his stuff, and now I'm obsessed. Though a lot of his other songs get loud and rocked-out, Dirt Floor is firmly in the realm of one-man-with-an-acoustic-guitar gorgeousness, reminiscent of Pink Moon on one end of the spectrum and For Emma, Forever Ago on the other, though he's way more blues-influenced than either of those guys. Highly, highly recommended.

I anticipate that Jason Falkner's I'm OK, You're OK--now finally released in the US after several years of only being available as an import from Japan--will probably be giving both those albums a run for their money in coming weeks, though. It's vintage Falknery goodness--his voice is as strong as ever, and the hooks will insinuate themselves into your very soul. "Anondah" is utterly gorgeous, and "This Time" is basically a perfect album opener.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Tiny Magnets (oh, hey, look: a MySpace page!) have a show coming up this Friday, 2-26, at the Horseshoe on Lincoln. (Guys, this is not to be confused with the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted.) We're set to go on around 9:30. Bring yr friends!

2010-02-17T08:09:00.001-06:00

Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Tiny Magnets will go on around 9:20. See you there, Chicago!

Tiny Magnets

2010-01-29T09:44:00.002-06:00

Tiny Magnets
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Friends: it's my rock 'n' roll debut tonight. Come check us out! Featuring me on vocals, Brian Cremins (singer/songwriter/guitar player extraordinaire and impresario of Short Punks in Love), Kevin Henretta (of Plastics Hi-Fi and Ten Hundred on lead guitar filtered through enough pedals to rock your face directly off), and Michael Main (of St. Aviator on drums and bass).

Inglourious Basterds and the Year in Film

2009-12-28T23:50:00.006-06:00

It probably goes without saying that Inglourious Basterds was one of my favorite movies this year. I'm not sure that it beats out Kill Bill for my fave Tarantino of the '00s (I was just bowled over by what he accomplished with that film, esp. after revisiting it this summer), but it was unquestionably a highlight in the rather dull year that '09 was, for me, for movies.

It should also go without saying that this isn't QT's WWII movie--it's his WWII-movie movie. Huge difference. For all the intertextual trainspotting that the most obnoxious filmies were falling all over themselves to point out (Aldo Raine is a wink to Aldo Ray! etc.), I don't think this point was given enough attention. Dono very rightly and thoughtfully pointed out over on his blog that, among other things, reimagining Hitler's demise doesn't actually change the historical record, doesn't actually change the fact that all those people died in concentration camps, doesn't actually erase any of the atrocities that occurred and linger in our memories. Of course it doesn't. But after decades' worth of WWII movies that have more subtly attempted to redraw the shape of history in ways that are often way more odious in their piousness and self-righteousness (as Eddie Argos put it, Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now), QT's genius here is to be as fucking in-your-face about his historical revisionism as possible. If we're going to necessarily fictionalize WWII by making a movie about it, why not, at this point, just use every ounce of juice available in the medium and get our rocks off? As Mike Barthel put it, "No one, at this point, needs to be educated about the Nazis or the Holocaust; anyone who wouldn’t have sympathy for the Jews or antipathy for National Socialism is pretty much a lost cause, and it’s hard to imagine any piece of torture-porn or rigorous factual evidence convincing someone who’s not already in that camp. So why not, you know, have some fun with it?" To reiterate: this isn't a movie about WWII--it's a movie about WWII movies. Nobody is desecrating anything here, at least nothing that doesn't deserve to be desecrated a little bit. Don't all the Saving Private Ryans and Life Is Beautifuls need to have the piss taken out of them a little bit with pure punk rock cinema?

Because, as Sean T. Collins so brilliantly pointed out, that's exactly what this is: punk rock cinema. It's snotty and sneering and unapologetically going to leave anyone in the dust who doesn't get the joke. How the fuck else did you think QT would deal with the subject matter? As Archie Hicox, the English film critic-turned-solider-turned-spy, says right before the massacre in the basement tavern, "I hope you don't mind if I go down speaking the King's." In other words: when shit looks grim, you use the language available to you, and then you enjoy your Scotch.

And the language available to QT is movies, the intoxicatingly beautiful and ridiculous grammar of which underpins stuff like the Hugo Stiglitz intertitle and its accompanying power metal guitar riff before Aldo Raine busts into prison to tell him "we're big fans of your work"; Shosanna's face, enjoying the literal last laugh, projected onto the smoke rising from the movie theater-turned-gas-chamber that has been set ablaze using actual film stock; Frederick Zoller turning from a soldier into an actor; Goering fancying himself the Third Reich's David O. Selznick; Bridget von Hammersmark conflating spying with acting; Donny Donowitz and Private Ulmer's breathless action-movie-cliche exchange before busting into Hitler's opera box ("After I kill that guy, you have 30 feet to get to that guy. Can you do it?" "I have to!"); and, of course, the final, cheekily self-referential shot of Aldo Raine drawling "I think this just may be my masterpiece." Even the WWII-movie convention of everyone going around speaking accented English gets a nod during the impeccable opening sequence when Hans Landa shifts from French to English and back again.

Which reminds me--holy shit, this movie was subtitled in at least three different languages and one of the major plot points turns on being able to discern inconsistencies in another character's accent and use of idiomatic gestures. This, rather than the male-dominated cast of soldiers and its attendant tough-guy posturing, is the true hearkening back to the era of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: language, my people, language. All the sitting around and talking to kill time, all the ways that secrets are traded as precious commodities. Language divides just as sure as it brings pleasure; it's a weapon every bit as dangerous, in its own way, as Aldo Raine's knife. Nicknames and rumor (the trash genres of verbal communication, as it were) serve, elegantly, a kind of double function here, as destabilizing tactics among the governments and their martial emissaries (eg, Hitler's futile insistence that no one ever refer to Donowitz as "the Bear Jew" again) and as sly commentary on the world of film fandom (eg, the repeated question "have you heard of me?", Landa's pointed insult to Utivich about his height).

All of which, of course, would be bullshit if the movie wasn't so much fun and also so lovely. Much has been made of the final showdown at the premier of Nation's Pride, and for good reason. It has to be one of the most taut, thrilling sequences since...well, maybe since the House of Blue Leaves vignette in Kill Bill. The use of Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was a brilliant, achronological touch that just catapults you into the excitement and anticipation of the moment. Sublime.

There's much, much more to be said about the film, and I'll probably get around to saying more eventually. I just felt like I needed to get some of my most salient impressions up here (four months after the fact, ahem; thanks for your patience, friends) before the end of the year. Viva QT!

*

The few things I've seen since our last movie update right after Thanksgiving have been mostly lackluster. I fell asleep during the final climactic battle sequence of Avatar, and A Single Man is as dumb, shallow, and pretty a film as you'd expect a douchebag like Tom Ford to make. Up in the Air didn't do much for me other than prove, more than ten years after the release of Out of Sight, that America clings tightly to its favorite enduring fantasy of having nearly anonymous sex with George Clooney after getting picked up by him in a hotel bar. (JR Jones made me cackle when he referred to Clooney in his review in the Reader as "the most adored man in America after Barack Obama.") Also, Vera Farmiga is super pretty (though I still always momentarily think she's Claire Forlani). Sherlock Holmes is fluffy and fun, almost distractingly so--Robert Downey Jr., talented as he demonstrably is, pretty much doesn't even act anymore as much as he personifies a series of exclamation points bouncing around at 24 frames a second. In the plus column, I liked Broken Embraces quite a bit more than any Almodovar film in the past few years, especially when you realize it's not actually about the Penelope Cruz-centered love story, but actually about the improvised family structure created by and around Judit and her son. And though I missed it during the approximately five minutes it was out in theaters this summer, I finally just caught Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience on DVD and really loved it. I love that he's one of the few filmmakers willing to engage in any sort of conversation (reductionist as it necessarily must be) about the ways that people make and use money. The personal trainer character made me want to gag on my own tongue a couple times for the ways that he reminded me exactly of the trainer I was working with for six weeks this fall.

Otherwise...yeah. It's been a pretty boring year for movies. Whither the explosion of creativity and innovation we saw ten years ago in '99? Was it just a fin de siecle thing? Not much has really stuck with me this year. It's all the single word movies: Up, Moon, Taken, Humpday, Adventureland. More importantly, there was also Bright Star, Bad Lieutenant, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, as elaborated upon above, Inglourious Basterds. And, in their own weird ways, also The Soloist and Two Lovers. That's not even a movie per month! Hopefully you've had a luckier year than me, my darlings. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the new year and the new decade, shall we?

Bonus track: in chronological order, here are my top 20 favorite films of the '00s.

Almost Famous--2000 (I'm pretty sure I saw this movie the same day I had Ethiopean food for the first time--CTLA, be a good Boswell and correct my memory if I'm wrong about this)
The Anniversary Party--2001 (this is really of a piece with Rachel Getting Married, as far as their being real-time depictions of talented friends gifting each other with the extravagance of their talent; I have a real soft spot for that sort of thing)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch--2001
Moulin Rouge!--2001
The Royal Tenenbaums--2001 (although I seriously did debate citing The Life Aquatic; I've really come around on that film since I originally saw it in the theater, now that I think I better understand what it's doing)
Insomnia--2002 (Christopher Nolan's most underrated film)
The Pianist--2002 (Polanski, you fucker, I wish I knew how to quit you)
Signs--2002 (shut up, I don't even care--this is my favorite film about the experience of the day of 9/11)
All the Real Girls--2003
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead--2003 (it's Clive Owen in a neo-noir; why didn't more people see this?)
Lost in Translation--2003
Kill Bill, Vol. 1--2003--and Vol. 2--2004 (it's really unfair to think of them as separate movies)
Before Sunset--2004
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--2004
Cache--2005 (along with seeing Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, this is one of my favorite filmgoing experiences ever)
A History of Violence--2005
There Will Be Blood--2007
Man on Wire--2008
Rachel Getting Married--2008
Bright Star--2009

Best Music of 2009

2009-12-23T14:49:00.001-06:00

Previously: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

*

Though I'm going to go on and on in the following paragraphs about the minutiae of what I loved most in these individual songs and how they colored specific moments in my life this year, I'm struck oddly mute now that it's time to make a statement about the whole enchilada. At the root of it all, to be honest, after the overwhelming angst of '08, I basically just wanted to make you guys a kickass mix this time around. What else could I possibly say to top the simple truth of that aspiration?

Well, of course, in my attempt to eschew narrative as I was assembling this comp, I've only ended up more emphatically tracing the outline of the journey I've been on in the past 12 months: sugar-rush highs crash down into contemplative lows, everything swirling together into a general impression of '09 that I hope holds up beat by beat but will also end up being greater than the sum of its parts.

But, now that I've been doing this for a while, I feel like I"m finally getting the hang of how to make it work most effectively. Am I talking about the mix or the year? Take your pick. The whole point of these things has always been to blur that line a little bit, hopefully for the benefit of us both. Truthfully, there's almost nothing I look forward to more than the chance to design this little musical and emotional excursion for you at the end of each year.

But, enough with the boo-hooing! Screw the self-conscious navel gazing! Let's party like it's 1999, a decade after the fact.

*

1. Quiet Dog--Mos Def
Mighty Mos returns! This simple, stunning track reminds us, in the era of auto-tune and overcooked soul samples, of hip-hop's barest essentials: voice and beat. It, of course, helps that both of the elements here are killer: handclaps that crunch like celery, drums that rumble like they're perched on a polar ice cap so that they can use the length of the planet to resonate, and Mos's endlessly appealing mischievous playfulness. Dude whispers his way out of this track--what a testament to his bottomless well of charisma!

2. Dull to Pause--Junior Boys
Any album that sets itself up to be an exploration of the place where the act of cinematic creation and the act of seduction share language and become momentarily synonymous was bound to interest me at least in passing, but I never expected to fall quite as hard as I did for Begone Dull Care. It's immaculately wrought from front to back, its cool cynicism coming on like our era's answer to Steely Dan in their heyday. The amoral licentiousness of Jeremy Greenspan's whispery croon is mottled with just enough pillowy charm that it fools me into believing that the creepy, Hitchcockian possessiveness of the lyric "I don't want to share you / so don't say good night" is actually kinda sexy.

3. Which Song--Max Tundra
I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release at the end of '08, which was probably for the best since it afforded me plenty of time in the usually musically barren beginning of the year to really drown myself in its pleasures. Even though it's arguably of a piece with the rest of the spazzypants stuff I got heavily addicted to this spring (which you'll read more about soon in re: Micachu), I hesitate to diminish the brilliance of what Max Tundra's done here by reducing its appeal to "hey, that shit's crazy!" I mean, it is crazy, but it's also funny and cutting and thoughtful and positively overflowing with hooks and deeply satisfying melodic invention. The always casually brilliant Mike Barthel compared this album to a Magic Eye image, noting that you have to wait for your brain to relax into it and assemble the different sonic chunks before you can hear the shape behind all the squiggles. But unlike a Magic Eye picture whose scribbles can be ignored or cast off as mere obfuscation of the thing you're really looking at, there's no there here--the scribbles turn out to be the essence of everything that's enjoyable about this music in the first place.

4. Not a Robot, but a Ghost--Andrew Bird
For as much as I love Andrew Bird, he's kind of like the musical equivalent of Michel Gondry--so intimidatingly brilliant and creative that his output can get a bit samey if he's not challenged by an equally brilliant collaborator. For my money, any time he lets Martin Dosh really pull out all the stops, the results always soar. (I'm sure this is why I prefer Armchair Apocrypha, which Dosh's fingerprints are all over, to Bird's other solo albums thus far.) The keening in his voice here is all the more potent with the beats bolstering the angst in such an sharply visceral way.

5. Temecula Sunrise--Dirty Projectors
My computer died for about a month right in the middle of this summer, and one of the last new releases I'd synched onto my iPod before it happened was Bitte Orca. Much like the experience of being isolated with DCFC's Narrow Stairs in the deserts of New Mexico last year, being forced to focus my attention on this album for an extended period of time was, in a sense, an amazing relief. Without the option of swapping in and out a bunch of other music, I enjoyed the luxury of really getting to know this one deeply. Sure didn't hurt that it's eminently deserving of sustained attention, full of all the intense drama and philosophy and catharsis I'm always looking for in an album. The angular and inventive guitar solo here floors me every time. Unlike most guitar solos plopped into your average indie rock song, it's not just a bracketed section of sound called [guitar solo]; it's something curious and rich and inviting and every bit as compelling as the vocals surrounding it. (Also, music theory nerds, please e-mail me if you can figure out the time signature this song is written in. It's had me stumped for months.)

6. Eat Your Heart--Micachu & the Shapes
For at least the first half of the year, I just surrendered to the fact that something in me wanted to listen to the spazziest music possible all the time. Call it the yang to last year's Bon Iver-dominated yin or whatever, but I wanted to feel assaulted by noise so abrasive it constantly courted pure annoyance. Dan Deacon's Bromst did a respectable job, but no album sugared me up as immediately or intensely as Micachu's Jewellry. The herky-jerky time signatures, broken toy instruments (and vacuum cleaners!), and her guttural drawl all hit this weird pleasure center somewhere in my occipital lobe and just blissed me out with totally overwhelming insanity.

7. Rudie Fails--White Rabbits
Considering how wholly uninterested I am in White Rabbits as a band, they sure have a way of writing songs that capture my imagination to the point of obsession. (I'll spare you the Alice in Wonderland free association here.) Of course, getting Britt Daniel to produce this recent batch of songs was a pretty surefire way of grabbing my attention and guaranteeing at least a modicum of affection. "Percussion Gun" was an early favorite from It's Frightening (o ye of the awesome front cover), but something about the balance of looseness and ferocity here gave "Rudie Fails" legs I wouldn't have necessarily expected. But dude--That piano! All that empty space! The vocal howl! Even if it's just Spoon Jr., I'm OK with that.

8. Middle Cyclone--Neko Case
Guys, this is the song she named her entire album after. Who else would have the balls to write something this emotionally naked and then so confidently direct everyone's attention to it? This song made me sad before I even got sad again this year. Neko sings truth.

9. The Sleeping Beauty--American Music Club
Consider this the equivalent of me waving my arms in the air, jumping up and down, and shooting off air horns to draw everyone's attention to the wonderful and unjustly slept-on American Music Club album The Golden Age. Though it was released early in '08, it came to my attention this summer and sank its hooks into me immediately with its West Coast-gothic vibe. There were long stretches of time when it was really the only album I could stand to listen to. I could extol the virtues of pretty much any of its songs--though my special faves would include "All My Love," "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco," and "The Dance"--but the autumnal regret and muted fatalism of "The Sleeping Beauty" just fit like a glass slipper (to mix my fairy tale metaphors) here. If there's any album cited on this mix that I would go out of my way to advise you to check out in full, it's this one.

10. While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear, feat. Michael McDonald
Did you not believe me last year? Do you remain unconvinced of the stratospheric excellence of this song? I believe Mr. Michael McDonald might have a thing or two to say about the matter. Guys, I'm sorry, I know it's kind of obnoxious to run the same song two years in a row, but when Grizzly Bear released this B-side, it was like they were daring me to do it. I couldn't not take the bait. This song's still fresher than fresh a year and a half after I first heard the live recording of it. I would wear the essence of those cymbal crashes as a perfume if I could find a way to bottle it.

11. Hard to Find a Friend--Baby Teeth
There are plenty of great bands working in Chicago right now, but Abraham Levitan is in an altogether more rarified group--dude is a straight-up great songwriter. He's got a seemingly effortless way with with melodies that are easy-on-the-ears yet deceptively complex and with vivid lyrics that trip pleasantly off the tongue while telling poignantly humorous (and humorously poignant) Everyman stories. Add to that potent mix the band's utterly winning on-stage charisma and stealth chops (Peter Andreadis--subtlest drummer I've heard in ages and the band's secret weapon), and they're like a time bomb of rock just waiting to explode out of the Midwest. Don't say you weren't warned.

12. The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)--The Decemberists
It's Tuesday, so that must mean it's time to hate on the Decemberists. Or, wait--is it backlash-to-the-backlash day? I can't keep that shit straight anymore. Lucky for everyone who's turned a blind eye to the hype cycle, Colin Meloy just keeps on writing impeccable songs like this one. Though I initially dismissed it as a mere pretender to "Wicked Little Town"'s throne, I eventually opened my ears enough to hear the actual song I was listening to, instead of just my perception of it. And when I finally heard it, it became one of those tracks I almost couldn't listen to on the train for fear of bursting into tears any time it so much as came up on shuffle. The romantic complexity laced with foreboding in the lyrics coupled with the featherweight bombast of the arrangement makes this one of the roundest songs I've heard all year.

13. Save Me from What I Want--St. Vincent
Though I ultimately found Actor too wearying an album to garner much repeat play, this track immediately jumped out at me. It keeps Annie Clark's more outre instrumental affectations in check while letting her extremely nuanced vocals shine with subtle shades of humor, exasperation, and ennui. Plus, the transition from the Decemberists to this is secretly my favorite segue on the comp, both sonically and thematically.

14. Crazy/Forever--Japandroids
Japandroids' Post-Nothing was definitely, surprisingly, one of my favorite albums this year, thanks to its perfect combination of heart-on-sleeviness and go-for-broke sonic force. I love any band that can make me feel like I'm 16 again (except with actual good taste in cool music this time). They get extra bonus points for being stereotypically dorkily polite Canadians live in concert.

15. 1901--Phoenix
Though I loved Alphabetical when it came out in '04, I kind of lost track of Phoenix for a while there. In my brain, I tend to file them in the same drawer as Sloan: un-show-offy professionals who have a way with a killer hook, whose recorded output is so consistent that their albums sometimes, weirdly, seem redundant. Put it another way--they're like a well-made TV show like House or 30 Rock that you can just pop into and out of, episode by episode, without getting lost in the season's major narrative arc. A piece of easily accessible art that didn't make me work to crack it open, "1901" goes down smooth every time, like a bourbon vanilla milkshake.

16. Brother Sport--Animal Collective
Perhaps the apotheosis of this year's obsession with all things annoying-but-catchy. There were a few weeks during that hideous late February/early March time of year when I would blast this song straight into my ears first thing in the morning as I let my light therapy box sear my retinas from its perch next to the bed. (What, do you have a better suggestion for not turning homicidal at the end of a grueling Chicago winter?) The counterpoint between the Saturday morning cartoon sonics and Panda Bear's harmonies stacked as wide as the Lake Michigan shoreline is somehow so stupid, so fucking funny, that it's perfect--transcendent even. Likewise his spur to "OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your throat a luttul" shifts from being phonemic soup at first to then resonating as a spiritually valid mantra for creative self-agency. I loved "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" as much as anyone, but the pinata-like explosion of Muppetty affability and wisdom here at the end of the album will always mark "Brother Sport" as the defining track of Merriweather Post Pavilion for me.

*

Honorable mentions this year go to Short Punks in Love's "Olivia," Metric's "Help I'm Alive," A.C. Newman's "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer," the xx's "Basic Space," the Clientele's "Harvest Time," Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Franz Ferdinand's "No You Girls," Anni Rossi's "Machine," Passion Pit's "The Reeling," Arctic Monkeys' "Cornerstone," and the Duckworth Lewis Method's "Jiggery Pokery."

Thanks as always to anyone who recommended anything to me this year, indulged my enthusiasms, came out to a concert or festival with me, or made any kind of joyful noise that touched my life. Special thanks to JH for working with me again on the beautiful packaging that will come with the actual burned copies of the CDs.

November Update

2009-11-29T14:55:00.004-06:00

Hello, my kittens. Are you ready for your now-regular monthly dispatch from the land of Wrestling Entropy? In all honesty, I'm not even sure I am. I started an insane workout regimen about six weeks ago, and just about the only thing I've gotten out of it is a deeper understanding of the fact that meatheads and gym rats aren't necessarily dumb as a matter of course--they're just fucking exhausted all the time. All the blood that would normally be helping their brains compose lovely and thoughtful sentiments has been rerouted to their muscles, leaving them dim and ineloquent masses of crabbiness and fatigue. OK, well, maybe that really is just me, but man--this shit's been brutal. Anyway. To the extent that I've been able to scrape myself together enough to do anything remotely of interest this month, here's what I've been up to:

Max Tundra, Live at Schubas. I was just talking to Eric and Annie about how it's become impossible to tell what shows are going to sell out immediately and what shows you're going to be able to waltz right into at the last minute. I found out about the November 5th Max Tundra show a day or two ahead of time and utterly panicked. I figured there'd be no way I would be able to get a ticket. Well, not only was I able to buy one, I could have brought along about 50 of my closest friends. I was soooo bummed at what a small turnout there was for the show. Granted, he didn't go on until about 11 pm on a Thursday night, the Mountain Goats/Final Fantasy (bandonyms ahoy!) double-header was scheduled the same night just up the street at the Metro, and Schubas is a terrible venue for dancypants genres--but still. It's Max Tundra! I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release in late '08, but after finally grabbing it earlier this year, it's absolutely been my personal #1 album of '09. I tried to tell him as much while folks were congregating around the merch table at the end of the night, and it was a supremely, comically awkward interaction. I just kept gushing and he just kept running out of ways to say "thanks, I appreciate it," and the whole thing escalated with an embarrassing-for-us-both high five. (Initiated by him--allow me to spare myself a little dignity by making that fact perfectly clear.) Anyway, the album is still unimpeachable and you should check it out if you haven't had the pleasure yet.

After nearly a year of fits and starts, I finally finished reading American Prometheus a few weeks ago. It was astonishingly good. I have no idea how a book of this scope gets researched and written (not to mention edited), but it's seriously gorgeous. I lived with the book for so many months, and it contained so much heartwrenching emotion, I was literally in tears as I finished the last page. Highly, but not lightly, recommended.

As something of a palate cleanser (ahem), I also read Toni Bentley's butt sex book The Surrender pretty much immediately thereafter. It was really quite great. It's less prurient than it could have been and she's a surprisingly lovely writer. It was also interesting to see how structurally similar it was to Eat, Pray, Love. Is there some sort of "contemporary woman's memoir" script that necessitates a tripartite structure, a post-divorce journey of soul-searching, feats of physical endurance invented to mirror and in many ways overcome emotional blockages, culminating in greater self-awareness and inner peace? Will someone who's not been working out six days a week please write this essay for me? KTHX.

I saw more movies this month than I realized I did, mostly thanks to the time afforded me over four-day holiday weekend. In brief:

The Men Who Stare at Goats. Completely ridiculous and demonstrably not very well written, but somehow amusing in spite of itself. I'm sure this is mostly thanks to the effortless charisma of most of its cast. I just wish they weren't working so hard to save a movie that didn't necessarily deserve to be saved.

Tropic Thunder. Obvy, I'm way behind the times here, and, even after seeing the whole thing, I felt like I didn't really need to thanks to the best jokes being given away in last year's omnipresent trailer. But it was still pretty enjoyable anyway. The fake gay priest movie preview at the beginning probably got the biggest laugh out of me, but Jay Baruchel's film nerd monologue about Renny Harlin was a pretty close second. That kid prob should also have been in The Men Who Stare at Goats in re: effortless charisma.

Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, I am 100% the target demographic here, but there's no sense in tip-toeing around the fact that I loved every fucking minute of it. Seriously, it's just delight upon delight, while also remaining deeply, deeply weird. The bit with the wolf near the end? No exaggeration: I was weeping with laughter. I saw it on Thanksgiving night and the audience fucking applauded when the credits began to roll. I always love the extravagance of the gesture when that happens at the end of a movie. No one involved with its creation or performance is going to hear it; it's just a pure, spontaneous expression of happiness and fellow-feeling and aesthetic satisfaction.

Coco Before Chanel. This was a bit more of a snooze than I was hoping/expecting, but it was ultimately redeemed for me by how much of an unconventional hero Coco is presented as here. She's not particularly charming or likable, but she's still this gutsy dame who gets shit done and befriends all kinds of powerful and influential people and builds her own empire from scratch. I was glad to see a small group of young-looking girls in the theater on the afternoon I caught this; what an awesomely feminist message for them to be exposed to: it's OK to be bitchy and difficult! The world won't fall apart and you'll have more self-respect and you'll probably get a lot more things of genuine value accomplished that way!

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Holy shit. So awesome. Ridiculous and dark and hilarious and foul. I know this is a totally obnoxious thing to say, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I would have absolutely gone apeshit-level bonkers for when I was about 19. Not that I enjoyed it any less at 30, but I could just imagine adopting this as a kind of secret-handshake movie back then, my love for it becoming a place that would feel like an exclusive club inside my own brain, a place to meet up with other like-minded friends to discuss its many hideous pleasures. There's no way to overstate how fucking fantastic Nicolas Cage is here--because he's already gone ahead and embedded the overstatement in his own performance. There's also, of course, the subtextual level where the character's story becomes the story of the post-Katrina plight of the city, which realization had me racing to my bookshelf to start reading my gratis copy of Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood immediately after the movie to help understand contemporary New Orleans a bit better. Do not sleep on this one, fellow lovers of neo-noir and all things bat-shit insane.

I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, be sure to pop over to Pitchfork News and check out Elvis Costello playing "High Fidelity" with the Roots. I just...there are no words. Does shit get any cooler than this? It's inspired me to rock out to Get Happy!! the past few days. Every time I let my love for Elvis slip a little bit from my immediate consciousness, something like this comes along to remind me why dude will forever be one of my faves.

Also, hey, Animal Collective, where do you find the time/energy/creativity to fart out another superlative set of songs in the same calendar year as Merriweather Post Pavilion? The new Fall Be Kind EP is a stunner, totally worth it for the first two tracks alone, though the entire moody journey is incredibly rewarding. Embarrassing admission: when I first heard Avey Tare sing that line in "On a Highway" about "Noah's dreaming," I was totally trying to figure out the Biblical allusion until I read the Pitchfork review, which reminded me that that's Panda Bear's real name. Oh. Right. Duh.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend, my darlings!

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T09:55:00.002-05:00

Happy Halloween, my kittens! What kind of treats do I have to share with you today?

Bright Star. It's probably already come and gone from your local theater, so a fat lot of good this recommendation will do you until the DVD comes out, but I have to go on record as saying this film was wonderful. I was absolutely rapt the entire running time. When the lights came up, the first thing I said to Benji (who gave it a lovely review here in his awesomely fun new weekly column over at The New Gay) was: "all those little Twilight girls should be forced to watch this as a corrective." This is how to deal elegantly and passionately with young love and unrequited physical longing. Campion and her lead actress Abbie Cornish did an extraordinary job of respecting the intensity of the emotions while still allowing them to be completely youthful and wild. Cornish's breakdown when Fanny finds out Keats has died is totally earned and totally heartbreaking. It's not just the love story that's compelling here, though--the quiet way that her family embroiders the edges of the scenes gave the whole thing a warmth and intimacy that occasionally bordered on claustrophobia (as real families often do), and Paul Schneider (yes, that Paul Schneider) continues to be one of those MVP, will-watch-in-anything-he-does kind of actors. Also inspired: hearing Ben Whishaw as Keats reading one of his poems over the closing credits instead of going straight to music.

An Education. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I think Nick Hornby's one-dimensional script just kind of hamstrung it before the movie even had a chance. It reminded me of the problems I had with State of Play--all these awesome actors borderline wasting their talents working extra hard to redeem the shitty dialogue and flat character types. Rosamund Pike especially (known to the romantics among us as Jane Bennet from the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice) did a heroic job overcoming the on-page limitations of her "I'm dumb and pretty" broken record, giving her some real sadness and charm where none were naturally occurring. Dominic Cooper, too, as her boyfriend Danny showed enough spark and charm and glamor to make his scenes memorable, and I nearly cheered when Sally Hawkins showed up for a brief, heartbreaking moment near the end. The usually unimpeachable Alfred Molina and Peter Sarsgaard weren't served nearly as well, unfortunately--though Molina's monologue to his daughter, apologizing to her through her closed bedroom door, was tragically tender and regretful in all the right ways. But, to the film's credit, as with Bright Star, there was an enormous amount of sensitivity in portraying the lead character Jenny as quite bright while also allowing her to also be petty and vain and rash, which kept her well outside the bounds of annoying movie precociousness. You can check out the meat of Lynn Barber's true story and a little bit about the making of the film here at The Guardian.

I don't know who Daisy Chapman is, but her cover of "Our Mutual Friend" was linked recently at the Divine Comedy's Twitter page. I wanted to love it, both because that's one of the best songs Neil has written in the '00s and because DC songs should always be covered more often than they currently are, but unfortunately she sucks all the life and nuance out of it by singing the surface of the song instead of the subtext. The original version that appears on Absent Friends (and, ahem, my best of 2004 mix) is nearly inexhaustible, thanks to the way that Neil's interp reveals, in a paradoxically complex way, the essential shallowness of these characters--all the vapid conversation about how it's hard to hear your own voice at the nightclub or how the old 45s "are like the soundtrack to our lives." He also leaves enough ambiguity in the storyline to doubt whether the girl was intentionally leading the narrator on or if he just drunkenly misconstrued her level of interest in him. No such nuance in Daisy's version! Though, yes, she has a lovely voice and comes up with an inventive solo piano arrangement to reconfigure the chamber music affectations of the DC original, she goes straight for the jugular in the most uninteresting way possible. She oversings and oversells the first person narrator's heartbreak, leaving no possible interpretation aside from her conviction that she's been betrayed. Which also, of course, opens up an ugly sort of girl-on-girl catfighty misogyny now that the genders are reversed--blame the other girl for "stealing" the guy, rather than holding the dude accountable for being fickle and sneaky. Sigh. I hate to be overly critical because, like I say, I think the DC's back catalog is ripe for people to reinvent, but singers have to be able to match all the intelligence that Neil has built into these songs for the covers to actually be worth a damn.

Patton Oswalt's My Weakness Is Strong. I have nothing critically interesting to say about this, only that I LOVE IT. It's not as 100% solid from front to back as Werewolves and Lollipops, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the pro-Obama stuff will probably make you wistfully sad/nostalgic for early '09, the way it captures the time before things got all kinds of ugly with health care and whatnot, but even with that--hell, especially with that--there is so much pure joy and silliness throughout. Dude is very clearly operating at the top of his game here. Hopefully you've also read Pitchfork's very sharp review of the album and Patton's AV Club interview.

Japandrooooooooooooids! Caught these guys at a freaking 3 pm show, of all things, at Schubas earlier this month, and it just reminded me why Post-Nothing has been one of my surprise favorite albums of '09. The songs are loud and fun and dumb in the right ways, and I just wish I had a car and a stretch of open road so I could blast this stuff into the warm night air. I also totally didn't realize that they're Canadian, so there's an extra layer of delight when, after you've been pummeled with all that meaty guitar and electrifying drum work, Brian King starts gushing uber-politely about how grateful they are that we've showed up to support them. Adorable. I snapped a few pictures that you can check out here.

Be safe out there, tonight, my darlings, if you are getting dressed up and partying.

September Omnibus

2009-09-23T22:12:00.000-05:00

Hello, my darlings. It's been a busy month, mostly for personal reasons (all good, don't you worry!), but I suppose it's time to do another quick roundup here to keep you abreast of the pop cultural goings-on in my world.

Yes, I have seen Inglourious Basterds. No, I'm not ready to write about it yet. For both your sake and mine, I want to get this one right, so you're going to have to continue to have patience with me. KTHX.

I did go on a bit of a documentary binge, though (perhaps in response to all the intellectual heavy lifting required by the Tarantino project--just needed to cleanse my palate a bit from all the intertextual references and whatnot). Over the course of three days, I saw It Might Get Loud, Paper Heart, and The September Issue. Contrary to what even I would have expected, I think The September Issue was my favorite of the bunch.

It Might Get Loud was fun but flimsy. Jimmy Page looks like this wonderful old lion, and I actually didn't realize how long he'd been a professional guitar player before the Zeppelin juggernaut, so that was super interesting to learn about. The Edge was totally the odd man out in the threesome, and he kept getting lost in his own logical contradictions as he was describing his philosophy of guitar playing--he'd start to espouse all the beauties of simplicity (modifying chords to ring more purely and openly with fewer notes), but then you'd see him hooked up this his huge rig of computerized effects pedals or standing onstage at one of U2's bloated stadium shows, both of which couldn't be more complex and elaborate. His heart is in the right place, though, I guess. His musical reference points were also fairly divergent from the blues idiom that continues to inform the playing style of both Page and Jack White, which left his contributions a bit in the cold as well. Jack White was an interesting addition to the mix, not least of which was due to the fact that there are no other comparable guitar players of his age and level of fame/success/stature who could have fit the bill (srsly, who else would you have put in there? Josh Homme? Doug Martsch? Stephen Malkmus? I love those guys, but there's not a chance in hell). He also came in with enough hunger and ego blazing to keep those elder statesmen on their toes. There's no way I'd ever want to be friends with that guy, because he just seems like such an impossible dick, but I really respect the hell out of him as a musician and pop cultural figure. I also kind of wish that the movie had gotten even wankier, though. I wanted to hear more about specific chord tunings, songwriting techniques, recording tricks, all that trainspotting nerdery. There's something always slightly hypnotic and wonderful about listening to incredibly skilled people talking about things that I have utterly no frame of reference for. For some strange reason, my dad used to subscribe to Guitar Player magazine when I was still living at home, and I grew curiously addicted to flipping through it--though all the talk about pedals and amps and whatnot could get a bit tedious, there was something incredibly fascinating about that level of detail that goes into your garden variety rock song. I suppose I'm in the minority here, and the director probably didn't want to alienate the already small target demographic for this movie, but I could have used fewer rhapsodic monologues on the theme of "when I was a young boy, the guitar just called to me..." and more hardcore information about what they're actually doing when they're playing guitar. By the end of the movie, though, I kind of started to hate white men and longed for somebody to do a ladies' rock version of the same--Joni Mitchell, Carrie Brownstein, and Annie Clark, maybe? Can somebody make that happen?

My girl crush on Charlyne Yi continues unabated. The nice thing that Paper Heart does is that it sucks you in with the idea that you get to watch her fall in love (or playact a simulacrum of what happened when she once upon a time purportedly fell in love) with Michael Cera, but it actually turns out to be a love story about friendship. The most interesting relationship in the whole movie was between her and the "director" (Nicholas Jasenovec, played onscreen by the totes adorbs Jake M. Johnson). It felt like they had the most screen time together, and it's beautiful to watch their relationship unfold as they tease each other, give each other nicknames (he endearingly calls her Chuck throughout), confess to each other their fears and ambitions in everything from life and love to their careers in Hollywood, and bicker and make up as their realize the true importance of their friendship. How can a garden variety romance with the indie-heartthrob-of-the-moment possibly stand up to something genuinely sweet like that? Luckily, the movie doesn't try too hard to force it and pretty much lets both of these "love stories" do their own thing, on their own time, with their own weight. Sure, much of it is cutesy and if stuff of this nature is inclined to bug you, there's no way anything I'm going to say will change your mind. But, there's a sweetness and a gentleness to it that I found plenty appealing.

Even though I'm not a remotely fashionable girl, I've always secretly kind of been fascinated by clothes and models and the fashion industry, almost in a scientific way, so Benji didn't have to do much convincing to get me to see The September Issue with him. And I loved it, loved it, loved it, largely due to the amazing onscreen presence of Grace Coddington. I can't even begin to summarize her list of achievements and accomplishments here, but she's the perfect complement to Anna Wintour at Vogue. The two women balance each others' strengths and idiosyncrasies so well, neither of them would probably be able to do her job as effectively without the other. It's a beautiful partnership, and of course it's hugely inspiring to see two women of such power and influence rocking their professions at the absolute top of their game. Even if you don't dig fashion, per se, it's a fascinating entry into the broadly defined "putting on a show" genre, as a bunch of creative people come together to make something beautiful out of thin air before the clock runs out. Highly recommended.

I also had the delightful opportunity to see Sondre Lerche play a solo set at Schubas last weekend. I hadn't seen him live in concert since April '07 at the Double Door, but it's always a treat to see him when he rolls through town. I haven't picked up his new album yet, but I plan on doing so soon. As I observed the first time I saw him play a solo show way back in November '04, hearing his songs with nothing but his own guitar accompaniment only emphasizes how cunningly wrought and durable they are. The jazz chord voicings and sweetly twisty melodies can reveal themselves more fully when you're not distracted by the noise and excitement of a full rock band set up. I suppose it's only natural that he'd keep getting better as a singer, songwriter, and guitar player as he matures, but it's almost shocking to watch someone already so laden with so much pure talent continue to grow as a musician, basically in real time. (And the fucker's still only in his mid-20s!!) After opening with a song I'm assuming came from Heartbeat Radio, he ripped into an insanely rocked out and amped up version of "Faces Down" that, in all honesty, the rest of the set almost didn't recover from--it was that good. It was really almost too much too soon in its utter brilliance. He was unfortunately beset by some technical difficulties with his guitar mic, but that just gave him a chance to unplug and give us a totally acoustic version of "Say It All." It was one of those totally unplanned moments that takes a show up a level from enjoyable to special; the room was nearly glowing with warmth. His talent really brings out the best in his audiences, too. Maybe it's just because it was the 7 pm show and, as such, was filled with folks too old (and/or too young) to want to stay up for the 10:30 pm set, but everyone stayed respectfully quiet while he was playing--until he invited us to sing along, at which point everyone busted out not only perfect recall on the lyrics, but also on the harmonies, too. Like with the Juana Molina show back in February, I left the club wanting to be a better, more creative person. It's some next level shit when a show is inspiring like that. The photoset from the evening is posted to my Flickr page here.

In other music news, I already Twittered about it here, but, man, is that American Music Club album The Golden Age good. It's been on nearly constant repeat on my iPod for the past few weeks. It's not flashy or show-offy in the slightest; it just does everything right. There are so many turns of phrase that leave me utterly breathless ("I'll be the match that holds your fire / I'll be the note that sings from your wire / if I can give you all my love" in "All My Love" and "Years ago my soul went missin' / lookin' for a life no one would mourn" from "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" come immediately to mind but there are dozens of others scattered throughout), and "The Dance" has to be one of the most devastating songs (outside John Darnielle's oeuvre) that I've heard in ages. I suspect the album's only going to continue to grow on me.

As far as reading material, I've been absolutely devouring And Here's the Kicker. You can find out more about the interviewees at the book's nice and simple website here; take a look at the list there and maybe you'll understand why I've been forcing myself not to rush through it in an attempt to prolong its pleasures. I probably could have dog-eared every other page, it's so full of interesting insights, but George Meyer's interview is sticking in my brain most at the moment. For instance, in talking about cultivating the state of flow in comedy writing (specifically referencing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work!), I thought this was brilliant:

The work you do in this state has grace and ease and resonance. It's the opposite of what Michael O'Donoghue used to call "sweaty" comedy, when you've laboriously squeezed out something tedious, and the effort shows. When you're "in the zone," a joke will just land on you like a butterfly, and only if you scrutinize it later do you see how it came together from disparate elements. . . .

[In other to cultivate this elusive state] You have to be prepared. You need basic writing skills, of course, but you also want to have lots of raw ingredients rattling around in your skull: vivid words, strange song lyrics, irritating euphemisms, disastrous experiences that have been bothering you for years. To feed this stockpile, you need to expose yourself to the real world and all its hailstones.

The other essential is humility. You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and stale and derivative. If you don't take yourself too seriously, you'll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the muse's next visit. . . .

I used to berate myself if I couldn't think of a killer joke for every spot, but I gradually eased up on that. You can't keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it'll run away and find a new pimp.

Seriously, guys, the whole book is chockful of stuff like that. It's been an unremitting delight for me as a comedy nerd. Definitely recommended for those of you with similar interests and obsessions.

On quite the other end of the spectrum, the interview with Philip Zimbardo, the professor behind the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, in this month's issue of The Believer is not to be missed. Apparently it's an excerpt from a lengthier interview that will appear in the forthcoming McSweeney's title A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, but the full text of The Believer's version is available online here. It's horrifying stuff, but really important reading.

So what about you, my darlings? What's been keeping you busy and fascinated this month?

Death Proof

2009-08-26T12:54:00.002-05:00

Even though, intellectually, I see and to some extent understand that QT's films aren't for everyone, that they're problematic for some thematically and in their treatment of violence, etc., emotionally it's unfathomable to me. I get such a jolt of pure joy out of these movies--both in the sense that they bring me joy personally and in the sense I get that they bring him joy as well--that when people talk about disliking his oeuvre, it's like when I hear someone say they don't like chocolate. It's just like, what? How can you not love this?

It makes sense that Death Proof would be one of QT's most meta/intertextual films, as it's his installment of a "double feature" made in homage to both a style of cinema as well as the whole experience of consuming these kinds of films, made in concert with his best filmmaking buddy. But revisiting it this past week, I found myself more deeply delighted than I'd remembered by the formal elegance on display here--probably because I was initially distracted by all the trash trappings he was playing with (intentional scratches on the print, sleazy mise-en-scene, sudden shifts from black and white to color, the vintage "feature presentation" and "restricted" animations before the movie actually begins). Not only, obviously, is Grindhouse bifurcated, so is Death Proof, and, it's clear to me now, so too is the second half of Death Proof. The movie seems to be constantly splitting itself in half as it moves farther and farther away from any sort of gesture toward "realism" as it becomes more and more purely about cinematic conventions, so that by the time the girls kill Stuntman Mike, it's not really about whether or not these characters would "actually" behave this way--it's more about the symbolic death of the exploitative male gaze. I mean, obviously, right?

The two casts of women in this film are fairly obvious doubles/recursions of themselves, down to their character "types"/looks, haircuts, hierarchies, conversations, etc. I read this as not just indicative of Stuntman Mike's pathology as a stalker looking to endlessly recreate a pattern in his victims but as a comment on Hollywood's deeply boring tendency to do the same. There's always going to be the naive sweetheart, the sassy New Yorker, the kick-ass black "bitch," and the tough girl somewhere in the movies, right? In a way, it reminded me of those scenes in Inland Empire where all those pretty girls were hanging out in a small room, like veal in a pen, seemingly just waiting to be "killed" by the camera for their youth and beauty. The crucial difference between the two sets of women in Death Proof, though--the difference that the power of the story basically hinges on--is that the second group, the group uniquely capable of defending themselves and exacting revenge, is the group of movie people. I think this is QT's rebuke on the prevailing notion that movie nerdery is strictly a boys' club. It's like he's saying, "women are just as familiar with these tropes as dudes are--and not just familiar with them, but when given the space to do so, uniquely capable of using that familiarity to transform and subvert them."

That's why Rosario Dawson's coup de grace drop kick to the head is absolutely crucial, no matter how uncomfortable it's made some (ahem, male) critics. QT sets it up with the kind of subtlety that his detractors seem pathologically incapable of seeing in his work: in the earlier surveillance scene when Stuntman Mike is taking pictures of the second group of women at the airport, we see Abernathy and Lee vamping around for their own amusement, doing cheerleader-esque high kicks. Filmed through Stuntman Mike's spy-cam, their behavior becomes fetishized, and we're meant to get a voyeuristic thrill out of it--their legs are long and tan, their physical familiarity and affection with each other becoming subtly homoerotic (the key reasons that cheerleader movies ever get made in the first place, right?). But then the same action, the high kick in the air, is transformed into one of power, and, yes, table-turning violence. The message here is that the strength and beauty of her body cuts both ways, and she knows it, and all women should know it.

This is not meant to bag on the characters in the first half of the movie, of course. The sequence in Austin is filled with delights of its own, chief among which comes right before the real violence begins, when Kurt Russell extinguishes his cigarette and then looks directly into the camera. For me, for pure meta-thrill in acknowledging and challenging our gaze, it's got to rival the moment in Y Tu Mama Tambien when in the dive bar, right before the infamous threesome scene, Ana Lopez Mercado similarly breaks the fourth wall as she dances toward the camera. Mike's slight smile and glance back at us makes us 100% complicit in everything that's about to happen, and, just like Rose McGowan locked into the passenger seat (where, as he just explained, the camera would be if the car were being used in the filming of a movie), there's nothing we can do to change or stop it. What a thrown gauntlet.

Speaking of Rose McGowan, I also love her delivery of the line "That pituitary case? Mighta kicked my ass a couple of times--sorry, I'm built like a girl, not a black man--but I'd die before I ever gave Julia Lucai my chocolate milk." I'm generally indifferent to her as an actress, but, shit, she nails that interp so well, with so much humor and musicality, that I want to program it as my phone's ring tone.

I also love the fact that Tarantino casts himself as Warren the bartender in the first half of the movie. Momentarily setting aside the endless debate about his skills as an actor (I will remain respectfully neutral on the point for now), it's such a playful way of heightening the metanarrative here, of reminding us that this movie is unapologetically about movies. The linguistic doubling might be superficially facile, but it's clever: "I love that philosophy: 'Warren says it, we do it!'...Shots first, questions later. Here we go. Post time!" I mean, "shots first, questions later"? Come on. It's cheeky and it's silly, but I love it. He's directing the drunken craziness of the night, like...well, like a director. This bar scene is also where we get those endless shots of frames within frames within frames, the camera constantly set up behind random panes of glass, partitions, doorways, windows, and, of course, windshields. Everything here is mediated; we're always being reminded that we're looking through.

So, there you have it, kittens! My trip through Tarantino's old work is complete, and I'm sooo looking forward to finally checking out Inglourious Basterds. It might take me a while to write something up here, though, since I feel it takes at least three viewings of a well-made movie before I'm able to sufficiently wrap my head around it. Catch you back here soon.

Kill Bill, Vols. I and II

2009-08-19T06:15:00.002-05:00

This film is way too big to be dealt with in a mere blog post. It deserves comprehensive, book-length analysis of the kind that I'm in no way equal to. So, at the risk of tragically oversimplifying its brilliance, I'll just say that it strikes me that Kill Bill is pure opera: it's too big, too much, too wide-ranging, and all intentionally so, to make the point that this is what relationships feel like. Those who dismiss or belittle Tarantino as doing nothing more than playing stylistically clever headgames aren't watching with their hearts open. If there's anything "clever" about the moment when Beatrix rounds the corner and lays eyes on her four-year-old daughter for the first time, I'll eat my shoe. Likewise, have these critics who deride him for formal trickery never been in a situation when a conversation with a former lover takes on the emotional tenor of being armed to the teeth in a zero-sum contest that absolutely has to end in bloodshed? The stakes are almost comically high, sure, but dude--the stakes of life are comically high, no?

Anyway, I'm getting grandiose and defensive and testy, mostly on account of the fact that I just read the first few paragraphs of Entertainment Weekly's review of Inglourious Basterds, where Lisa Schwartzbaum writes, "But Tarantino's gleefully assembled spectacles are inextricable from his frustrating emotional limitations: Everything is a game." Bluh. I mean, I guess if you've only paid attention to his films long enough to parse their intertextual references, maybe they'll read as games. But, one of the biggest sources of pleasure for me in rewatching his films these past few weeks has been feeling the warmth of his heart. Dude loves movies and he loves language and he loves his actors and he loves this act of cinematic creation. It's kind of unfathomable to me that anyone could miss that, if they're truly paying attention.

Which sort of leads me back into the primary question that I have about Kill Bill: I'm having a hard time remembering how it was received upon its initial theatrical release. I have a vague feeling that it's considered one of his lesser efforts, which seems absurd given both its cinematic and emotional scope. I think it's going to be a while before we see its like again, and that's emphatically including Uma Thurman's performance. If the film as a whole reads like a shuffle-version of trash genres, her performance likewise is downright encyclopedic in terms of the range and depth of feeling she conveys about the Experience of Being a Woman. She has certainly never looked better onscreen; as blogger Kasia Xavier so accurately observed [link NSFW], "I think Tarantino knew exactly what he was doing. You take a born-pretty girl and you dress her up in pretty things, curl her pretty hair and she becomes empty. Vacuous. The only thing she can claim as a self identity is her one dimensional beauty. But take a pretty girl and throw some shit on her, and make her fight her way out of it and she'll grow to be other-worldly radiant and a force to be reckoned with."

It also made more sense to me upon this re-viewing than it ever has before why, duh, of course, O-Ren Ishii's childhood backstory had to be told in animation. Sure, it's homage to yet another beloved Asian cinematic genre, and sure, the subject matter was way too disturbing to film with an actual child actor, but it was also a tonal doorway through which we have to pass to transition into the "cartoony" violence of the big House of Blue Leaves fight sequence. It seems so obvious to me now, but realizing this was kind of profound in its formal, functional elegance.

I sat down to watch this the other night, telling myself I only needed to watch Volume I, but as soon as it ended, I thought, "there's no fucking way I'm not going to finish the whole thing tonight." It's just that absorbing and engaging, despite the length (which really isn't that bad, all things considered). I mean, even when you get into those loooong monologues at the end delivered by David Carradine (God rest his soul), they're every bit as thrilling as that first, manic showdown between Thurman and Vivica A. Fox. Not to mention that I was fresh off a two-day silent meditation retreat at the Zen Buddhist Temple I attend here in Chicago, so those scenes of Beatrix using the power of her brain to reanimate her own limbs or persevere through that intense martial arts training or focus intensely enough to dig herself out of her own grave all hit me with a unique resonance.

I mean, I know I'm a crazy, unapologetic Tarantino fangirl and all, but this film is so much more rewarding than I think most people give it credit for being. It honestly contains multitudes. I'm not even scratching the surface.

Jackie Brown

2009-08-11T20:43:00.001-05:00

OK, I was totally in tears within the first three minutes of rewatching Jackie Brown. That opening sequence at the airport has to be one of my favorite sequences in film ever. It just keeps expanding: it starts off as a clear homage to The Graduate, but then you see that, rather than being super-emo about a twenty-two-year-old white man's sense of spiritual stasis, it's updating the reference to make a comment on an aging black woman's inability to gain much traction against her life. But then the pace evolves, as she starts walking briskly, eventually breaking into a run. At that point I realized that her journey through the airport is also a metaphor for the journey of her life. First it's an unhurried glide when everything seems easy and progress happens without much exertion; then it's a strutting, confident stride on her own steam; then it's a panicked dash to the finish line, trying not to be late for her sense of responsibility to herself, for her outside commitments, and perhaps even for some perceived appointment with her own destiny--that rush to get it all in before it's too late. It's also one of Tarantino's few purely cinematic moments so far in his oeuvre. It's like watching him finally learn to really be a director, to trust his visual instincts without the snappy dialogue to back it up. He's reveling in film history here--again, with the fairly explicit bite from The Graduate, but also with the look and feel of '70s credit sequences via the typography and color palette, but I also even see California-style Altman here in those lengthy tracking shots and the way the sunshine gets all blown out as she runs past the window in silhouette. And, of course he's also reveling in the deliciousness of that fact that he has unfettered access to photograph a woman as stunningly beautiful as Pam Grier for as long as he wants to--a deliciousness that's thoughtfully tempered with clear respect and affection. You can almost hear him thinking, "let me shoot you like this so that I can make everyone feel about you the same way that I feel about you, so that everyone will remember how amazing you can be." As I watched all this unfolding, revisiting this much loved film, I started laughing at its brilliant audacity, its multivalence, its perfection, then crying because it was all kind of too much--then laughing at my crying, then crying some more for good measure. It's beautiful. (Check it out here on YouTube if you haven't seen it for a while yourself.)

Jackie Brown is probably the Tarantino film I've seen the most and am consequently most familiar with (and, depending on the day, it's probably the film I'd call my favorite of his), so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me on the order of what I experienced in the past few weeks with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Watching it this week brought more a sense of pure joy to be revisiting this old friend. I was struck, though, with how much everyone in this film is aging with varying degrees of discomfort about it. The whole notion of taking these nearly forgotten '70s movie stars like Grier and Robert Forster is right there in front of your face, and it obviously comprised many of the talking points surrounding the movie when it first came out. But I don't think I'd ever really noticed the anguished enormity of the line that Ordell speaks to Louis right before he shoots him: "what the fuck happen to you? You used to be beautiful, man." Wow. It had never occurred to me to read their friendship in light of their past history together, but of course it makes sense. They've seen each other age through time wasted in prison and "career" changes, all leading up to this last proverbial chance to make one big score. Of course, there's also the meta-level commentary on DeNiro's own aging from skinny young punk lighting the world on fire with his Method ferocity into a portly, avuncular character actor taking roles that were more and more beneath him. "You used to be beautiful, man." This is the movie's battle cry. And not in a shitty, judgmental way--just in the way that taking a moment to observe the passage of time can be profoundly philosophically flummoxing.

This is also, of course, the film where Tarantino starts to transition more decisively away from men's stories and into women's, becoming, if not a feminist filmmaker per se, then at least one who keeps a deep and abiding love for all manner of female kick-assery close to his heart. And, pound for pound, give me this soundtrack any day of the week over Reservoir Dogs' or Pulp Fiction's!

In other news, I was delighted to have been asked back as a guest blogger over on eat!drink!snack! this week. I contributed to Shawn's newly launched "the musical fruit" column, where he's pairing songs with fresh produce. You can find my post on the Long Winters' "Blue Diamonds" and a lovely pint of blueberries here.

Spring Awakening

2009-08-07T13:59:00.001-05:00

OK, despite the fact that, intellectually, I know that no good can come of being ashamed of one's musical tastes and that the notion of "guilty pleasures" in music is terribly fraught, I still often have a hard time publicly copping to some of the shit that I love. A perfect example is Duncan Sheik. I can't think of anyone more hideously uncool, but, guys, I secretly looooooove Duncan Sheik! I'm not even kidding. It's been really hard for me to get up the nerve to admit it in this forum, but I have to: I own all his albums (except for the one that came out early this year; just haven't gotten around to it yet), and, what's more, I still actively listen to them. It's not like they're moldering in the back of my closet--I tend to take Phantom Moon with me when I travel on airplanes (makes a nice pairing with Elliott Smith's Either/Or--somehow all the acoustic guitar soothes me when I'm in midair) and his self-titled debut remains one of my favorite things to listen to in the dead heat of summer. I downloaded the soundtrack to Spring Awakening when it came out, and, even though I didn't listen to it all that much, I was still pleased as punch that he gained so much recognition for it. So, you best believe that I was super-psyched to have a chance to actually see the show now that the touring production is playing here in Chicago for a few weeks. Coming of age stories? Florid Broadway storytelling and emotions? Duncan Sheik's delicate Nick Drake-esque melodies and arrangements? Sign. Me. Up.

Benji and I went on Wednesday night, and I really enjoyed it. I didn't go apeshit-level bonkers or anything, but I really enjoyed it. Mostly, though, I was delighted by the fact that it, with all its relative perversity intact, has achieved such great success in the current Broadway landscape that seems to be otherwise dominated by jukebox musicals and retreads of marginally successful Hollywood movies. The second act is a bit weak--it gets kinda punitive toward the characters and then tries to make up for it by becoming more stereotypically "Broadway" with bites from Les Miserables (ghosts singing inspiration from beyond the grave!) and Into the Woods (children will liiiiiiiiiisten!). But the first act is amazing. The lights came up for intermission and the first thing I said was, "I can't believe all that just happened in the first act. There's a lot going on there."

The one major drawback to this performance was seeing it at the Oriental Theater, rather than in a more intimate black box. The actors all have youth and beauty on their sides, but they don't quite yet have the chops to fill a room that big with their voices or their presence. Nor should they necessarily need to. Though the emotions and topics in this play are huge, to retain their power, they should still end up feeling like whispered secrets, and there's nothing whispered or secretive about a venue that big. Wouldn't it have been awesome if they could have figured out a way to book a stint for the show at, like, the Empty Bottle or the Vic? But, as Benji pointed out, if you can sell out the Oriental Theater, why wouldn't you sell out the Oriental Theater?

Despite all that, once I figured out how the songs were functioning, rhetorically, in the context of the plot, I fell totally in love with the piece. When I first listened to the soundtrack in isolation, I felt frustrated that I couldn't quite follow the storyline. But seeing it on stage, it all becomes clear: they're updating the notion of a rock musical by using the songs as external expressions of internal teenage sexual frustration, confusion, torment, and longing rather than as ways to advance the plot or for characters to relate to each other. It's so simple and so smart; I don't know why no one's ever really done it before (at least on such a large scale). I mean, much of my own internal monologue really still is flashing lights and dance sequences and bits of songs, so it felt easy and natural to slide into this world where that level of drama needs musical accompaniment to fully embody all that emotion. What was even nicer for me, though, is, since I'm so secretive about my Duncan Sheik fandom anyway, hearing those familiar chord voicings and melodic intervals in the context of a narrative all about unspoken pleasures gave the experience of the play a nice little meta-twist. Like I wrote in my post about false musical memories, there's a sweet warmth in being waved to by your past in this unexpected way.

Don't forget, kittens: King Sparrow (who've been getting all kinds of big love from big places this week) plays TONIGHT at the Subterranean. Come rock out and take refuge from the rain and all the collateral Lolla madness.

Things That Exist/Things That Don't

2009-08-04T02:41:00.000-05:00

A coworker very kindly alerted me yesterday to the existence of a Bollywood reimagining of Breaking Away called Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. The fact that I haven't known about this film until just now seems slightly incredible to me, and I very nearly refused to give the DVD back to him after he showed it to me. I am obviously the first in line to borrow it after he's watched it himself.

My recreational reading habits are extremely erratic for a variety of reasons, and, true to form, I've been slowly picking my way through the mammoth, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer basically for this entire calendar year. But, I got a good chunk of reading done this weekend, and I have to say, the fact that no one has made a big, sexy biopic about Jean Tatlock yet seems wrong, wrong, wrong. (I would accept a Decemberists song as a viable alternative.) She was a former lover of Oppenheimer's, by all accounts both extremely brilliant and extremely troubled. She was also extremely committed to Communist ideals, and at the time it was believed that she may have been passing scientific secrets to the Russians--so much so that there's speculation as to whether her suicide in early 1944 was actually an assassination. She was also probably a closeted lesbian, who, as a student of Freudian psychology in the '30s and '40s would have been indoctrinated with the belief that homosexuality should be "cured," a pressure that surely only contributed to her already notoriously dark mood swings. She and Oppenheimer remained extremely close after he married his wife Kitty, but the demands--intellectually, energetically, and in matters of national security--of his work on the bomb eventually caused him to have to cut ties with her completely. As the authors of American Prometheus write: "From this perspective, he had acted reasonably. But in Jean's eyes, it may have seemed as if ambition had trumped love. In this sense, Jean Tatlock might be considered the first casualty of Oppenheimer's directorship of Los Alamos." A passionately interesting woman.

Pulp Fiction

2009-07-30T23:13:00.001-05:00

Oh man, you guys, this mini-Tarantino film festival I've programmed for myself is turning out to be the best idea I've had in months. Like that horrible old joke about memory loss allowing you to hide your own Easter eggs, it's awesome to rewatch your favorite movies when you've not seen them in so long that you've forgotten most of the major themes and plot points.

Pulp Fiction is so good it's kind of unreal. No, seriously. I know it's common knowledge, the most basic of basic received wisdom, at this point that it's a game-changer, a modern classic, etc., etc. But, straight up--do you actively remember how good this movie is? It's that good. Probably even better. I think I probably feel the same way about Tarantino that certain other people around my age feel about Stephen Malkmus: he was the right guy making the right art in the right medium at the right time in my life, and I'm kind of never going to get over it.

Watching Pulp Fiction again the other night for the first time in about ten years (seriously, I think it's been since Naremore's film noir class my sophomore year at IU), I was struck by how much this movie is really about secrets--about the usually accidental things that happen to people that remain unspeakable to anyone other than the person the experience has been shared with. There's the big ones, of course: Mia's overdose, Marsellus's anal rape, Vincent's shooting that kid in the face. But there's so many other little ones embedded throughout: the story about the foot massage that Tony Rocky Horror may or may not have given Mia, the admission that Butch makes to Esmerelda Villalobos in the cab about what it feels like to kill a man, the confidences shared between Butch's father and Christopher Walken's character in the POW camp; even the "royale with cheese" trivia is a bit of unlocked knowledge decoded by Vincent and shared with Jules. All of which makes Jules's final "I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd" monologue so powerful and so important--in publicly interpreting the verse from Ezekiel for Pumpkin/Ringo, he's made a decision that he can't keep the wisdom he's been granted via the "miracle" he witnessed to himself. He has to share it; he has to talk about it; he can't keep it a secret. Aside from the brain-tickling fun of the achronological narrative, this is the big reason why the story has to be told out of order--so it can culminate with that gesture of openness, with that revelation.

It blows my mind that I saw this in the theater when I was 15. I mean, I'm so, so thankful for being exposed to a movie this awesome at such a formative stage in my intellectual and aesthetic development, but, seriously...how fucking inappropriate! Did I even know what anal rape was at that point? I know for certain that the subtleties of Vincent and Mia's drugs of choice went way over my head. But, the very literal dance between the spaced-out haze of his heroin stupor and her coked-up frenzy as they try to come to some common ground at dinner is now so much more hilarious to me, but also painfully, poetically truthful in the way it shows how hard it can be to connect with another person because of all the bullshit racing around in our systems.

And those are just the big things. I was free to notice so many other little things now that I didn't need to worry about parsing the narrative timeline and wasn't overly distracted by the violence and the language. Like, how totally cheeky it was to open the movie with Tim Roth in such a diametrically opposed character to the one he played in Reservoir Dogs. Or how Bruce Willis is perfection in his role (and also way more alarmingly attractive than I ever realized--but that's maybe just because I'm getting older and my tastes are changing). Also, the fact that Butch's choice of weapon in the pawn shop scene is a samurai sword makes way more sense now in the context of Tarantino's oeuvre than it did in '94. Pre-Kill Bill, it just seemed like a super-over-the-top gesture played for laughs, but now it's so clearly a reference to Tarantino's love for chop-socky epics.

Kittens, my brain is still whirring days after watching it. But, mostly, I'm just happy to have reconnected with the film itself, both for what I remember it being to me at 15 and for the realization that it still has new things to offer me as many years later. Take a moment, if you can, to revisit something similarly important from your own past. I hope it likewise brings you no small measure of joy.

500 Days of Summer and Humpday

2009-07-28T19:11:00.005-05:00

Well, 500 Days of Summer was pretty much a piece of crap. I am EXACTLY the target audience for this movie, and yet somehow it made me want to punch puppies the entire time I was sitting in the theater. It's clear that the writer and director have much the same taste in "anti-" romantic comedy romantic comedies that I do, but they didn't do enough to spackle over the seams where they'd stitched together the bits they'd stolen from these other (better) films. The most obvious touchstone is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--tonally, organizationally, and character-wise (diehard-romantic leading man with "issues" vs. a headstrong, ultimately unknowable female love interest with a bulldozer's worth of charm), but there were also huge lifts from High Fidelity (the notion that pop songs will corrupt your ideas about love) and even Bottle Rocket (wise-beyond-her-years sage advice from a little sister). Zooey Deschanel's shtick is starting to get grating (um, ha), and for as wonderful as he is, and for as excited as I was about the idea of Joseph Gordon-Levitt making somewhat of a rom-com debut, he was sorely miscast. The role needed much more of a sadsack, and he's just too smart and strong an actor to believably play such a lovelorn wuss. Lloyd Dobler he is not. The best moment in the whole thing comes near the beginning when Zooey's character flat-out asks him if he likes her; he pauses a beat before saying "yeah" with as many shades of meaning as that word could possibly convey--longing and anticipation and doubt and shyness and truth and bet-hedging and coolness and dorkiness and desire and relief all at once. Aside from that, though, if you value your time, your money, and YOUR SOUL, skip eet.

Humpday, on quite the other hand, is graaaaaaand. I loved it! So, so much! It is ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny but also filled with so much beautiful truth that my cheeks hurt from grinning by the end of it. And not just truth about sexuality--though it has that to the degree that one would hope/expect--but truth about relationships and aging and the ultimate tenuousness of the ways we attempt to define ourselves and our loved ones. It's also totally refreshing to watch a movie with utterly normal-looking people in it--that is, utterly normal-looking people who, much like the people you know in your own life, become more and more beautiful as you get to know them. I can't say too much more about it without starting to give stuff away--and this is a movie that deserves not to be spoiled before one sees it. If it makes its way to your city, please do consider checking it out if you have the chance.

Also, how is this movie not going to be exactly the same as As Good as It Gets (which I detest)? Oh, Lauren Graham, you deserve so much better!

Also, also, also: Chicagoans, it's never too early to start planning for the weekend. ~~Catch King Sparrow for free (free! zero bones! just because they love you!) on Friday night at the Empty Bottle, and then~~ be sure to rest up for the Baby Teeth album release spectacular at Schubas on Saturday. If you've not had a chance to check out Hustle Beach yet, let me assure you that it's 42 minutes of pure happiness, one of those albums that goes down so smooth, you don't even realize how quickly it's whizzing by. "Big Schools" is so smart and so sly on so many levels; "I Hope She Won't Let Me" still absolutely kills me; and "Hard to Find a Friend" is the kind of stellar Billy Joel piano ballad that Billy Joel forgot how to write about 25 years ago. See you out on the town, kittens.

[Ed. note: Ha, so I posted this on Tuesday night, then Wednesday morning there was a huge spread in Chicago's Red Eye all about Baby Teeth, and in the interview, Abraham Levitan totally calls Billy Joel a hack. "He's just a poor man's Paul McCartney. Elton John, I would say, had a distinctive artistic personality, and I don't think Billy Joel has ever been more than a tribute band." Glad to know I totally got my '70s piano men references backward!]

[UPDATE: OK, this is officially the most appended entry in the history of this blog. The 7/31 King Sparrow show at the Empty Bottle was canceled. Come see them at the Subterranean on August 7, though! I know none of you are shelling out the clams to go to Lolla or to see Arctic Monkeys at the Metro, so you officially have no excuse to miss it.]

Pitchfork Music Festival 2009

2009-07-24T23:47:00.001-05:00

Haters Gotta Hate Edition

It's not like I didn't have a good time last weekend. Any excuse to spend two and a half days bopping from performance to performance to performance in the company of (mostly) like-minded strangers is generally OK by me. But this was the first year that the festival struck me as straining against itself. At first, it was the little, mostly organizational things: the long line to gain entry to the park on Friday night. The fact that the porta-potties were tucked into weird locations that weren't well laid out for folks to form lines that went much deeper than about four people. The fact that the stages weren't adorned with the Jay Ryan-designed banners like in previous years. Maybe this stuff just slipped through the cracks for one reason or another? But then as the weekend hurtled headlong toward its big Flaming Lipsian climax, I realized that this is no longer the little indie festival that could. (I know, I know: I'm just realizing this now? But hear me out.) There was so much less room allowed for the pleasure of surprise this year, as they've started to recycle bands from previous years' rosters (Yo La Tengo, the National, Grizzly Bear, the Walkmen) and as they're hewing with Mafia-like protectiveness to acts they've saddled with the dubious honor of being best new music despite well-documented evidence that maybe they're not quite ready for that level of exposure yet (Wavves, Vivian Girls, etc.). There seemed to be a certain kind of vague cynicism permeating everything--a weird combination of "we're just giving the people what they want"/"we're just doing what's expected of us"--that fell way short of the former "holy crap, guys, let's organize a big old show with all our favorite musicians!" vibe that was evident in spades in previous years. Let's hope this was an anomalous year and that 2010 will find the fest back in joyous, celebratory form. But for now, a quick rundown of 2009:

It's not entirely clear to me why they chose to schedule four bands on Friday night, instead of three as in previous years, and to start at 5 pm. I'm sure there were folks who traveled in from out of town and could arrive at the festival grounds early in the afternoon if they wanted to, but the rest of us schlubs worked a full day then had to contend with public transportation and the aforementioned lines at the gate before we could commence with the rocking. Which means I totally missed Tortoise's set. It's not the end of the world, I know, since they're from here and all, but I've still never seen them live and probably wouldn't be inclined to buy a ticket for one of their regular gigs since I don't know their stuff that well to begin with. I thought this would be a good, low-pressure way to check them out. No dice.

Even though this is technically the third time I've seen Yo La Tengo live, I still wouldn't call myself much of a fan (not because I dislike them; only because I still haven't devoted the time to exploring their catalog), so I guess I wasn't too broken up about the fact that they were basically just providing the soundtrack to the beer line. They sounded pretty good, from what I could tell.

I was all kinds of meh about Jesus Lizard. With my documented lack of '90s reference points, this reunion show didn't mean anything to me, and their songs all sounded pretty samey after a while. But, I always gotta give props to old dudes who can still rock out with total fuck-you attitude.

Built to Spill, though, I was legitimately excited to see. Even though I don't have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of their stuff, there's something in me at what feels like a subatomic level that really responds to Doug Martsch's guitar playing. Their set was the first moment of the fest when everything seemed to really click for me; it became more than just standing in an open field listening to some music with hundreds of other people. It became a rock show, with its own unique language and landscape, an energetic exchange both joyously bigger than any of its disparate elements and sublimely simpler than any of its attendant hassles or limitations. They closed out with a triumphant, cascading take on "Carry the Zero," their one song that I was really, really, really hoping to hear. I left the park on a high.

I rolled in kinda late on Saturday, just as Fucked Up was finishing their much talked-about set. I kind of wish I'd caught more of it, for spectacle's sake if nothing else, but...obviously not so much that I, y'know, made the effort to arrive on time for it or anything.

The first set I caught was the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They sounded exactly like their album--which is to say, cute but not particularly deep or memorable. It seemed like they played a few of their songs more than once, but that's just because they all sound the same. They seemed to be genuinely gracious about playing to such a large crowd, which is always nice to see, but I had my fill after about half the set.

Bowerbirds back on the smaller B stage were nearly drowned out by Pains' bass until you were pretty much right on top of them. They're still doing their smart, gentle folk, and they sound as lovely as ever. They played "In Our Talons," of course, which is, I guess, their version of a big fat crowd-pleasing jam.

Final Fantasy = the cutest. I haven't listened to He Poos Clouds in ages, and don't necessarily even have a craving to do so now (I find it's not an easy album to listen to as I'm just running errands around town), but I feel a real affinity for Pallett and his intelligent, artsy, melodramatic, super-queer sensibility. A girl in front of me gushed to her friend "this is the most impressive show I've seen so far at Pitchfork." Granted, it was still early in the weekend, but I couldn't resist somewhat snarkily scribbling in my notes that's because he's a real musician. I don't at all believe that the simple fact of being classically trained automatically makes you a superior musician--there's lots of wankery that can happen if you're too technically proficient and don't have genuinely creative instincts to supplement the skills that can more or less be beaten into your muscle memory--but in the case of someone like Pallett, the training has obviously significantly expanded the, ahem, palette he's able to put in service of his creative vision. The crowd was cheering for every flourish and epic melodic run. It was all really refreshing.

As we were all gathering across the field before Yeasayer, two dudes near me who were trying to decide how far to push toward the stage had the following conversation:

#1: Just wait til everybody mellows out.
#2: Is this going to be mellow music?
#1: It's like...intense mellow.

Awesome.

It had been threatening to rain all morning and finally started sprinkling in the middle of their set. It actually made everyone get really happy and surrender to the experience, and Yeasayer was kind of the perfect band to soundtrack the moment. That being said, they were the first of a handful of bands on the roster (more on which soon) that still kind of make me wonder, incredulously, "so...people actually like this?" Their world musicy dream-catcher aesthetic seems so deeply uncool that, were it not for Pitchfork's imprimatur, I gotta believe most folks would derisively mock it if they were given an unlabeled MP3 or CD of the stuff. Despite my incredulity, I stuck around for their whole set, and enjoyed it. Sinkane is touring with them on percussion now apparently (dude is everywhere!), so their rhythm section was especially impressive. Of course, the crowd went bonkers when they played "2080."

I have to say, the more I think about them, the more I find I can pretty confidently say that I actively dislike Beirut. I'm still not entirely sure why, but, similar to my wonder about why people like Yeasayer's brand of fusiony world beat, I'm always mildly offended by the way Beirut makes people believe they like Eastern European-style brass band music. You probably couldn't get 80% of that audience out to a neighborhood music festival to see a bunch of actual Balkan dudes play their horns and sing, and yet when Zach Condon's on stage, everybody's cheering for trumpet solos and all but throwing their arms around strangers' shoulders with this kind of false nostalgia for some vague notion of a motherland. I know that criticizing Condon for cultural appropriation is kind of a fool's errand at this point, and I know there can be a legitimate kind of beauty that can transcend notions of authenticity when it comes to these kinds of really well done, fictionalized, dream-state interpretations of a genre (sort of a la Kubrick's impulse to re-create New York on a sound stage rather than filming on location for Eyes Wide Shut), and it's not like I have any kind of chanson or Fado bonafides to defend against interlopers, and, believe it or not, I really can hear the sweetness in his melodies. But, I still found myself frowning more and more deeply as the set progressed. Part of this is probably because I get the sense that Condon is inordinately pleased with himself, yet masking it with a kind of false humility. I mean, he kept whispering "merci," all cute and knowingly, between songs, so much so that a couple girls behind me were actually discussing his "accent." Sigh. Even the horn tattoo on his wrist was bugging me. I'm surprised not to find more criticism of this nature anywhere at all online. Save for a delightfully harsh review of March of the Zapotec in Toronto's NOW magazine, everything else I was able to Google up in an admittedly quick search was mostly fawning praise. I wish I were willing to believe that this is just my issue, but somehow I think the definitive Beirut takedown has yet to be written. It's OK to come out of the closet, fellow Beirut apostates, wherever you may be!

At some point early the week before the fest, I was listening to Boxer on my iPod and then realized "holy shit, I get to see the National play live in a few days!" And then I got way excited. As with Animal Collective last year, there's really nowhere else the National would ever be considered a headlining act, which just made me so damn proud of 'em. I don't necessarily think their set would have made new fans out of anybody who didn't already dig what they're doing--I heard plenty of kvetching from various sources about how slow and dour their songs are; as if even their rabid fans would argue that fact!--but as far as I was concerned, they put on a rock solid, if not transcendent, show. Matt looked great and was flat-out funnier than I've ever seen him. He crawled off the stage and into the photo pit during the big climax of "Mr. November"--a gesture that song always calls for--but then immediately proceeded to make fun of himself as soon as the song ended: "I was gonna do something cool, but then when I got to the garbage can, I thought, 'this isn't as cool as I thought it would be.' But then I got over there and thought, 'no, this is pretty cool.'" They played a few new songs that sounded great, if predictably Nationalistic (this isn't a criticism). Looking forward to whatever their next album yields.

Rolled in on Sunday in time to catch Frightened Rabbit. It seems like every new year yields at least one token Scottish rock band that everybody's gotta lose their shit over, and as soon as they started playing, I snarked, "how are these guys not the Twilight Sad?" But then they won me over in spite of myself with their infectious energy and clear affection for the Chicago crowd: "I think we've played here more in the past 12 months than we've played in Glasgow!" Plus the lead singer has one of those great, wild, keening voices that you can really only get from Irish or Scottish rock frontmen--a little unhinged, a lot passionate, implicitly acknowledging that it's "just" rock 'n' roll while reminding us that that doesn't mean it's not the most important thing in the world at that particular moment. I'm curious to check their stuff out now.

I had sooo much fun seeing Blitzen Trapper in Austin last Thanksgiving that I couldn't wait to catch them live again, especially considering that I've been living with, and loving, Furr since then. Luckily, they were every bit as delightful as I remember them being. No lie: the title track from that album's as good a song as has been written this decade. Eric Earley was touched by something holy when he pulled that shit out of his guitar. Portland boyfriends!

After a bit of wandering, I caught a good chunk of the Thermals' set. People! I thought we had an understanding here! I thought that when it turns out I've been an ignorant moron who's slept on a band this awesome for far too long you'd have the friendly decency to publicly scold me about it or something. But noooo, I've just been going along with my daily life like it's no big deal that I've never listened to these guys. Clearly, this is a major oversight on my part. They tore the place up with a combination of ferocious punk rock energy and an extremely smart sense of fun. They covered a whole mess of classic '90s "alternative rock" bangers, which somehow, through the sheer force of their chops and goodwill, came off as a successful way to play to the crowd in this specific setting rather than cynically pandering to it. Smiles all around. I've clearly got some musical homework to do now.

Every time I get excited about seeing the Walkmen, I always kinda figure it's a nostalgia thing for me, since I so associate their music with my early days in the city: living in the apartment at 1945 W. Chicago Ave., stealing all Giddy's CDs, drinking too much, making friends with the Grinnellians. But then when I actually see them, I'm always bowled over anew with how fucking solid they are. As my life has progressed over the intervening years, theirs as a band has too--they've grown warmer and richer and deeper (pick the fine wine/Scotch whiskey metaphor of your choice). And, not to make an unfortunate pun on their most well-known song (which they did play, right near the top of the set--to get it over with, I presume), there's something almost Rat Packish about their self-presentation these days. And I mean this in a good way! The jazz inflections in the material from You & Me especially seem to come out a little more emphatically when you see them all casually dressed in nice button-down shirts and when Ham does a little chat to the audience over a song's instrumental introduction. It suits them well. Rather than becoming stale or a parody of themselves, they've truly found a way to continue growing as musicians and performers while still being instantly recognizable as the Walkmen. No small feat, that. Don't write these guys off, y'all, just because you feel like you got the hang of them in 2003. I would strongly encourage you to catch them live the next time they roll through your town.

I like dancey, rhythmic music a lot more than I typically let on, but, holy shit, was I ever unimpressed with M83. I actually laid down in the grass along the periphery of the park, staring up at the sky, too bored to even move. If you can let me know what the big deal about this group is, please do. But as far as I could tell, it wasn't much more than an endlessly recombinant collection of tacky and uninspired tropes--breathy female vocals over gated drum sounds, etc., etc.--somehow apparently legitimized/elevated in the minds of the crowd due to their French pedigree.

I started getting really squirrely at this point, out of relative boredom with the bigger acts that had been scheduled on Sunday evening to feel like some sort of culmination of awesomeness, out of physical fatigue from having been on my feet, drinking booze, and eating crap for two days, and out of emotional fatigue from navigating the sheer quantity of douchebaggery when you get that many people gathered in the same space at the same time. After a quick jaunt to get some soy ice cream (see above re: eating crap), I tried to make my way back over to see part of Grizzly Bear's set and ended up unintentionally wedging my way in front of two meatheads who were actually--I couldn't believe my ears--spitting all kinds of vitriol about the "faggots" and their autoharps on stage. Really, guys? Really? I quickly darted away into another spot but was so keyed up I couldn't soak in the band's sound at all. I suppose it didn't help my ability to pay attention that they were kind of indulging their own worst sonic tics at that moment, too, doing those trademark pummeling explorations of sustained crescendos that I find the least interesting thing about them, even when I'm feeling generous. They did segue into "While You Wait for the Others" soon thereafter, which helped redeem their excesses a bit for me, but I fear the damage had already been done.

I caught maybe two of Mew's songs back on the B stage and quipped that there was probably a high likelihood that a portion of the stoners in the crowd thought they were actually watching Passion Pit, what with the stratospheric tenor vocals and hella bass. Speaking of bass, that stage always seems to struggle with a too-muddy mix; it was actually so intense that I could only handle a few minutes before I had to wander elsewhere.

And thus began the wait for the Flaming Lips. The park was packed by that point, and I had absolutely no desire to fight forward closer to the stage. But, since so much of the effectiveness of their show relies on making the audience feel surrounded and overwhelmed--by love and joy and beauty, ostensibly; with stuff and noise and spectacle, if you're cynical about it--it ended up feeling like I was sitting on a beach, watching a storm far out at sea. It was epic and magnificent, but untouchable and unknowable, a lovely, distant curiosity. And then at a certain point after they all took to the stage, I kind of chuckled to myself as I realized, "oh wait--when you go to a Flaming Lips show to witness the circus, that means you have to listen to their music, too." Ouch. Look, I respect the hell out of Wayne Coyne, but, much like I feel about Will Sheff and Okkervil River, I'd vastly prefer to read his interviews and his wise, warm, witty quotable quotes than listen to virtually any of the songs he's ever written. The tunes simply don't do that much for me.

After standing on tippy-toes, trying to see as much as I could of what was happening on stage, I bailed out, to check in on The Very Best over at the B stage. Best decision of the weekend, by far. There wasn't much of a crowd back there, but the folks who were there were totally feeling the groove and having a balls-out fun time. My mood shifted for the better immediately and I couldn't help but start dancing. The vast difference that I felt between the two stages seemed like the most glaring example of the way that the Pitchfork fest seems to be buckling under its own weight at this point. Every inch of the Flaming Lips show felt rote and coldly calculated, despite its patina of "OMG, we're just a bunch of crazy guys who dig bright colors and wacky shit!" while everything about The Very Best felt organic and vividly human. That latter feeling is why I make the effort not just to attend the Pitchfork festival year after year, but why I go out to shows at all when I can usually think of a million other reasons--too tired, too broke, too far to travel, too late on a school night, etc.--why I should skip 'em. And, as I said above, that feeling was somewhat in limited supply this year, which made it feel all the more precious at the moment. The group left the stage, and we all cheered wildly for an encore. They came back and said, "you want one more song? Well, we're gonna play two!" the second of which was some kind of remix of Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There." Everybody took their lighters out and generally lost their shit. Since I don't really watch much TV or listen to the radio anymore, I totally missed the onslaught of MJ jams that everyone was revisiting after his death, so this was actually the first time this month that I'd even heard his voice. I got instantly choked up. The whole surprising combination of events was the festival highlight for me, for sure.

Which made going back over to the Flaming Lips for their big finish feel even more lame. After the truly moving musical embrace of that moment, hearing Wayne warbling through "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" felt really shallow...and that's one of their few songs that I actually like! I sort of tolerated the subsequent self-satisfied performances of "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Do You Realize??" and then made my escape from the park in what felt like a really anticlimactic way. In fact, Wayne was still demanding "do you realize??" as I made my way out of the gates and over to the Green Line. I do realize, Wayne, really, I do.

Big thanks to Parowpyro for being a game-for-anything festivalgoing companion for the weekend; you should check out his own entertaining take on the weekend's activities here. The rest of my pictures are posted on Flickr, but for some more professional shots, I would recommend looking through Robert Loerzel's (start here) and, as always, Kirstiecat's, which should continue rolling out over the next few days, weeks, and even months as she perfects them.

Moon, Tarantino, Micachu, Baby Teeth

2009-07-15T10:47:00.000-05:00

Moon--Let me chime in and say that this film is wonderful. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that it got made at all. It's so quiet and so patient and so taut and so mature. Sam Rockwell is fabulous; when that guy's good, he's superlative. It's also one of the most audaciously anti-capitalist things I've seen in recent memory, literalizing the plight of how a person can be wholly exploited by a system that depends on the service s/he can provide yet doesn't reciprocate in any meaningful way, until the person is spent and discarded. Don't sleep on this one, guys.

Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.

Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.

Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop).

Dirty Projectors/Sea & Cake and King Sparrow--Live in Chicago

2009-06-24T11:42:00.000-05:00

So, if you've been following my Twitter updates since the beginning of the month, you know that I've really fallen in love with the new Dirty Projectors album. Aside from the fact that it's just, y'know, good, I think part of the reason why it's hit me so hard is that it's poised right in the center of the Venn diagram where my garden-variety indie rock tastes meet my recent penchant for annoyingly spazzypants stuff meets my ever-present regard for highly trained/highly skilled musicianship. I find myself listening to it through to the end of "Fluorescent Half Dome," then immediately scrolling back up to "Cannibal Resource" to start the journey again. It's astonishingly good.

And yet, as the calendar was inching closer to their free show at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found my enthusiasm and anticipation constantly tempered by the memory of how lackluster I'd found their set at the Pitchfork Music Festival last year. Gorgeous to behold and impressive to contemplate, but nothing that moved me viscerally. Well, I don't know if it's a function of my liking Bitte Orca more than Rise Above or if another year of touring and a brand new set of songs has kicked their stage show to a new level or what, but, as I hash-tagged from my after-set Tweet: #mind=blown.

It goes without saying that these guys are brilliant musicians, but what I saw Monday night was, perhaps more importantly, a brilliant band. I had an unexpectedly good seat way down in front, rather than out on the lawn, so I was able to soak everything up with a minimum of distraction (which probably helped my feelings of goodwill). Their trademark technical virtuosity was definitely on full display, but they were also overflowing with all the expansiveness and vitality that I'd missed in them last year. Of course, the increased prominence of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman helps this enormously, but Longstreth himself seems to be coming into his own in much the same way that Kevin Barnes was on those first tours behind Hissing Fauna; it's clear that he's finally, truly comfortable with his idiosyncrasies as a musician and performer, which has allowed him to relax into his talent much more fully, trusting that it's going to do the work for him rather than him having to do the work on behalf of his talent. There's just this abundance of warmth emanating from him now. It's beautiful.

They played through all the highest highs of Bitte Orca ("Useful Chamber," of course, along with my current personal fave "Temecula Sunrise," as well as "Remade Horizon" with its insanely intricate harmonies that got the place going bonkers early on in the set and "Stillness Is the Move," aka this summer's unbeatable jam) and a short suite from Rise Above. I think the song they closed out with may have been a cover, but I couldn't tell you of what.

[Apparently the band was in a nasty car accident on their way from Detroit to Toronto in the subsequent days, but Pitchfork reports that everybody's doing OK.]

Theirs was a ridiculously tough act to follow, and true to form, the Sea and Cake didn't really try. Which isn't to say S&C put on a bad show; not at all. It's just that they're such consummate professionals that it really doesn't seem like anything would phase them. The scenester audience started its mass exodus as soon as the DPs were off stage, which I found tacky but not unexpected, but, personally, I felt like it was such a treat to just get to kick back and let their sound wash over me on such a perfect summer night. (Also, J. Hop's term "buttery sambas" has been making me giggle nonstop for the past two days. It's the kind of rock crit description that CTLA and I probably would have made fun of a few years ago, but now I just kind of am delighted by how right on but simultaneously affectionate and silly it is.)

I'm currently having computer troubles, so I can't get my few photos off my camera and onto my at-home laptop for uploading to Flickr, so I'm going to post a link to awesome local photographer Robert Loerzel's photoset from the show instead. They're much better than my shots anyway.

Afterward, I hightailed it up to Schubas for a King Sparrow show that had some awesome hype machine muscle behind it: a write-up from Chicago's own DeRo a few days prior and some prime-time love from Metromix in that morning's Red Eye. There was an impressively sizable crowd in attendance (esp. for a 10 pm show on a Monday night), and the guys definitely delivered. Though "Sightseers" will probably never not be my favorite song, I kept hearing other little things that I'd forgotten how much I loved: that cascading instrumental bridge in "Forest," the bouncy little pre-verse turnarounds in "Bones and Skin," and of course the overall sexy ferocity of "All's Cinnamon." I also love how their general collaborative kickassery prevents me from isolating any one element of their sound to the exclusion of the others; they work as such a seamless unit that a gush that starts out about John's drumming inevitably starts to transform in my brain into a gush about Sean's bass lines, which always leads back around to Eric's guitar and vocals. In short, these guys are the real deal. The Monday night rock show, triumphant once again.

Up, Away We Go, and Others

2009-06-15T22:28:00.003-05:00

To use Dono's helpful and apt term, now it's time for another omnibus edition of Wrestling Entropy.

First off: Up, you guys! Of course, it's utterly delightful. The sublime image of the house floating over the cityscape, held aloft by that riot of candy-colored balloons brought tears to my eyes, and the simple but golden "chipmunk voice" gag with the dog collar made me laugh so hard that some lady in the theater turned around to glare at me. But, as with WALL-E, perhaps what left me most breathless was the filmmakers' obvious familiarity with and affection for film history: did anyone else catch the Eadweard Muybridge reference over the closing credits? I laughed hard, sharply, once, then sat there stunned as the image disappeared--did that really just get tossed off like that? 'Cause damn. Not to mention several of those loooong "wait for it" sight gags (Carl descending the staircase on the chairlift, Russell being dragged across the dirigible window) felt clearly influenced by Jacques Tati's sensibility (especially Playtime).

But more than any of that, I was deeply touched by the emotional poetry of the thing. For those of you who know a little about my family, the story reminded me a hell of a lot of my dad (only without the redemption [ouch]): crotchety old bastard can't let go of either his memories of the past or his stuff, which prevents him from engaging in the life that's right in front of his eyes in any sort of psychologically honest or present way. I sat there violently shaking my head yes, yes, yes, yes during the scene when Carl realizes that in order to get the house airborne again he has to divest himself of all the material possessions he'd been clinging to that were weighing him down. Somebody over at Pixar clearly understands the mechanics of grief, and healing.

Unlike Away We Go, which I was totally prepared to give a pass to...until they decide to go live in Verona's childhood home. Eurgh. I ran into my friend Ray at the theater, and we were both fairly disgusted with the ending. Why would this couple, who claims to place such a high priority on community, choose to go live in isolation among the ghosts of her dead parents? Especially when Burt's brother and niece were clearly in need of some help of their own? Pixar would have gotten it right: Up ends with the old man's house disappearing into the clouds (because you gotta let that shit go) and the formation of a newly configured, slightly improvised family unit. That's the right ending. Away We Go ends with a retreat into childhood and away from genuine engagement with other people under the guise of "making peace with the past" or some bullshit. This is not the right ending. Don't get me wrong--there's much more to commend Away We Go than I thought there would be (particularly the Montreal vignette and, as ever, Paul Schneider in general), but fuck that ending, man.

Elsewise: I caught the Man Man/Gogol Bordello show a few weeks back (pics here). I tell ya: there is almost no band working today that I trust as much as I implicitly trust Man Man. It doesn't even bother me that they don't banter with the audience. (I usually like a little banter.) They're just too busy creating a whole new world during the 30-45 minutes they have to give us. What more could banter possibly add to the experience? What an astonishing group of musicians.

As for Gogol Bordello, it's good to get recharged with that immigrant punk energy every once in a while. Plus, I couldn't help but marvel at their graphic design all night. Whoever designed their slingshot logo is totally firing on all cylinders: there's David and Goliath iconography combined with a sort of Marxist/populist ideology and a super juvenile punk rock sneer. Yes, please.

St. Vincent live at the Metro (pics) was a delightful way to spend a Sunday evening. For whatever reason, I haven't fully warmed to Actor yet, but I really enjoyed hearing all the songs live. (It definitely didn't hurt that she claimed it was the best night of the tour so far.) When she started really blasting on some of those apocalyptic guitar freak-outs, I just couldn't help grinning and thinking, "this is truly feminist music. This is the sound my fucking ovaries would make if amplified."

If each era gets the metanarrative about show folk and storytelling that it deserves, what does it say that the '70s got The Killing of a Chinese Bookie while we get The Brothers Bloom? Sigh. I don't mean to be a dick about it, and it's obviously unfair to put a young guy like Rian Johnson up against Cassavetes, but also--come the fuck on. "Live the story until it comes true," etc., etc. It's clearly a young person's movie--both from within and without. At the same time, though, I don't want to begrudge Johnson his apprenticeship because he's got a lot of raw talent and I want him to be able to continue to have a career. But, the wide-eyed naivete and quirk qua quirk really exhausted me. And I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing.

Popular opinion seems to be that Zach Galifianakis makes/steals The Hangover, but I was rather partial to Ed Helms's performance. There's something quietly commanding about him here that I wasn't really expecting (Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I don't often agree, noticed this too). Of course the movie is outrageously offensive and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I've long had an inexplicable affection for this "shit goes down in Vegas" subgenre of movies, so I knew I couldn't miss it. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.

Well, Hello There, Stranger!

2009-05-20T09:42:00.002-05:00

My darlings! I have to catch you up on all the fabulous goings-on around these parts lately. Usually when this blog is quiet, it's just because I'm being a lazy-pants, but this time it's actually because I've been too damn busy to sit down and write (in addition to being a lazy-pants). We gotta get through this briefly or we'll be here all day:

The Flight of the Conchords, Live at the Arie Crown Theater
I'm not a huge fan of the Flight of the Conchords or anything--I've only ever seen the first season of the TV show and don't own the CD--but someone offered me a free ticket, so hell if I was going to turn that down. The show was at, of all places, the cavernous Arie Crown Theater. As soon as I walked in, I thought, surely the size of this room will be death to whatever charms there may be in this show. But, damned if those guys didn't prove me wrong. Though the show would probably have been much better in a smaller venue, they have soooo much stage presence that they managed to keep the place humming with laughter and energy for their entire (surprisingly lengthy) set. Of course, it helps that they let a good chunk of their real-life charisma seep into the songs, rather than playing up their helpless sadsack shtick from the show--these guys are pretty fucking funny and pretty fucking talented, and you know they know it, and that's not a bad thing. By the end of the night, it was feeling a bit like sugar overload, but overall, I'm supremely pleased I had the chance to catch the show. Pictures here.

Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, Live at the Lakeshore Theater
When I visited my brother in San Francisco last year, he scored us some last-minute tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Mary Lynn Rajskub do some stand-up comedy. It was an incredible night, and I stole a ridiculous amount of material from Janeane's set (the most notable being her bit about "the gravy boat"--I'm sure most of you who spend any time with me in real life are infinitely annoyed by my constant reuse of the term by now). When I saw that she was going to be coming to the Lakeshore Theater with Marc Maron (from whom I've also stolen a ridiculous amount of material over the years), I couldn't wait to have the chance to catch her again. I went with some gay boyfriends, and we had a delightful time. She's such an amazing talent. I almost got a little choked up after the show was over thinking about how big a part of my adult consciousness she's been. I'd always been a stand-up comedy nerd, even when I was probably too young to be watching much of what I was watching, but I feel like seeing her stand-up specials on Comedy Central when I was in high school was this amazing shift. She looked like me and was angry like me and was just ranting on this amazing tear, rather than delivering punchlines with the more typical stand-up comedy rhythms like (as much as I adore them) Judy Gold or Joy Behar or Rita Rudner. And for her still to be around, and still to be operating at this ridiculously smooth, high level feels like such an amazing gift.

Aleks and the Drummer, Live at the Empty Bottle
It was hard for me to believe that I'd still never seen Aleks and the Drummer play live in a proper venue (last year's brief set at the Wicker Park Street Festival barely counts), so I made the effort to catch their show at the Empty Bottle earlier this month. They're really a fabulous band, towering over the current proliferation of other boy/girl drums/keyboards groups. I think this is due mainly to their appealing weirdness--Aleks is just about as bat-shit crazy as they come (in a good way--that voice! those clothes!), and Deric, in his spasmodic ferocity, absolutely stands as one of the best rock drummers around town (and I'm seriously not just saying that because he's a pal). Catch 'em while you can, Chicagoans. Pictures here.

Leonard Cohen, Live at the Chicago Theater
Leonard Cohen's always been one of those guys I knew I should be into, but just never took the time. Oh sure, I'd heard him sing some of his songs here and there, as well as all the covers, of course ("My penis is like a Leonard Cohen song: everyone likes it better when it's covered"), and just kind of figured "OK, I got it. Deep voice, poetic lyrics, female back-up singers. Done." Well, what I never took the time to properly realize is that fandom is the aggregate of letting Leonard Cohen work on you--you can't just listen to one song and leave it at that. You have to be willing to absolutely drown in Leonard Cohen for a while, and then you'll be baptized as a hysterical drooling fan. Which is exactly what happened to me at the Chicago Theater. Benji--who's been a fan ever since he heard a DJ playing Cohen Live as he was packing up at the end of the night at the bar in Bloomington--offered me one of his two tickets, and I'm infinitely grateful that he did. It was an absolutely magical night. First and foremost, of course, were the songs. And when I say songs, I don't just mean "bits of music and lyrics written and played by a singer and his band"--I mean, these are songs. There's just no denying the craft at work there. There's a reason why people cover his stuff all the time; it must feel like putting on a really well-tailored set of trousers or expensive pair of shoes. They're just that well done. But the man himself was absolutely oozing with energy and joie de vivre. He played for something like two and a half hours, literally skipping on and off the stage between sets and encores. His reverence for both the act of performing and for the other musicians on stage with him was deeply touching. He would step back and hold his fedora to his heart whenever anyone was taking a solo, and the two times he went around the stage introducing everyone individually, he bowed to them all with true respect, humility, and affection. And as all this was unfolding, it was hard also not to be reminded of his age, how this might be one of the last times any of us might ever see him perform live on stage. It didn't feel like a victory lap in the lazy or self-congratulatory sense--it felt like a man preemptively saying farewell on his own terms. Needless to say, I was a teary-eyed wreck by the end of the show. You can be sure I'm a huge Leonard Cohen fan now. Pictures here.

State of Play
If you're gonna go in for an elegy-to-newspaper-journalism movie, you'd be far better off with The Soloist. State of Play isn't bad, necessarily, it's just a bit...thin. (Unlike Russell Crowe, amiright? Hey-oh!) The cast is full of amazing actors (oh, Helen Mirren, cradle me to your bosom and insult me, please), but the script felt incredibly flat. It's hard to imagine what would have attracted so much talent to the project, other than maybe working with director Kevin Macdonald hot off his success with The Last King of Scotland.

Baby Teeth, Live at the Empty Bottle, with My Dear Disco
What the hell--springtime on a random Thursday: might as well go check out a Baby Teeth gig. They're getting ready to release their next LP this summer, and they brought a shitload of new jams to the Bottle last week. It really made them step up their game a bit, too. They played with an almost nervous intensity I've rarely seen in them before--and it suited them well. Perhaps they were also encouraged by the shit-hot opening set from Ann Arbor's My Dear Disco (between them and Nomo, what the FUCK is in the water up there?!). Imagine a version of Maroon 5 populated by a bunch of dorky yet adorable college-age dudes and a set of uilleann pipes, and you can kind of envision what they're up to. Apparently they usually work with a female singer, too, but her voice was blown out, so she wasn't on stage that night. I can't even imagine how much more over-the-top awesome that would make the group, though. They had incredible energy and incredible musicianship. I'll look forward to seeing them again soon. Pictures here.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Despite having been obsessed with the movie since its release in 2001, I'd never had the opportunity to see the show live on stage. The American Theater Company has been putting it on this month, though, and I knew I had to jump at the chance for tickets. Ohhhh, kittens, let me tell you how hard I sobbed. Going in, I pretty much knew I'd be a goner by the end at least, but I wasn't anticipating how much just hearing the songs themselves would kill me. I forget what an emotional attachment I have to them. All it took was the opening notes of "The Origin of Love" and I was like, "oh. Right. This music" and the waterworks just started flowing. I don't know that the production itself was necessarily exceptional--though the wardrobe person wins major points for putting Hedwig in a punked-out Obama "CHANGE" t-shirt dress for her entrance--but there's just something incredibly special about the show itself. Even though it's been a number of years since I've actually sat down and watched the movie, it was fascinating to see the emphasis the two media put on different aspects of the story. When you're not distracted by the physical presence of Tommy Gnosis, the relationship between Hedwig and Yitzhak gains so much more resonance and importance. Giving her back her power at the end of the show and ending with her on stage while Hedwig walks off, almost stripped bare, becomes such a beautiful gesture after you've spent an hour and a half watching her sit there, seething quietly, literally on the periphery of the stage and our awareness. And because we haven't been distracted by the actual sight of Tommy and Hedwig's love affair and we're not craving the sugar rush of that "first love" narrative, the D/s dynamic is allowed to flourish in a much more organic way here, whereas it always felt like kind of an afterthought to me in the movie. Anyway, I'm super, super glad I finally had a chance to see it live. (I snapped a quick picture of the awesome set design.)

Angels & Demons
Sublimely hideous. This thing was so talky it should have been a radio play, while also being gratuitously, graphically violent (to compensate?). Tom Hanks does a game job of trying to keep the thing afloat, but it's really Ewan McGregor's movie. The choice that he makes to play his character as perpetually soft-spoken was kind of brilliant. And the plot twist involving the helicopter totally sucked me in; I jumped right to the assumption they wanted me to make and loved them for playing on my gullibility. I found the overall logistical simplicity of the movie amusing, though. It seems that an easy attack that people often make on faith and Western religions especially is that they're reductive and binary--good/evil, right/wrong, eye for an eye, etc. But this movie was doing the same thing with "knowledge"/"research." It was never a matter of truly interpreting anything; it was just "here is a symbol; do you know what the symbol means? If yes, then proceed to the next plot point."

Destroyer (solo), Live at the Empty Bottle
Dan Bejar is becoming one of those musicians that I will immediately, reflexively go see if he's playing in town. It just feels like a compulsion, like I need to be in his presence if he's here, maybe as some sort of energetic exchange for all the pleasure that his music brings me. He played a solo set at the Bottle on Sunday night, and it, appropriately, felt like something holy. He reached deep into the Destroyer back catalog, thrilling the fanboys clustered around the edge of the stage, while also hitting us with some Swan Lake and New Pornos ("Streets of Fire"). I will also stand by my assertion that not nearly enough people give this guy credit for being as funny as he is. His ability to perform a meta-narrative of Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert at the same time that he's giving us a legitimately gorgeous Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert was just brain-ticklingly awesome. "Did I play anything from Your Blues?" he mumbled into the mic at one point about halfway in to the set. The place went bonkers with people shouting out song requests. "Forget it. That album's too hard," he mumbled back, not so much shooting down the idea as making it clear he never meant it in the first place. A lot of times that night I found myself laughing like I laugh at Wes Anderson movies--alone, in the odd corners around the jokes, not even so much at anything funny that's happening. He's really such a singular talent. Pictures here.

Less germane to the usual pop cultural subject matter of this blog, but no less time-consuming and significant in my life recently: I did another 30-day juice fast, lost ten pounds, cut off all my hair, and spent a weekend helping out around the Zen Buddhist temple that I attend during the celebration of the Buddha's birthday (kinda like Buddhist Christmas). So, yeah. It's been a busy few weeks. How about you, my darlings? What's going on in your corner of the world?

The Soloist

2009-04-26T23:19:00.002-05:00

Well, count me in with the rest of the filmies who are saying The Soloist is so much better than you think it is. Yeah, it’s a tortured musical genius movie, but it’s also way more stylistically ambitious than it needed to be. I mean, the sound editing on this thing, you guys—I saw the movie at the Davis, which I love having accessible within walking distance from my apartment, but now I wish that I’d seen it down at the River East or somewhere with better acoustics. Their use of voice over and the rest of the stuff on the soundtrack is really a fairly brilliant way to deal with the inherently uncinematic nature of both movies about writing and movies about music. It swings for the fences in a lot of places, and misses, sure (I reeeeally could have done without that final shot of all the mentally ill people dancing at the end, and the ranging, impressionistic shots of LA’s homeless communities with Jamie Foxx reciting the Lord’s Prayer in voice over was a bit much as well), but it also gets a hell of a lot right. The 2001-esque (yeah, that 2001) sequence of dancing lights when the two lead characters go to a symphony rehearsal was so unexpected and so nice, and the shots of those two birds flying over LA while the cello music swells on the soundtrack was so overwrought that it curved the circle all the way back around to incredibly moving. Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx’s performances are likely to win all kinds of plaudits this year, so, whatever, I don’t need to pile on here, but I absolutely adored the moment when Downey Jr. is hanging around at the community center interviewing that old lady, and he throws his head back with this narcissistic glee and laughs, “you’re so awesome!” It was such a wonderfully honest moment of writerly enthusiasm—he was totally not in the moment with this other human being but was already busy mentally constructing a probably condescending anecdote about her. I’ve totally been that kind of asshole, and it was both bracing and weirdly comforting to see on screen. Don’t let the sappy trailer fool you on this one, y’all. It’s worth a look.

Whereas last year I was busy boo-hooing into that Bon Iver album for months on end because it was all gentle and full of pain, and stomping around the neighborhood listening to the Dodos strum their acoustic guitars and bang their drums, this year all I want to listen to so far is the spazziest, most annoying music I can find. I mean, the Neko Case album is gorgeous and all, and I know I’m going to really like it a lot more when I’m in a better headspace for it, but I just can’t pay attention to it right now because I’m busy jonesing for anything that’s full of harsh, electronic sounds and beats that are so aggressively irritating that they’re like ohrwurms on Viagra. There’s Animal Collective, of course (“My Girls” is a given, but OMG, you guys, “Brother Sport” has been killing me lately: “OH-pen up your OH-pen up your OH-pen up your throat a luh-tel”). Per Dono’s recommendation, I’ve given a few listens to Dan Deacon’s Bromst (still letting it grow on me, but I dig what it’s doing). Like everybody and their Tumblr crush, the Micachu and the Shapes album is making me ridiculously happy (right now I have five tracks starred in the smart playlist I call “songs to watch out for”—and there could be five more by the end of the week the rate things are going). And the granddaddy of ’em all: Max Tundra’s Parallax Error Beheads You. The explosive brilliance of that album makes my teeth chatter. There’s so much going on in it, and it seems so overwhelming (ahem), but then once you start to learn it, you realize that he’s in complete control of every vintage keyboard blip and drum machine stutter. Plus he’s funny as all hell, dopily insecure, and laser-focused on pointing out really subtle instances of a certain kind of hipster bullshit (fashion, wanky film students who’ve read a bit too much theory). It's an astonishing achievement, and I'm sooo glad I didn't let it slip by just because it kind of flew under my radar upon its release at the end of last year.

Hey, That's Me!

2009-04-15T09:52:00.003-05:00

I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute to this month's "snack away" series over on eat!drink!snack! My post is up today.

Charlyne!

2009-04-08T13:00:00.001-05:00

And, just like that, a new video with Charlyne Yi popped up online yesterday (via). To make it even more awesome, it's for the Man Man tune "Rabbit Habits" from last year's excellent album of the same name and also features Fred Armisen.

Man Man "Rabbit Habits" - watch more funny videos

Well, let's just go ahead and make it an all-video edition today, shall we? (BTW, if you follow my Tumblr, you've probably seen all these already.)

Here's the song that's been stuck in my head for the past couple days, Max Tundra's "Which Song" (via):

Via Cassius, some awesome old-school John Roderick from his Western State Hurricanes days, doing an early version of "Carparts" (aka, one of five songs Merlin Mann would "love to hear performed by a competent junior high marching band"):

And, just because it makes me happy, the Divine Comedy doing "Tonight We Fly" for La Blogotheque:

#18.1 - THE DIVINE COMEDY - Tonight...
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Speaking of the Divine Comedy, if you haven't been checking updates to the sidebar at left, you may not be aware that I started a Divine Comedy oeuvreblog a couple months ago. Progress has been slow so far (ugh, there's this other little thing in my life called a day job), but maybe broadcasting about it here will be a good way of publicly shaming myself into doing more work on it more consistently.

The Omnipresence of Apatow

2009-04-05T22:30:00.002-05:00

Sigh. Judd Apatow (or rather, the idea/signature style/cinematic sub-sub-genre of "Judd Apatow") is like that person from high school that you keep bumping into once, twice, sometimes three times a year, usually at other people's parties, sometimes out on the street somewhere, and whenever you see him/her you're like "WTF? Are we friends? Why are you still in my life?" But after those WTF moments have happened several years in a row, you just kind of give up and accept the fact that your social circles are inextricably and inexplicably linked, to the point where you almost kind of look forward to the random run-ins, despite whatever stress they may cause you.

Which is to say, for as many issues as I've had with Apatow and his loosely affiliated stable of cohorts over the years, somehow, on this rare weekend when I had both time and money to spare, I found myself taking in I Love You, Man and Adventureland at the theater. WTF? Are we friends? Why are you still in my life?

I Love You, Man, despite peaking early and featuring one of the worst end-of-movie wedding scenes since The 40 Year Old Virgin, is very funny, and Paul Rudd is absurdly charming (srsly, this is the kind of role I didn't even know I wanted him to play when I mentioned in my write-up on Forgetting Sarah Marshall that he needed to start carrying movies on his own again). But, perhaps predictably, it left me wondering why there isn't more space for female oddballs in these films. I mean, when I think of the majority of women I hang out with on a semi-regular basis, it's kind of awesome to realize that they are all extremely weird in totally wonderful ways. They're all super foxy and successful in their fields and many of them are in loving, functional relationships, and there's no doubt that they can match my dude friends pound for pound with The Funny. Obviously I'm biased and my control group is probably way skewed, but you get my point. Why is it seemingly so hard for writers and directors to represent this reality in these movies that have come to dominate our notion of contemporary film comedy? I'm sure Rashida Jones is a fine actress and it's cool that she's doing work on all these TV and film comedies, but her role as Paul Rudd's fiancee was so boring and lame. How much more interesting would this movie have been if she were swapped out for the "wacky" friend played by Sarah Burns (or hell, even Jaime Pressly, with her signature turbo intensity perpetually cranked up to 11), and then treated as the romantic lead, with all her tics and neuroses intact? To this date, Charlyne Yi in Knocked Up, who obviously wasn't even close to a having a prominent role, is the most memorable female character for me in any of these movies, and it's really because she was so gleefully fucking bizarre. More like her, please. This is the reality we live in. There's a reason why people love Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig so much. They're the exceptions that prove the rule.

Despite being billed as "from the director of Superbad," I was really, really delighted to find that Adventureland is a sweet and sensitive little movie, full of tenderness and sadness and a nonjudgmental attitude toward the very true-to-life and occasionally morally compromised situations the characters find themselves in. I think if I were just a few years younger, it probably would have knocked me out even more. Jesse Eisenberg is perfect (I gotta check out Roger Dodger again sometime; I remember loving it when I saw it in the theater and totally forgot Eisenberg was the kid in it), and it's so cool to see what a smooth, unforced actor Ryan Reynolds has become, even in this small role. Though I, of course, understand why the movie needed its last scene, part of me wishes it would have seized the ambiguous ending and faded out just before that, with Eisenberg's character on the bus to New York, gazing out the rain-streaked windows, with the lights of the city shining through the raindrops like hundreds of light-emitting diodes, with the Replacements' "Unsatisfied" blaring on the soundtrack. It was such a beautiful moment.

In case you missed it last week, over on Fluxblog, Matthew Perpetua, man of the people, in his infinite wisdom, gave the Internet what it truly wants: kittens, cheeseburgers, and dreamy photo montages of President Obama.

Also in case you missed it, Shawn has been rolling out many exciting changes and additions to the Eat! Drink! Snack! empire: a site redesign, the daily "Nosh Nook" entries, a Twitter feed, and, every Wednesday this April, entries written by special guests from around the world (the first from Germany's very own Jonesalicious).

I AM A LLAMA; YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID

The Remains of the Day

2009-03-21T03:53:00.003-05:00

I finished reading The Remains of the Day for the first time about a week ago after picking up a copy at a friend's book swap party and really enjoyed it. Unreliable first person narration, crisis of masculinity AND nationality AND class AND professional purpose AND age AND political affiliation--it's great. Because I am Bridget Jones, I decided to watch the Merchant Ivory film version on DVD Friday night at home with a glass of red wine, and, holy crap, you guys, it's sooo bad! And not because it's lacking in "action," arranging matches style, but because there's actually rather too much action. For as long as it is (about two hours and ten minutes), the pace feels ridiculously frenzied (is it the editing? I couldn't tell), the nondiegetic music is overly fussy and bullying, and most of the acting is totally lacking in anything resembling emotional intimacy. (Oddly enough, Christopher Reeve, the bloody American, is one of the few bright spots in the whole mess of stiff-upper-lippiness.) I don't know if it just hasn't aged well or if it was this bad in '93, but woof. I love a good English drawing room drama full of pregnant pauses and unspoken emotions, but nothing in the preceding clause at all relates to this movie.

Trifecta of Dorkiness

2009-03-18T11:47:00.002-05:00

So, I know many of you out there grew up like, y'know, actual teenagers, engaging in typically teenagery behavior and listening to legitimately cool music, and it must be awesome for you when bands like Pixies reunite and go on tour and release new material and stuff like that. But, do you want to know what the pop cultural equivalent is for me? How it looks when the stuff that's inextricably linked to memories from my late teens and early twenties (and, in all fairness, those of some of my closest comrades) all of a sudden comes back to prominence? Well, look no further than a few of this week's headlines and other newsworthy happenings:

~Ben Folds is releasing an album full of a cappella groups' interpretations of his songs

~The Decemberists have released their latest album, The Hazards of Love, which is, like The Tain writ large, basically a big, gay rock opera

~Steve Martin has bankrolled a high school production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile in Oregon after a bunch of parents signed a petition protesting it's too racy.

Yep. Somewhere in the universe, the 18-year-old version of myself is exulting over this news. Here, in Chicago, the 30-year-old me is faintly wincing.

Recent Movie Round-Up

2009-03-15T22:41:00.000-05:00

Taken--Really, sometimes this is all I want out of a movie. Simple, fast, dumb, lots of action. And Liam Neeson! I've always been fairly ambivalent about him, despite a long-standing joke among old friends about his being "the greatest dramatic actor of our time," but he's wonderful here, mostly thanks to his appealing looseness. There's a scene where he approaches a prostitute on a street corner in Paris, purposely trying to monopolize her time so he can bait her pimp out into the open, and he's all Jacob's ladder jangly limbs, gushing about how pretty she is, asking if her dress is made of real silk, and wondering if he could get some sort of package deal if he saw her multiple times. It's goofy and hilarious and awesome and hinges entirely on his ability not to skeeve us out with the interaction. Maybe it's Irish charm or whatever, but these little sparks of warmth come as welcome correctives to a role that could have been all Charles Bronson steely revenge self-seriousness. Plus also, the car chases were bad ass. Why are all the best movie car chase scenes either set in Europe or filmed by European directors these days?

This Is England--Like the bastard hybrid of American History X and Son of Rambow I didn't know I wanted. Watched this with Parowpyro while I was hanging with him in Brooklyn and, despite being exhausted from several days of walking around NYC and several nights of drinking until all hours, I miraculously didn't succumb to the notorious Felusian narcolepsy as soon as the opening credits finished rolling. Seriously, it's that good. A movie about skinheads set against the backdrop of the Falklands War, it could have descended into cheap sentiment in a million different places, but it maintains complete control over its mix of sensitivity (so frothy it's really almost whimsy, believe it or not) and gut-churning violence (that's never exploitative or manipulative). A really special little film. Thanks again, Shawn!

The Class (Entre les murs)--Woof. After a stressful and difficult week at work, I probably would have preferred to see something a bit lighter, but I'm still glad I caught this. It reminded me a bit of the HBO documentary Thin, which I also watched somewhat recently, for the way it doesn't let anybody off the hook--the students, the teachers, the parents, the administration--and for the ways that the system is shown to fail kids who are definitely challenging but could benefit from help the most. Much as my enjoyment of Slumdog Millionaire was heightened by having read Maximum City, my appreciation for The Class was enriched by my love for Adam Gopnik's essay collection Paris to the Moon. Though he doesn't deal too much with the schools specifically in his writing, he does give a wonderful picture of the very French love of debate and committees, where the notion of a theoretical Good is often privileged over the reality of the circumstance right in front of their eyes, which you see here in the many scenes of the teachers meeting to discuss how to deal with certain students and other problems in their classes. Also, the fact that there are only about two moments in the whole movie where the prevailing air of stress and tension is alleviated (by my count, the display of Souleymane's photo essay near the middle and the student vs. teacher soccer game in the courtyard at the very end) recalled Gopnik's description of the European attraction to soccer, as opposed to the American love of basketball. In his piece "The World Cup, and After," he comes to see the multitude of points scored in an NBA game as "a little loud, a little cheap...more goals than you know what to do with...like eating whipped cream straight" whereas the World Cup is "a festival of fate: man accepting his hard circumstances, the near certainty of his fate....Nil-nil is the score of life....Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick." Over on Tumblr, Deborah Fight with Knives says that "It’s the most realistic movie I’ve ever seen about teaching...however, it’s so true to life that it kinda felt a lot like going to work." Depending on your stomach for that sort of thing, you should either seek this out immediately or steer clear of it altogether.

Two Lovers--Wow. I almost can't tell if I even liked this movie, but I loved its audacious weirdness. Joaquin Phoenix's performance is almost like nothing I've ever seen before. The preview makes the film look like the standard, sexy "dude can't decide between the girl that he wants and the girl that he has" story (which, in a lot of ways, it is) without giving any indication that his performance is veering close to Crispin Glover levels of lunacy. It's angular and raw and unvarnished and utterly lacking in narcissism (almost to a fault), but also mannered and broad and old-fashioned (in the best sense, like a vaudevillian silent film star transplanted into some European art movie from the 1960s or '70s). Truly, it's astonishing, and I don't know what to make of it. As for the rest of the movie, the levels at which the characters emotionally manipulate each other aren't especially subtle, but they're not supposed to be--there's a certain kind of theatrical beauty to how acute they are. The film ends up feeling like an elaborate piece of origami, all the intricate folds adding up to something unnatural, painstaking, pointless, delicate, and lovely. If swinging-for-the-fences ambition that feels like nothing else in contemporary cinema right now--both for good and for ill--is your sort of thing, don't sleep on this.

Frozen River--Despite the movie having won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, it's still curious to me that Melissa Leo was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance here. She's quite good, but it just doesn't seem like Oscar's cup of tea, at least not in 2008/9, especially in such a small indie. But hopefully, as it did for me, the nomination will draw people to the movie, which deals with race, class, and gender gracefully and organically without ever seeming like a movie that you'd want to describe as dealing with race, class, and gender. There's something fiercely political in the image of Leo, Misty Upham, and the two female Chinese immigrants running across the melting St. Lawrence River during the film's big climax. And of course the shot of this new sort of hybridized, improvised family at the very end totally hit me in my soft spot for that sort of thing.

How Much Joy Can the Heart Handle Before It Explodes?

2009-02-25T20:31:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-15T19:29:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-03T23:30:00.002-06:00

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.

New Divine Comedy in '09

2009-01-12T09:44:00.001-06:00

So many of my fave bands are releasing new music this year: Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, the Decemberists, the Long Winters (if J-Rod can ever get around to finishing the lyrics). And now we have word that Neil Hannon is going into the studio to give us a new Divine Comedy album in the latter half of the year. Squee! What an embarrassment of riches. Any word on what Spoon's working on these days...?

Nope. Didn't watch the Golden Globes.

Go listen to the Del Shannon song posted here. Thank me later.

This has been making the rounds at the office recently. I love it.

The return of The Dollar Store on Friday night was amazing. Next month's installment will be on February 13 at the Beat Kitchen instead of the Hideout. Even if they hold it at the dentist's office, though, you should still go.

808s and Heartbreak

2009-01-05T12:22:00.001-06:00

Finally took the time this weekend to delve into 808s and Heartbreak and all I can say is wow. It's the first Kanye album I've liked as much, as unequivocally, and as instantly as The College Dropout, and I can feel it surpassing my esteem for even that album already. That single 4/4 handclap mixed in with the explosive, syncopated beats at the beginning of the "Love Lockdown" chorus might be the most eloquent handclap I've ever heard. It's so human, so delicately, understatedly emotional in the midst of all the bombast. It sounds like a crazy homeless guy dancing--blissfully, obliviously, in slow motion--on the sidewalk while businesspeople and other rush-hour foot traffic hustles briskly past him. It kinda chokes me up, actually.

Also--and this is just a knee-jerk reaction--but, between the preponderance of martial drumbeats throughout, all those anguished, meaty strings, and the arresting combination of raw and studio-treated vocals, is there a way that this might be considered, stylistically at least, Kanye's Homogenic?

Marley & Me and Revolutionary Road

2009-01-03T15:22:00.001-06:00

In general, I've always had problems with movies about stultifying conformity in the suburbs, especially movies set in the 1950s. As with anything, I'm sure there are, or at least could be, exceptions to this rule (I remember enjoying American Beauty when it came out, though maybe it's just because I saw it early enough in my formative years as a film studies student that I was still open and receptive and relatively nonjudgmental about my tastes, and I might feel differently if I saw it again now), but for the most part, whenever I think of movies that have made me truly angry, they're usually movies about suburban conformity, usually set in the 1950s.

Which means that Marley & Me irritated me a bit, probably irrationally given what it's actually trying to do/say, and that Revolutionary Road made me positively seethe.

I didn't mean to see Marley & Me, but I'd misjudged the starting time of another movie I wanted to sneak into after Doubt was over, so, curious about this dog story phenomenon and interested in checking out Owen Wilson's latest bid for semi-respectability, I ducked in. And I'll say as charitably as I can that I can understand why it's been pretty well reviewed. There's a sweet grace in the tone, with just the right combination of regret, melancholy, resignation to/acceptance of the controllable momentum of one's own life, and true pleasure taken in fleeting glances at joy when they come. I understand why this is appealing, and I understand that it's a dramatization of someone's memoir, and I understand that, on a broader scale, the film's events are emblematic of legitimate choices that real people make all the time. But still, the overall impression that I was left with when the movie was over was...I hate straight white men.

Which is ridiculous! Some of my favorite people in the world are straight white men! Not to mention that I'm generally as big a sucker as they come for masculinity-in-crisis stories (ahem, my fawning over The Wrestler). But somehow, taking this story, which I can only assume is very charming in a book that one might read on the train during the morning commute, and putting it on screen changes the weight of the thing. Film has a way of universalizing the values it's dramatizing, a way of saying "this is what's important to us, this is what really matters underneath it all," perhaps no more plainly than when the movie itself purports to be humble or simple or slice-of-life (slice of whose life?). And I just wanted to gag at the uncritical, unironic cultural hegemony in this movie. Again, I know that these are real issues that real people face and that the decisions are deeply important to the people that make them, but the fact that Jennifer Aniston's character gives up her career to have babies and stay home to care for them and finds a way to convince herself that she enjoys it and finds it fulfilling despite how exhausted and miserable she clearly is felt really icky to me. But ickier still was the fact that her story wasn't even the one we were supposed to feel most sympathetic to. The movie centers around all Owen Wilson's "this is not my beautiful house / this is not my beautiful wife" boo-hooing. She repeatedly comforts him when he's depressed about his job or getting older or his place in the world or whatever. Ugh. And, of course, there's the throwaway line when Wilson's character's old college friend sees a picture of Aniston after many years apart and says, "wow, she's holding up really well." The character's supposed to be a womanizer, and we're supposed to feel sort of sorry for how empty his life is since he doesn't have any stable relationships, but come the fuck on. Don't sneak that shit into a movie that dads are taking their little girls (and little boys) to. Luckily, I find Wilson's persona pretty reliably charming or I probably would've hated the movie much, much more.

Aniston, though, seemed kind of miscast. She's lovely in the early scenes of their marriage, but--and I don't mean this in any kind of tabloidy, unintentional cinema verite way--she just doesn't have the right kind of warmth as an actress (yet?) to convincingly play a mother of three. I loved her in The Good Girl and Friends with Money, so it's not a matter of not thinking she's a very capable and winning actress. There was just a weird stiffness about her in the second half of the movie.

Oh yeah, and the dog dies. I won't apologize for the spoiler because if you didn't see it coming, you should be punched in the face.

So, I hated Marley & Me because it celebrates everything wholesome and traditional about family life, while trying to have it both ways by paying lip service to the characters' "am I ready for all this?" and "is that all there is?" doubts, but then I also hated Revolutionary Road because it's utterly condescending about the same.

It's always really unclear to me who these 1950s suburban conformity movies are for. Are they supposed to shock contemporary people living a life of suburban conformity into the realization that their very existence is hollow and meaningless? Are they supposed to flatter supposedly hip and sophisticated urban audiences into congratulating themselves for having escaped all that (while probably succumbing to bland conformity of another stripe--have the right opinion on the right wine, listen to NPR, go to these kinds of movies)? Are they supposed to shed a light on the shocking-to-exactly-no-one notion that the American dream often fails people, that the post-war era didn't deliver on all its shiny promises? Maybe I'm missing some greater artistic import in these movies or being willfully daft about how the '50s milieu serves a purpose/shorthand as a genre unto itself. Please help explain it to me if I am. But, I can't help but feel like, at some point, these movies are necessarily going to be insulting somebody in some way.

I found it fairly offensive for Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio to be making an Important Cinematic Statement about the perils of living a life of mediocrity. I'm of course not anti-Hollywood--the only way The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could successfully do what it was trying to do was to use the hugeness of Brad Pitt's movie star presence and our familiarity with his face and body as a special effect unto itself, and that was maybe the only thing I appreciated about the movie--but there is an uncomfortable residue left behind when actors of that stature end up attacking, with whatever good intentions, the basic choices and lifestyle of a large part of their audience.

I haven't read Yates's novel, so I don't know how some of the plot points function there, but the glaring obviousness of much of the story was just as offensive. Again, maybe I'm missing the point, but really--these are the places the story is going to go? This is the truth-teller character you're going to let be our Greek chorus? This is the big final shocking situation you're going to culminate with? I'm all for the skillful use of archetypal characters and story lines, but...the tropes just didn't seem too skillfully used here. It was all very self-congratulatory and pandering.

Winslet's performance is competent but by the numbers. She does look amazing, and not just in the immaculately well-tailored period costumes. She's aging into her face exquisitely, though she's a bit skinnier than she probably should be. DiCaprio, on the other hand, still looks distractingly boyish. I guess that probably works in his favor here, giving an extra ounce of tragedy to this idea of a man surrendering to lockstep conformity before he's had much of a chance to know anything different. But, I did like the sexy young secretary (played by Zoe Kazan, who looks a bit like Kristen Schaal) and the fact that there was a disclaimer in the final credits that the filmmakers received no kickbacks from the tobacco industry for all the onscreen smoking.

I'm not exactly sure why these movies rile me up so much. I guess, at the bottom of it all, they just don't square with my experience of the world. Do I think the suburbs can be a soulless, deadening place to live? Of course; I'm infinitely grateful not to be living there myself now. I also pretty fundamentally believe, though, that everybody's doing the best they can. Life is what it is, and people make the best choices they can make given the circumstances, and even if they're vaguely unhappy or--gasp!--even slightly tacky, most people living in the suburbs are still really good, decent humans. Is there no way to effectively dramatize these two seemingly opposed ideas, with compassion and wit and respect and intelligence? However, I also think it's important to find a way to expose people to the lifestyles and values of all different kinds of communities, to give equal weight to stories that break out of that constricting, insular habit of only telling stories about "ourselves" (however we define "ourselves"). Getting used to peacefully coexisting with people who might share nothing other than simple physical proximity is, to me, one of the great lessons available via urban living. And for those who cannot, do not, or choose not to live in the city, I think they're owed the option to see films that tell well-made, accessible stories about, well, about something other than straight white men. Maybe it's good for me to take these occasional trips to the suburbs, though, if that's what I need to get fired up about my own priorities again.

Movies in 2008

2008-12-31T16:58:00.000-06:00

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.

Best Music of 2008

2008-12-23T15:10:00.005-06:00

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

King Sparrow, Tonight at Bottom Lounge

2008-12-18T13:08:00.002-06:00

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!!)

Twilight

2008-12-14T21:01:00.001-06:00

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.

Confession

2008-12-10T19:33:00.002-06:00

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.

The Ballad of Vina and Italo

2008-11-30T12:21:00.004-06:00

If the NMAs had a category for "best stop-action animation featuring wine bottles on a hero's journey," I'd say this video created by Jessie, Eric, their pal Mitch, and myself on Saturday night would be a lock for 2008. Enjoy.

Synecdoche, New York

2008-11-17T00:47:00.004-06:00

Sigh. Well, kittens, here's another movie I feel like I'm going to be defending to its many vehement detractors for a good long while.

Seems like consensus is that Synecdoche, New York is a mess, but my god, what a wonderfully beautiful mess. Aside from the various and sundry easily recognizable Charlie Kaufman mindfuck tropes, it's also full of his signature "the unknowable-ness of the other" pessimism, but it's rendered delicately enough that, though I disagree with the spirit of the argument, I didn't mind it at all. It actually feels positively Kubrickian in its depiction of a unit destroying itself from within--the unit being Philip Seymour Hoffman's body, mind, and soul. In fact, I intuitively sensed I'd love the film as soon as I read Owen Gleiberman's dismissive review in Entertainment Weekly, which was so reminiscent of his totally-missing-the-point write-up of Eyes Wide Shut back in the day. And, wow, is the comparison ever apt: there's the fantasia version of a blandly stage-y New York on one hand and, on the other, there's the odyssey of a man wandering and fucking his way through a landscape of gorgeous, powerful women, most of whom end up being dreamlike, endlessly recursive stand-ins for each other--for whom he's no match physically, emotionally, sexually, or intellectually--while at least one vaguely ominiscent, or at least omnipresent, man tracks his every step. (Not to mention the subplot involving a lengthy trip to Berlin, which even links it to the German-language source material Traumnovella.) There's also shades of the highly controversial ending of AI, when Hoffman's character reveals his desire to re-perform and thus re-live "the happiest day of his life." I hated much of AI, mostly for the places that Spielberg's influence was felt heaviest, but I've always been a staunch defender of that "happy" ending because I feel that everyone misinterprets how darkly Freudian it actually is. Far from feeling like Synecdoche rides off the rails about halfway through, I felt like the weirdness it just keeps descending into actually becomes richer and deeper and more rewarding, even as it becomes more and more willfully incomprehensible. The actor-priest's monologue near the end may be a wee bit on the nose, but I was thankful for its paving the way for the introduction of the summarizing notion that "everyone is everyone," which set up that final scene in which Hoffman pathetically yet tenderly apologizes to a near-stranger who's clearly a stand-in, for, well, everyone. Then again, I'm a sucker for that kind of thematic/narrative trick.

And, fuck me, what a cast. Hoffman is brilliant as ever (the role is actually a perfect companion piece to what he's doing in The Savages), but, as mentioned above, the women are especially phenomenal. I never tire of watching Catherine Keener (like Mary-Louise Parker and Frances McDormand, she's becoming impossibly foxier with every year she ages). It's been a while since I've seen Samantha Morton in anything--I forgot how marvelous she can be, and her slightly plump physique felt like a welcome breath of reality. It seems, after her appearances here and in Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There, that Michelle Williams is happily turning into quite the actress, and, as she's lost the Dawson's Creek-era baby fat in her face, she's becoming more and more heartbreakingly lovely, somehow evading the dreaded too-skinny stickbug look, ending up somehow slim yet womanly. As I mentioned in my review of The Nines, Hope Davis is always a welcome presence, even in the tiniest role, and getting Emily Watson to double Morton was both hilarious and inspired. And, saving Dianne Wiest's appearance for the end was the absolutely perfect flourish to an already incredible roster of talent.

Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know that I tend to prefer and privilege these ambitious movies that swing for the fences, even when they don't succeed 100 percent of the way, so it should be no surprise that I adored Synecdoche. It's deeply, deeply sad, but really worth it. As CTLA always used to say, I laughed, I cried, I took notes.

UPDATE, Jan. 15, 2009: For those of you who may have stumbled through to this blog by Google searching for "priest monologue synecdoche, new york," I'm happy to (finally) be able to point you to a transcription here.

A New Beginning

2008-11-05T10:56:00.002-06:00

In stark contrast to the morning after last time, the sun is out today, the sky is bright blue, the air is unseasonably warm, the trees are still full of glowing, fiery foliage, and, as I wrote here, TV on the Radio's "Golden Age" was the first thing that popped into my head when I woke up and opened my eyes. Let's not get ahead of ourselves or anything, but damn. This feels good. Proud of Chicago, proud of us all.

Early November Pop Notes

2008-11-03T21:19:00.004-06:00

SB asked me recently, "don't you have to write about the TV on the Radio show on your blog?" Truth is, I wasn't really planning on it. I just didn't feel like I needed to pile on them again after my Dear Science review. As I mentioned to Parowpyro over email, I can't think of another band I like as much as TVotR that's left me as resoundingly underwhelmed as they have recently (aside from perhaps Bloc Party--I could barely get through Intimacy). I'm glad I finally had a chance to see them live and all, but the show did absolutely nothing for me. Unlike a lot of folks, I actively enjoy Sitek's overstuffed production aesthetic, so the songs, translated live, were missing quite a bit of oomph for me, even when they brought a whole shitload of people onstage for a percussion jam and sent the horn section up into one of the boxes. I swear, I'm not trying to be stubborn or contrarian or whatevs, I just wasn't feeling it.

Openers the Dirtbombs fell a little bit to one side of the too-loud/too-heavy spectrum for my taste to make me want to listen to their stuff on a regular basis, but they were enjoyable enough live. The one thing that really endeared them to me, though, was the way they utilized what's usually just dead-air space after their set: their lead singer/guitarist and one of their drummers (yes, sigh, one of their drummers) started to unplug and pack up their gear as the lights came up, while the other guitar player, the other drummer, and the bassist continued to vamp on a nice little groove. As the bassist, and then the guitar player, began to drop out, splinter off, and pack up, the drummer kept his backbeat steady, even as the roadies began to disassemble the drum kit out from underneath him, until he was just banging on the side of the kick drum. It was a highly amusing use of that transitional time, and a fun challenge to see how long they could keep it going. I cheered way louder for that stunt that I did for any of their other songs that night. I just appreciated that extra little bit of silliness and playing with the form of "rock show opening set."

Movie-wise, I made damn sure to get my ass out to see Rachel Getting Married and loved it, loved it, loved it. I don't know if it's just because I've been to four weddings this year since mid-August (with a fifth coming up this weekend!), but it just totally wrecked me. A handful of the people I've talked to about the film have complained about the meandering pace and the ridiculously idealized/utopian vision of the attendees, the music and other entertainment at the reception, and of course the wedding itself. Aside from the fact that I have an inherent soft spot for these kinds of movies where so much of the pleasure of the piece is derived from watching beautiful, talented people give of their beauty and talent in what feels like real time (it reminded me a lot of sentimental fave The Anniversary Party), I think it's precisely those elements that are key to the film's success. You need them to be able to breathe a bit, to unwind from all the horrifyingly tense scenes of family drama. It would just be too relentlessly unpleasant, claustrophobic, and even melodramatic otherwise. I just felt like it was extraordinarily well paced, both from scene to scene and from front to back, especially as information about Rachel gets parceled out. The right to happiness you see she's earned so dearly by the time she's ready to walk down the aisle absolutely destroyed me. It just hit me in a deeply personal place. Seriously, I was a mess there in the theater. I wouldn't say that Anne Hathaway is brilliant, though she's used extremely effectively and certainly has scenes of brilliance (the cringe-inducing speech at the rehearsal dinner stands out especially). Kudos to the ever-enjoyable Bill Irwin for elevating what could have been a boring patriarch character (the malaprop "hungabungas" for "hamburgers"--whether improvised or appearing in the actual script--made me want to barf with glee, it was such a perfectly dead-on one-word encapsulation of his genial suburban dad attitude), and, all my recent carping about TVotR to one side, I thought the casting of Tunde Adebimpe was inspired. He's clearly very attractive, but not in an over-the-top kind of way (imagine if the part had been played by Taye Diggs or whoever--egad), and he's got such a quiet, gentle strength in his onscreen presence that was absolutely necessary for getting you to connect with the otherwise underwritten character. I'm not necessarily recommending this movie to you--if your expectations are too high from all the glowing write-ups it's received already, I don't want to contribute to the disappointment they'll probably engender in you if/when you eventually see it. Plus, I'm just not in the mood to fight about it too much, because, as I said, I loved it, full stop, and just kind of want to keep my warm feelings about it for a little while longer.

I also had a chance to catch up with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd been hoping would be a teenage, indie rock Before Sunrise set in New York, but ended up being more like a millennial indie rock Adventures in Babysitting set in New York without the urban scariness (the city is definitely a benevolent presence throughout in that by-now cliched "the city is another character!" kind of way). Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but...expectation management and all. Cera's charm, while not exactly wearing thin quite yet, could just use a fresher environment to flourish in; I'll be eager, for obvious reasons, to see how he fares in the Scott Pilgrim movie.

I just can't get enough of the Sea and Cake's new one. Honestly, I now think a lot of my indie rock fatigue from last month was really just disappointment that none of those new releases was Car Alarm. After growing to love Everybody so much last year, I didn't really realize how much I was looking forward to the follow-up. It's dandy. Just really easy on the ears--and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. My dad and a fellow musician friend of his always used to say of their favorite jazz soloists "they play it the way you want to hear it played," and I think the same is eminently true of the Sea and Cake in general.

Juana Molina's Un Dia has also gotten quite a bit of play recently. Kittens, this is music to blow the remaining autumn leaves right off the treetops. Either that or to keep those lonely ones left over plastered right where they are, melancholy but vibrant, lit from inside with a dying fire, in perpetuity. Everything I've ever read about Molina has led me to believe I'd respond really well to her work, and I'm happy not to have been wrong in that assumption.

"And then, he DJ'ed the afterparty." Hallelujah. Bring it.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

2008-11-02T21:37:00.004-06:00

Quite simply one of the best books I've read in a long damn time.

If you're the type of person who's likely to initiate a conversation with me by asking "so what are you reading these days?" you've inevitably been bored by the response I've been giving since about mid-June: "still slogging through that book about Bombay." Despite being employed in the publishing industry (or perhaps because of it), my reading habits are ridiculously erratic, and, even though I've been eager to check this book out since I first read the wonderful interview with author Suketu Mehta in the February 2008 issue of The Believer on the plane home from visiting my brother in San Francisco, I had a hard time tackling this 556-page behemoth. Partly, it was because of the book's structure: nearly half is dominated by the front-loaded section entitled "Power" that focuses on riots, gangs, cops, politics, Muslim vs. Hindu tension and other sensitive issues that inspire such brutality on the city's streets. It's fascinating stuff, and insanely well reported, but just not all that inherently interesting to me. It was only when the book finally opened into part two, "Pleasure" (and then beyond that into part three, "Passages"), that I felt myself becoming truly drawn in. Of course, the deeper I got into the book, the more I realized how ingenious the structure actually is. Like some sort of journalistic interpretation of Zeno's dichotomy paradox, it makes its way across this incredible distance by dividing itself in half, then in half again, then half again. And, much like a too-long, too-much Bollywood movie, with every chunk of prose that Mehta churns out, giving you pages and pages about a character or an issue, not exactly numbing you as a reader, but lulling you into a false sense of placid receptivity, he'll then cap the section with an incredibly potent paragraph or page that cuts to the juiciest, bloodiest part of the heart of the matter. I got somewhat addicted to that wonderful feeling of being intellectually punched in the throat, feeling more than a little breathless with emotion, marveling at his pacing and his ability to give you the exact punctuation that you didn't even know you needed. The book is littered with these gems, and if you look at my copy of the book, you'll see dog-eared corners marking them (beginning, yes, about halfway through), like little winks or high-fives, to myself or to Mehta or maybe both of us, I can't quite tell. Earlier this year I picked up the Jane Jacobs classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and, um, failed to finish it. Not for lack of interest--I'm sure I'll go back to it again one day, perhaps sooner rather that later--but it just wasn't the right book for me at the right time. It's polite and wonderfully sensible, and even a bit droll in places. But, with my recently renewed and reconfirmed passion for cities and the type of life it's possible to live in them, I think I wanted it to be more like Maximum City: absolutely pulsating with life, crying out in extremes of despair and ecstasy and every possible recombinant variation of the two, a profound meditation on the atomic essence of people, places, and things at their most raw and unfiltered. Highly, highly recommended, kittens.

Man Man, Live at the Bottom Lounge

2008-10-21T14:35:00.002-05:00

Scott at Pretty Goes with Pretty has written insightfully recently about the "cluster of impressions" you often form about a particular artist or band before you've ever heard their music based on the general way other people talk about it (usually reductively, usually in a way that makes you think it's not for you). On a somewhat related note, I had the joy of discovering this weekend what it's actually like to see Man Man perform live, which was so much more interesting than what I'd been assuming it would be like to see Man Man perform live over the past three years that I've been trying to get to one of their shows. Sure, there's the white clothes and the warpaint and the circus pirate Salvation Army band Looney Tunes song structures, but does anybody talk about how smart these guys are? Even when I'd heard a million times over that old chestnut "they're so much better live," I just assumed that was a testament to their energy or insanity or a general anything-goes unpredictability. But I wasn't really prepared--at least until I read Honus Honus's comment in a recent issue of Magnet magazine that his intention was to make the band a musical version of the Jodorowsky film The Holy Mountain--to be confronted with this overwhelmingly intelligent controlling consciousness humming behind and in the spaces between the notes. These dudes know exactly what they're doing, and, three albums and many, many tours into their career, they've gotten absurdly good at doing it. (I was at the early show on Saturday night and have no idea how they were going to do all that again immediately thereafter.)

It's not exactly that they're hiding how smart they are or anything--it's more that their chosen aesthetic allows them to work on two levels simultaneously. The cliched, received-wisdom-about-Man-Man level is the level that allowed all those fourteen-year-old boys to flail around in a mini-mosh pit at the lip of the stage, just buzzed out of their gourds on the electricity in the music and performance. (And let me tell you--I very rarely ever wish I were a fourteen-year-old boy, but I sure as hell did on Saturday night. It would have felt surpassingly awesome to be able to participate, and reciprocate, with the show in that way.) That's the level you expect, the level you can predict. But the second level, the quieter level that you'll never really see until you're present in a room with them when they're doing their thing live on stage is the level that...what? I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing what it is. It's a level of confidence, I suppose--their own confidence that they're in complete control of what they're doing, which in turn gave me as an audience member the confidence to trust them to take me where they were going to take me. (This is the same confidence I felt last summer when I saw of Montreal play for the first time at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and in many ways I think the comparison is apt.)

This confidence also binds together all the disparate elements that compose the standard Man Man talking points (the aforementioned white clothes, warpaint, etc.). When someone starts describing those aspects of their performances, it tends to sound like the most eye-rollingly hipsterrific collection of willfully random yet somehow artsy/pretentious affectations smashed together to give an overall impression of "OMG, crazy!" But it's actually all remarkably, even precisely, balanced in practice, like some sort of exquisitely spiced curry that plays sweetness and heat and savory elements off each other until your primary impression is just "holy fuck, I don't know what this is, but I know I want more of it."

And for as much as I've been enjoying Rabbit Habits this year, the album is almost rendered obsolete by my desire to never listen to their music anymore unless I can hear it live, so overwhelmingly satisfying is the complete live performance package. Almost--because one of the spices in the curry is the fact that these guys are amazing musicians, and, shit, just listen to them play. CTLA and I always become enamored of Chris Funk's proficiency on multiple instruments whenever we see the Decemberists play live, and it's like Man Man has three Chris Funks in the band. The marimba parts, the Django Reinhardt-aping guitar lines, the squawking horns--the casual mastery is thrilling. Plus, of course, Pow Pow is an insanely gifted dervish on the drums and Honus Honus is pure sex, a young Tom Waits soundalike that mightily resembles Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited, 'stache and all.

I realize their aesthetic may not be for everyone, and I realize that my attempt to describe what they're doing here is only contributing to the problem, adding to whatever cluster of impressions you've formed around them, but I would seriously encourage you to check out their show if they tour anywhere close to where you live in the near future.

Opener Tim Fite was likewise a welcome surprise, a wonderfully oddball combination of Shockheaded Peter-era Tiger Lillies and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, capable of getting a roomful of hipsters to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" not just once, but twice in the course of the show. Um, and then he rapped?

The rest of my pictures from the night are posted here.

I also did make it out to that Jamie Lidell/Baby Teeth show at the Metro I was pimping a few weeks back, and it was every bit as fantastic as I was expecting. Baby Teeth played a shitload of new material that sounded awesome, and Lidell's band has indeed tightened up since the beginning of their tour in June. And Jamie's voice is just...wow. "Rope of Sand" always kind of gets ruined for me on the album because of those breathy female ah-ahs that get layered in toward the end of the track, but hearing him sing it live just totally destroyed me in the best way possible. There's a certain point at which this guy is just so talented that it's like he's sneezing diamonds. Pics from that show here.

Welcome, Facebookers

2008-10-07T08:30:00.001-05:00

I don't know who linked to me on Facebook, but to those of you who are visiting from behind those garden walls, I say welcome.

New Music, Fall '08

2008-10-05T14:49:00.001-05:00

I really resent the seasons when new music releases start to bottleneck. It makes me hate all my music, makes my music consumption feel like just that--consumption. I'm sucking up album after album, not really liking anything, even when it's stuff by artists I happen to be fond of or admire. My eyes and ears glaze over, and I just keep reflexively hitting "shuffle" on my iPod because I can't bear to make the effort to try to emotionally or intellectually connect with another new album qua album. It usually happens in the late summer, but through whatever trick of scheduling fate, it's hitting me now. So, if you're in the mood for some (mostly) crabby, dismissive, unfair, and kneejerk reviews, read on.

TV on the Radio, Dear Science
Is there anyone on earth who can convince me that this album is actually as good as it (and everyone else) thinks it is? My relationship with TV on the Radio's music is kind of all over the place. I got into them through Cookie Mountain, and I dig the hell out of that album. But then earlier this year, as some of you may remember, I went backward and started listening to Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes a lot, almost accidentally. And it's just so dark and twisted and sexy, esp. in the way that it almost dares you to dismiss it as ugly with its harsh electronic skeletons jutting out all over the place and its slowly maddening water torture beats. Great stuff. And now, though, Dear Science? I was put off by it the first few listens, then felt myself start to relent a little bit, but now I'm back to being hugely skeptical. You know what always snaps me out of my momentary lapses of generosity? When I think to myself: what if Bjork had released this album? A not so small part of me would have died inside. Everyone would have trashed it for being so, so horrible. But because it's TV on the Radio, it seems like we're all trying to will them into being a Big, Important Band through the collective force of our praise. I mean, they're pretty great, but I don't think they're anywhere near to maxing out, or even meeting, their potential yet. (I loved this interview, esp. the bit when the interviewer says, "I demand perfection from this band. I truly believe that they are capable of becoming a great band. Their combinations of genres and influences, their sonics and vocals. They could become like Radiohead." I really kind of agree at this point.) The unfortunate "We Didn't Start the Fire" (nevermind "It's the End of the World As We Know It") chant in "Dancing Choose" just makes me so embarrassed for them. "Family Tree" is just about as un-pretty and uninteresting as a supposedly pretty/meaningful song can get. The fact that they not only built a song around the phrase "shout me out" but also use it as the song's title? Unforgivable. (It just makes me think of that awful MySpace-era phrase that always curdles my blood a bit: the bon mot "hit me up!" Gag.) I give them credit for what they're trying to do with "Lover's Day," but really it just seems like an inferior rewrite of the much more arousing and affecting Desperate Youth album-closer "Wear You Out." "Red Dress" does have some pretty genuinely nice funk to it, and parts of "Halfway Home" (esp. the chorus) are exciting. Mostly, though, this album reminds me a lot of the Decemberists' Picaresque: it sounds exactly like what you'd expect it to sound like, with some high points here and there, while still managing to be deeply boring on the whole. Hopefully they'll give us their equivalent to The Crane Wife the next go round.

AND SPEAKING of the Decemberists, does anybody actually understand what's going on with their new "singles series"? I'm pretty savvy about downloads and the like, but all this multiple version, multiple release date crap just makes me feel old and crabby because I'm finding it impossible to remember what comes out when and when I can gain access to it.

Bound Stems, The Family Afloat
I really like the Bound Stems, and I really like to be able to support a hometown band, and there's nothing...wrong with this album, so I don't know why I'm not loving it more. Maybe I just need to give it time. They've trimmed the stray threads off all the patchwork pieces they cobble together to create their songs, which gives it a bit of a slicker, poppier sheen, belying its complexity. I love all the big, multiple voice singalong parts, and hearing Janie Porche repeatedly coo the title phrase in the context of the relentlessly building "Sugar City Magic" is a really great suckerpunch that left me breathless with emotion on the first listen.

Cold War Kids, Loyalty to Loyalty
I've been an unapologetic Cold War Kids fangirl from the beginning and am pleased as punch on their behalf to see that their upcoming show in Chicago sold out almost instantly (even before I could manage to get a ticket; I haven't been able to see them live since the Hideout in October '06 for this very reason). The songs sound great, though there are no immediate standouts on a par with "Hospital Beds," "We Used to Vacation," or "Hang Me Out to Dry." But, again, it's hard for me to bring myself to put this album on. I'll be scrolling through my iPod, and I'll see it sitting there, just waiting for me, but there's nothing really pushing me over the edge to dig into it. Maybe if it had come out earlier in the summer, in isolation, away from all these other albums clamoring for my attention, I would've been able to get more excited about it.

Kings of Leon, Only by the Night
I know it's deeply uncool to like Kings of Leon, but I just love how barfy they are. I'm willing to be patient with this one a little while longer because it took me quite some time to really hear what Because of the Times was doing. At the outset, though, I'm enjoying it on a shallow level. "Manhattan" is proving to be a standout.

King Sparrow, Derailer EP
Here's another Chicago band, this one pretty new on the scene. I haven't had a chance to hear them live yet, but based on their wonderfully crunchy forthcoming five-song EP, I've already put their November 15 show at the Double Door on my calendar. (Full disclosure: singer/guitarist Eric Georgevich is a pal.) It's refreshing to hear a young band come out of the gate with such a full, confident spectrum of sound--subway rumble bass lines hurtling past scuzzy dump truck drums, gritty guitars playing cat and mouse with splashy, insistent cymbal crashes, while the sweetly melodic tenor vocals curve and twist above it all, like a brightly colored flag planted on top of this whole hill of noise. The songs are pretty immediately ingratiating, with the taut and chugging "Sightseers" (my personal fave so far) opening it all with a bang. Keep your eyes and ears open for these kids!

Thieves of the Night
And, one last one for the Chicagoans. There's no music here, just a must-see promo video that's not even two minutes long. You really should imagine double penetration.

Jamie Lidell + Baby Teeth

2008-09-25T09:32:00.003-05:00

Don't sleep on this, kittens. This shit's gonna be hot.

DFW

2008-09-14T11:00:00.003-05:00

RIP times one million, David Foster Wallace. Not to compare them in the same breath or anything, but between him and Heath Ledger, the amount of potential talent we've lost this year is completely, astonishingly sad. I won't comment or speculate on the circumstances of his death, for mine is not to judge, but I'm super fucking broken up about it. Guess I finally have to get around to reading Infinite Jest now. I wish I could immediately put my hands on a favorite passage from one of his essays to quote here in memoriam, but the breadth of his brilliance makes it hard to come up with a quick few lines off the top of one's head. Please post in the comments if you can come up with anything.

Recent Concert Roundup

2008-09-09T21:28:00.002-05:00

Kittens, I've been to a number of concerts in the past month that, for one reason or another, I haven't had a chance to tell you about yet. Let me do so now.

Early in August I made the last minute decision, prompted by an invite from work pal MS, to catch the She & Him show at the Park West. I hate to get all backlashy about it, esp. given how much I genuinely like that album, but . . . I'm gonna do it anyway. First off, the audience was ridiculous. It's the same problem I had the two times that I've seen Eddie Izzard perform live--everyone there is just a bit too amped to see the celebrity on stage, which skews the energy in the room all out of whack. The performer isn't required to win anyone in the crowd over, which, unless you're, I dunno, Nick Cave or somebody, means you're probably going to pander a bit. Zooey's got an undeniably fine voice (which comes off even better than expected live, despite the fact that she definitely oversings, a la Adele), but with the audience ready to go into ecstasies over every note out of her mouth, she was able to hide behind her charm a bit more than I would have liked. Give the people what they want, I guess.

That being said, I'm convinced that there is no more generous musician working in the loosely defined realm of indie rock right now than Matt Ward. Seriously, you guys, for as enormously talented as the dude is, there seems to be not a shred of ego in him. Even though he's at least 80 percent of the draw, for me, to this group, he was just hanging back at the side of the stage in a truly supporting, one might even say subordinate, role. It's really a beautiful thing to watch him make so much space for Zooey to shine. It's truly a testament to how much he clearly adores her and believes in her talent. And not just her talent, but the talent of all the musicians he's surrounded himself with. I can't remember what the last song before the encore was ("Sweet Darlin'" maybe?), but he pulled his by now familiar leaving-the-stage-before-the song-is-over move, which allowed the band to jam on the outro and receive all the audience's (well deserved) adulation at the end of the song. From anyone else (like, say, Beyonce), it would feel shrewd and bordline manipulative ("it's my spotlight to give and now I will give it to my underlings"), but it always comes off as completely classy with him.

Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond opened and sang backup for most of She & Him's set. Talk about a fucking dynamo! She was totally gorgeous and endearingly batty. With her old timey songs, upscale thrift shop fashion sense, and aw-shucks stage demeanor that was so painfully earnest it felt like there just had to be some wickedness underneath it all, she came across as nothing so much as a burlesque performer minus the striptease. I'm definitely planning on checking in with her Lavender Diamond material.

Later in the month came my favorite musical one-two punch in recent memory: Joanna Newsom performing Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, then Aesop Rock at the Abbey Pub on Saturday. At first blush, of course, they couldn't seem more opposed, but it didn't take long for me to realize how truly complementary they are--two supremely gifted wordsmiths exploding the boundaries of their chosen genres, making slobbering fanboys and -girls out of diehards and casual listeners alike.

As for Joanna at the Symphony Center--what a treat. I find myself returning to Ys in the oddest moments (such as the early morning prep time of my juice fast earlier this summer), and the brilliance of its through-line as a musical/thematic statement was utterly undeniable in a live setting. I just sobbed and sobbed during personal faves "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Cosmia." I paid a little bit of extra money for a better seat with some good sight lines, and, boy, was it ever worth it. I've steadily warmed to her unconventional voice over the past few years and will now officially no longer hold truck with anyone who talks smack about it. There's just everything a person could want in a vocalist there: warmth, character, spirit, sensitivity, not to mention killer intonation.

Aside from the overhwhelming brilliance and clarity of the CSO buoying her throughout the performance of Ys, she also brought along four other musicians who contributed to those songs, then accompanied her on a bunch of stuff from The Milk-Eyed Mender, as well as some more recent material, after a brief intermission. Drummer Neal Morgan particularly blew me away for his ability to get more music out of a kick drum, floor tom, and some cymbals than I've seen a lot of jackasses get out of a full guitar rig. Plus, he plays barefoot in a three-piece suit, which is, OMG, like totes adorable in its twee mash-up of high-brow earthiness. I also couldn't help but smile at the thought that this was probably the first time out at Symphony Center for a lot of the greasy haired indie rock kids in attendance, which has to count for something.

Aesop totally lit me on fire the next night. The fact that he performed "Fumes" would have been enough to make the show worthwhile in itself (remember those 27 perfect songs with a five-star rating? yeah, that's one of 'em), but dude is such an amazingly magnetic performer it would be hard to overstate just how enjoyable he is to watch. (Plus also, tall.) The genius of his lyrics, the sly, twisty sophistication of his character sketches and narratives, and the devastating sexiness of the soda-pop fizz in his voice all hardly need to be mentioned, but I just couldn't get over how much fire he puts into his physical performance on stage. (Check out my pictures from the night and hopefully you'll see a bit of what I mean.) On the basis of the crowd's reaction, I was definitely one of the few neophytes there. Everybody was loving the stuff off None Shall Pass, without question, but the place really went bonkers whenever he started spitting rhymes from the previous two albums, with call-and-response all over the place, no matter how intricate the syntax and meter. I've also acquired new artwork for the apartment, which always makes me happy.

Oh. I also went to a wedding. And it was fucking awesome.

This Just In: I'm Full of Shit!

2008-08-28T20:49:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm willing to eat my words here: Shearwater's Rook is an incredible album. I kind of hate the term 'grower', but that's clearly what it is. I just needed to learn the contours of the music better before I really could hear what it's doing. I've been listening to it a lot these past few days, and it's fucking epic. The piano lines sound, in places, like EST (RIP!), the guitar lines churn like Lake Michigan in a thunderstorm, and the little spikes of various reed instruments throughout give me tingles. All that being said, however, I still do think Meiburg over relies on his falsetto. I just have trouble with the preciousness of it. Trouble is, I get the sense that he thinks it's one of his selling points as a singer/musician, that he thinks he's really bowling us over when he pulls it out. But, I just don't hear it as an instrument in the same way, say, Justin Vernon's is. When Vernon uses his, I hear genuine pain. When Meiburg uses his, I hear an overeducated young man emoting with maximum self-consciousness. Meiburg's a very fine singer; his full-throated howls are resonant and exciting. But there's something slightly, unfortunately one-dimensional about his falsetto, kind of like getting out of the pool and wrapping yourself in a soggy towel. But anyway. I'm glad to have been proven wrong about the album; it's become a good companion for me (esp. with my previously mentioned fetish for listening to a full tracklisting in one sitting on the train in the morning).

Oh yes, and how about the Walkmen's new one? I didn't have my hate on for A Hundred Miles Off the way a lot of folks did, but I, weirdly, appreciate it even more now for the way it seems like such a clear dress rehearsal for the more mature, refined, almost elegant sound they've got going on with You & Me. Their talent for cracking open their albums with tightly coiled menace and desire continues unabated; "Donde Esta La Playa" instantly made me go "woah, hold on a second here..." when it first came rumbling into my headphones. That combination of the midnight bebop perambulations of Barrick's drums and the saline midrange of the beyond-mellow organ is the doorway to exactly the kind of sound and exactly the kind of songs the Walkmen have always meant to be playing and writing. This might prove to be a career-definer for 'em.

Other recent highlights from my personal Class of '03? Well, the fucking Stills, OK? They're such a superlative B+ band. It is an uncomplicated affection I have for them! I just like Tim Fletcher's voice and find their rhythm section consistently inventive.

The Nines

2008-08-22T14:09:00.001-05:00

Remember the first couple times you saw Pulp Fiction in high school and you had a bunch of pseudo-philosophical conversations with your friends afterward discussing the possible theories of What Was in the Briefcase and Why Marcellus Wallace Wore the Bandage on His Neck? Well, imagine if someone took a composite of all those conversations and turned them into a feature-length movie, and you'd be pretty close to the experience of watching The Nines. Lowbrow, Hollywood-insidery, vaguely meta, self-consciously straining to be a Donnie Darko-esque mindfuck, and ridiculously yet sophomorically pretentious--this movie is a veritable Arthur Murray instruction manual of post-Tarantino cinematic missteps.

Kittens, this movie is a mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I found myself inexplicably delighted by it anyway. Maybe it was the sheer joy of having a free night at home alone to watch some piece of shit DVD on my couch in my jammies with a glass of booze in hand or maybe it's because it reminded me a bit of my old fave Dead Again (which I haven't seen in ages but am pretty sure I'd despise if I saw it for the first time now), but I just couldn't bring myself to get too riled up by it, despite the fact that it continued to go exactly in all the most obnoxious directions I was mentally begging it not to go. Even though it was missing the erotic Eurotrash patina that usually distinguishes these horrible train wrecks I find so fascinating, I think it also was reminding me of movies like The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Birthday Girl in the way that it was committing with poker-faced abandon to the insanity of its own attempt at a distinct internal logic.

It was also buoyed by a really remarkable, well-chosen cast and a superb series of performances from Ryan Reynolds. Is he the North American Jason Statham? Or is he the Ryan Gosling of B-movies? Either way, the smartest thing The Nines does is begin with Reynolds in character as a hot, cocky, drug-addled TV star on a bender--which is to say, a persona akin to how you probably think of the real-life Ryan Reynolds, if you think about him at all. Then the movie shifts into its second layer of narrative and he appears as a gay screenwriter trying to get a new TV pilot on the air, and damn if the genuine subtlety and range he shows all of a sudden doesn't completely upend how you'd just mentally oriented yourself to the world of this movie and your perceptions of his talent (or lack thereof). I'm absolutely sure this must have been an intentional choice, very much of a piece with the film's whole theme of questioning/destabilizing how well you truly know yourself and the people closest to you in your life. Like I say, it's probably the smartest thing the movie does over its 99-minute running time. The character is apparently based, loosely autobiographically, on writer/director John August, so who knows how much of the performance is just an impression, but I'm not sure how much that matters to me, especially given that Reynolds goes one further in the third and final vignette and shows a real, sweet gentleness as the bearded video game-designer dad.

The movie simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in its attempt to use Melissa McCarthy to make some sort of comment on perceptions of weight in Hollywood and society, but hey, a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role is still a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role, so I'm not inclined to complain too much. The perennially underused Hope Davis is also a welcome presence.

I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Go but had a lot of problems with the insipid daddy issues and faux-profundity about "storytelling" in Big Fish (two of the most prominent features previously written by August), and it's amazing how much The Nines feels like the exact intersection between the two (with a few heaping tablespoons of Soderbergh's incredibly irritating Full Frontal thrown in for good measure). So, little wonder, then, that I found myself drawn in and repulsed by it in equal measure. For better or worse, though, I kind of can't get it out of my head today, which I always, ultimately, take as a good sign.

Also, koalas are telepathic and control the weather. Best throwaway line this side of Spike's bitchy, sotto voce sneers in Buffy.

False Musical Memories

2008-08-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

Obviously, I know that, to some extent, everybody associates certain music with certain specific times of their lives. But does anybody else have false musical memories? Everytime I listen to Death Cab's "We Laugh Indoors" (and, to a lesser degree, "A Movie Script Ending") I'm all, "oh yes, this takes me right back to that fall I spent with Holly in Seattle." Except I totally wasn't listening to that album at least until three years later. What the hell, Gibbard? Way to distill the exact emotional and experiential tenor of the Pacific Northwest and write it directly into the spaces in and around your songs. The same goes for pretty much the entirety of the Clientele's Strange Geometry, which feels so much like the summer I spent studying abroad in London during college that I can all but smell the pee and exhaust fumes from the Underground when I listen to it on my iPod. That album came to me in the dead-freezing cold of January 2006, so, again, I have no idea how the combination of Alasdair MacLean's songwriting and the muted haziness of the production in general can evoke my wistful, romanticized, undergraduate's sense of London so uncannily. I'm thankful for it, though. It's nice to be approached and kind of waved at by one's own past in these unexpected places.

Kids, I hope you're not sleeping on the Kills' Midnight Boom this year. It came out in March, and now that I've been living with it for a few weeks, I'm lamenting that I didn't pick it up sooner. It's so ballsy and smart and sexy. I want to get the lyrics to "Cheap and Cheerful" tattooed down the length of my torso: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring, baby, when you're straight / I want you to be crazy 'cause you're stupid, baby, when you're sane."

On the total other end of the spectrum, Adele's 19 (thanks again for the rec, Giddy) has an amusing way of turning my life into some kind of Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy every time I listen to it. Something about the sound of a British soul singer crooning over tastefully produced horns, I guess. She oversings like mad, but there's such a purity in it, like she's just discovered what she can do with her voice and is hollering at the top of her lungs to keep herself company. The fact, too, that pretty much all her songs are about being lonely but hopeful about love is hitting me in just the right places in the moments when I need that squishy kind of reassurance and commiseration. Plus, if one has to make a Britney-vs-Christina choice between her and Duffy, well, give me the cute chubby girl any day of the week.

Awesome Things About Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea...

2008-08-10T21:39:00.003-05:00

...that have nothing to do with the music:

That Lalitree Darnielle photo of Dave Berman on the back of the CD case. I love concert photography, and I love photos of people looking happy. Double word score.

"Just put your fingertips on the polar bear noses + strum."

The fact that it's only 33 minutes long means that I can listen to the entire album during my commute in the morning. Music nerd OCD.

Radiohead, Live at Lollapalooza

2008-08-03T21:20:00.001-05:00

No less than the best concert I've ever been to.

I know I tend to be the little boy who cried wolf of hyperbole, but you guys gotta take my word on this one. It was incredible. Magical. Transcendent. I almost can't talk about how good it was.

I was certainly digging it for the first four or five songs (S'gum's got the setlist) but wasn't feeling terribly transported and thought, since this was my first time ever seeing them in concert, maybe reports of their live chops were vastly overrated or that maybe I was simply expecting too much. But then they played "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," which started me on an emotional roller coaster similar to the one I experienced two weeks ago during Bon Iver's set at Pitchfork, where my personal emotional associations with the song melded with whatever groove the band was finally settling into, and then I just bubbled over into full-on fangirl freakout mode for the remaining hour and a half. The band achieved liftoff at that point as far as I'm concerned, kittens. How does one band manage to be so perfect? They're not doing anything, really, but, in that, they're doing everything. It's spectacle without hokum, virtuosity without undue pretension.

Of all the songs to bring me to tears, I started crying during "No Surprises." Not quite sure why, other than that it's so damn pretty, and, circumstantially, that I found it incredibly sweet that a bunch of people in the crowd were evidently also moved enough to start pulling out their lighters. Not really being a sports fan, and not being so politically active that I go to too many protests or rallies, it's easy for me to forget the power there is in being part of such an enormous group of people focusing all their attention and positive energy on one thing, at the same moment in time. The crowd was totally squirrelly before and after the set, but I gotta give credit, at least in my small little patch of the field, to everyone for honestly, enthusiastically, and basically politely engaging with the music and the performance while it was happening. And as that song was ending and I was wiping my eyes, I heard some dude near me exhale kind of dreamily, "the city looks really great tonight," which totally choked me up all over again.

I haven't even mentioned yet the most remarkable part of the night: the fireworks display that started up at the beginning of "Everything in Its Right Place" and then peaked during the big swell in the middle of "Fake Plastic Trees." Apparently the fireworks were connected to some other event going on over at Soldier Field, but the effect couldn't have been more magical if it had been intentional. The crowd flipped out. I started laughing, and then crying a little again, and then laughing some more, and just couldn't stop. Pure, pure joy and wonderment. I absolutely couldn't, and kind of still can't, believe that I was lucky enough to be there, to be a part of such an amazing moment.

And lucky is indeed the word for it--I didn't pay a cent for the pleasure of any of this. I hadn't bought tickets in advance, preferring instead to take my chances on the street and see what I could get from a scalper beforehand. As I was scoping out the territory, though, I totally coincidentally ran into my boy Tito and his brother as they were getting ready to enter the park with their wristbands. Once inside, Tito slipped his off and sent his brother back out to give it to me. We made it inside with no trouble at all. Those of you who know him (and to know him is to love him, as they say) will of course not be surprised that Tito insisted the only thing I owed him for it was a hug.

Before Radiohead went on, we caught Bloc Party's set. Which, yes, hilariously, makes this the third time I've, basically accidentally, seen them live. Other bands I've seen live three times? The Long Winters, the Divine Comedy, the Decemberists, the National, Andrew Bird, Laura Veirs...in other words, my favorite artists. Apparently Bloc Party is my indie rock equivalent of 10 Things I Hate About You, ie, something I now have a reluctant and slightly guilty fondness for because I get sucked into it anytime it's on/around. I mean, I'm not sure when "This Modern Love" became my jam, but fuck if my heart didn't start racing a bit when they kicked into that little rocking horse intro. What a gorgeous and affecting song. They were playing with a replacement bassist, which was slightly unfortunate since their rhythm section is so unbelievably tight, but I guess I can allow it since Gordon Moakes was back home in England with his parter, who was having a baby.

I wished I could have heard more of Grizzly Bear when we arrived at the park, esp. given that they debuted a bunch of new material, but what I could hear as we were headed across the grounds sounded fabulous. Likewise Malkmus/Jicks, who played between Bloc Party and Radiohead, on the most immediately adjacent stage, just barely within earshot. At least I got to hear a couple snippets of "Gardenia" on the wind.

The Dark Knight and Bloggy Updates

2008-07-28T14:49:00.002-05:00

And now for the least essential film review ever written: The Dark Knight was great. Heath Ledger was great, Aaron Eckhart was great, Christian Bale was great, Maggie Gyllenhaal was great, Gary Oldman was great, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine were great, Christopher Nolan's direction is great, Chicago-as-Gotham looks great (there's a bunch of stuff that was shot on Franklin just south of my office, which is great). I got a leeetle fatigued with all the high-stakes ultimatums and apocalypses toward the end (srsly, how many times can you ratchet up that tension before it starts feeling like crying wolf?), and I wasn't having seventeen orgasms by the time the credits rolled like I thought I might, but those are relatively minor complaints in the grand scheme of its overall greatness. The hugeness of Ledger's Joker could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but he was really swinging for the fences and somehow made it all work, spectacularly. The scene where he escapes from prison in the cop car and leans his head out the window into the night air has got to be one of the most strikingly beautiful moments I've seen in a movie in a long time. It's also amazing to me, as I said to moviegoing companions M&M afterward, how much acting Bale manages to do through that mask and suit; I'm thinking here particularly of the scene in the interrogation room, with all that coiled rage and intensity apparently being projected purely through his nose holes.

And hey, how 'bout that Quantum of Solace preview? Hot diggity damn. I laughed out loud at that series of shots with Daniel Craig walking up over the horizon line. So completely badass.

Inspired by a recent Rocket Report posting, I've made quite a few long-overdue additions to my blogroll at left that, as the sidebar header suggests, would be well worth your time. I draw your attention to

* 807nica, a journal from former work pal Erin, newly minted as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua

* the genius that is current work pal Pam's LJ creamsnake (her post from February about kittens in vases, drunk dials from first-ever boyfriends, and the fashion of Larry Sanders is still one of my favorite things on the internet ever)

* Shawn's forty-third, by my (exaggerated) count, blog, eat! drink! snack!, which I love unreservedly for the way this seemingly silly rubric of reporting on his snack food consumption allows him to muse pithily on all manner of tangentially related topics

* my girl Megs at Jonesalicious in Boston (and soon Germany)

* Bushman's Tumblr, Not from Texas, to tide you over until he gets back to posting at his redesigned main site

* the estimable photographer, rock enthusiast, and Chicago-based world traveler Sid at Too Much Rock (though not explicitly linked, be sure to also check out his Flickr page, too).

Pitchfork Music Festival 2008

2008-07-24T00:40:00.006-05:00

Is it fair to say that this was the most enjoyable Pitchfork Music Festival for me yet? Well, whether it's fair to say, or even true, I'm gonna say it. This was the most enjoyable Pitchfork for me yet. I gotta believe that not having super-high expectations for any acts that I was dying to see probably helped, as it allowed me to just kind of peacefully float through the park and catch what I fancied catching at any given moment over the course of the three days. Being in the moment tends to yield pretty high returns, y'know?

That being said, I feel like this was also the first year that there was too much good stuff going on--enough so that I had to make some hard choices about what to miss. And it's not like I wasn't pretty diligently on my feet for most of the weekend. Yet I didn't see any of Les Savy Fav, Spiritualized, Atlas Sound, or Chicago faves the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, I only caught the last few minutes of Dizzee Rascal's set (but managed to take some of my favorite photos of the fest while I was there), I was entirely too tired to fight my way into any position to catch Dinosaur Jr. on Sunday night, and I didn't really make any OMG new discoveries like I did last year with Jamie Lidell. Not to mention that I completely missed a bunch of impromptu shit like King Khan giving away ice cream and Tim Harrington giving $2 haircuts. But, I did Just Say No to the mud. (Well, as best I could.)

On to the music!

For the second year in a row, the Friday night ATP/Don't Look Back thing was the least essential portion of the festival for me, mainly because I didn't grow up listening to any of the three featured albums and hence have no real emotional attachment to them. Which is actually a pretty good test, I think, for how well they, or the groups in question, hold up. Does the music translate to someone not listening to it through a haze of nostalgia (or a haze of expectations, depending)? For the most part, yes. Mission of Burma killed it, just motherfucking nailed that shit to the wall, setting a weekend-long precedent for me of preferring the older, more established bands on the roster to the sexy young guns. Sebadoh utterly bored me to tears; it seems even they realized there was no reason for them to have been playing the gig. They just kind of shuffled and stammered through the tracklist, basically apologizing for taking up so much time. Public Enemy made me wanna fight the power, though, man. Plus, I always love watching dudes in the crowd flip out during hip-hop shows. There was a gaggle of guys of all different races around me shouting along to every lyric and affirming back everything Chuck D said. Flavor Flav was totally insane, but it's hard not to appreciate his sincerity when he cops to the fact that, even though he's all embroiled in the reality TV thing right now, Public Enemy will always be his first and only love.

One of the very few moments of legitimate panic I had all weekend was worrying if public transportation would get me to Union Park on Saturday afternoon in time for any part of Caribou's set. I know I'd just seen them a few months ago, but, based on how much I loved that show, and how much I've been obsessing over The Milk of Human Kindness since then, I needed to see them again. Fortunately, I got there for about half the set (after the rain ended), and boy was it worth it. I don't know what it is about this band, but they have something special going on. The melodies, the rhythms, the song structures, the trippy but also krautrocky vibe--they're just doing everything right, and right on the money, with humility, but workmanlike pride in a job well done, too. Dan Snaith is totes my new indie rock boyfriend.

It was something of a decisive moment for me after Caribou's set when I decided, fuck the Fleet Foxes. I think I'm a bit more susceptible to hype, in general, than I'd like to be, but I just decided I couldn't be arsed. Um, instead, I decided to succumb to hype on the other end of the spectrum and headed to the third stage for Fuck Buttons. Maybe I was just hoping to recapture the feeling of seeing them open for Caribou in April, or pay homage to how important that night was for me or whatever, but even if I was, they utterly surpassed my memory of that springtime show. How did they manage to do that in the middle of the day, in an open field, while I was totally sober? I don't know, but it was transcendent. The clouds even broke for a while in the middle of the set. The band is 100 percent cool, but somehow the experience of their music leaves no room for cool on the receiving end. You're either into that shit or you're not. It was delicious just to give in to it. That gauzy electronic thrum will totally envelop you if you let it, will dissolve you in the moment. It also helped that the audience was great--they cheered for every mood change, tempo shift, and distorto bass assault. It was totally inspiring.

Vampire Weekend was fine and all; it would be backlashy of me to kvetch too much about them. Esp. considering that, whether the humor is intentional or not, I don't think most people give them credit for being as funny as they are. There's a part of me that reads their whole snot-nosed, uber-privileged east coast shtick as total performance art. This Marathonpacks post on the band from last fall is about a million percent smarter and more on-point than anything I have to say here, but Eric's description in the first paragraph of how "Ezra Koenig fondly remembered the last time the band came to our fair college town" makes me giggle with glee when I think about the sniffly disdain (if not outright rage) that the band has inspired in various and sundry internet folks. Anyone who's going to get their classist panties in a twist about this freakin' band of all things probably deserves the high blood pressure. We're all indie as fuck now, and the decision to dress their career up in polos and wry collegiate charm is, depending on how you look at it, maybe one of the most punk rock moves they could have made. Which, even if most of the crowd wasn't as tickled by it as I am, is at least is registering at some level. Ezra was going into some spiel before playing "M79," inviting us to shout along with that "whoooah!" bit, and some kid standing near me kind of jokingly mused, "there's a lotta rules with these guys" and some other guy shot back, "that's because they went to school." That killed me. At any rate, they took the tempo on "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" down a few clicks, which served its lecherous preppy beach house vibe well, and I was entertained by how physically their bassist plays.

I thought maybe I was kind of over the Hold Steady, but...nope. Still fun to the max. I love that Craig Finn and Franz Nicolay seem to be actively competing for the honor of being the biggest fan of their own band, and I forgot how much the "how'm I s'posed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?" line in "Chips Ahoy!" always sucker punches me in the throat. In a weird way, their performance reminded me a lot of what I love most about seeing hip-hop sets at big festival shows like this--there's a million different, equally entertaining people running around on stage, they have the chops to fill the space to its utmost with physical grandstanding and noise, and there's a generous sense of inclusiveness looping like a Mobius strip between the band and the fans. I like this group an awful lot, but wouldn't call myself a superfan to any extent, yet when Finn ends the show by singing, "we're all the Hold Steady," I kinda feel like, "yeah! I am part of the life of this band and this experience right now; thanks for noticing and acknowledging it." It's such an easy trick, but it's a good one. And it works.

Ah, Jarvis. I don't know his--how you say--oeuvre well at all, but I was transfixed the entire time he was on stage. I had a really great sight line, thanks to a tallish Bettie Page look-alike photographer who insisted I stand in front of her (thanks, Bettie!), and used it to my advantage to take a slew of pictures. It's so nice to feel, as an audience member, that you're in the hands of a truly capable performer. Every move he made all night was fascinating, whether it was a knowingly lascivious hip swirl or simply telling a story about pre-concert anxiety dreams. There's a warmth and a professionalism in what he does that seems to stem from the perfect combination of experience and the fact that he's just a born performer. A rare treat indeed in the realm of (loosely defined) indie rock.

And then there was the sheer audacity of an Animal Collective headlining set. People, Animal Collective are not a headlining band. But...the fact that they were billed as such anyway completely delighted me with its perversity. The audience may have been actively digging it closer to the front, but back where I was standing, there was a palpable air of "huh?" in the crowd. "Do we dance to this? What's going on? How am I supposed to interact with this?" No matter--it was the perfect music at the perfect time as far I was concerned. Their songs felt like the night air, kind of drowsy and thick with a beguiling combination of leftover warmth and breezy, clammy cool. I involuntarily shouted "holy shit!" when that huge, massed chorus effect announced the beginnings of "Comfy in Nautica"; any other band, I probably would have been disappointed and merciless about the fact that Panda's vocals were more than a bit flat on the upper end, but I could not have given less of a fuck in that moment. Not to mention that I went utterly apeshit-level bonkers when they played "Peacebone." That song has got to rival "Hey Ya!" for being way less easy to dance to than you think it is, but I gave it my all anyway. (Um, there was much bouncing involved? I believe I waggled my arms above my head a few times?) Some angel somewhere near the park actually shot off a little spray of fireworks during "Fireworks," and I was deeply touched by the fact that Avey ended the song with two repetitions of the "you're only what I see sometimes" line instead of going back to "I'm only all I see sometimes" like he does in the album version of the track. Even if it was just a simple lyric bobble, I don't care. That's one of the key lyrical transformations in one of my favorite songs of the past five years (it's one of only 27 MP3s in my entire iTunes library currently designated with a five-star "perfect song" rating) and hearing it that way warmed me all over like a good shot of whiskey. To make the set even more special, who, of the hundreds of people crammed into the park at that point, should walk directly past me during one of the low-key droney moments but Dan Snaith. I kind of grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted that I really enjoyed his set from earlier in the day, and he thanked me and gave the most comically broad and good-naturedly dorked-out Canadian grin he could muster. A personal festival highlight, for sure.

"How was church? How many people here went to church this morning?" Times New Viking's drummer Adam Elliott asked us first thing Sunday afternoon. The fact that he plays sitting on a brown wooden folding chair, like the kind you might find in a church rec room somewhere, instead of on a regular old drum throne, gave the question a weird sincerity, in a way, before he careened into another Mark E. Smith-esque introduction to "pop song-ah numbah two!" Out from underneath the blanket of aggressively, intentionally disgusting sound quality that I've learned to love on their album, it was easier than ever to hear why they might very deliberately term their music "pop songs." And if my ears hadn't noticed it, I'd hope that the little bunch of daffodils sitting on the beat-up kick drum would have clued me into it eventually. What a perfect visual complement to the essence of this band's charm.

Dirty Projectors were all kinds of great, with a downright scary level of musical talent on stage. But, between the complexity of all the crazy-ass polyrhythms and finger-picking and hairsbreadth-tight harmonies, um, it's kind of no wonder that they're ever so slightly lacking in charisma. Maybe the indie rock master class vibe comes across better indoors, during a longer set? Regardless, Longstreth is like this beautiful Afrobeat-influenced ostrich and his bassist and other guitar player are totally foxy, so...there's that.

There's been a lot of hype surrounding King Khan online in the days since the fest, and he deserves every bit of it. All I can say is buh-nanas. He absolutely gave the performance that Jamie Lidell wanted to give at the Abbey Pub earlier this year. Khan isn't as gifted vocally (or perhaps even as musically) as Lidell, but the barn-burning stage show he cobbled together here was the spirit and genius of pure rock and roll stupidity. And, not to take away anything from his skill as a band leader and performer, but why aren't more people doing this? Even though it requires a largish band (horns + rhythm section + backup dancer and whatnot), the I-IV-V chord progressions are the kind of shit that these guys have been playing their entire lives, so the changes would be easy to pick up and easy to put 100% passion into at more or less a moment's notice. Like I said, Khan's great and all, but this kind of throwbacky, 1950s comic book version of rock and roll seems ripe for reviving on a larger scale. I mean, by the second song, he already had us picking trash up off the ground and flinging it all over the place. There's just nobody out there right now capitalizing on the essentially dirty, juvenile underpinnings of rock music like that. What's more, the audience totally knew how to handle it and took it in the spirit of joy and celebration, like throwing confetti. I was laughing so hard and loving it so much. And when he ended the show with a gospel-style rant, seemingly largely improvised, about crawling up inside of his woman while they were making love--"I pulled my leg in! And I pulled my other leg in! But I took mah shoes off because Indian people alllllways take their shoes off before they do somethin' holy!"--I was fairly convinced that I'd just seen something very, very special.

The Dodos were the weekend's big exception to my 'older is better' rule. Which I'm pretty sure is because they played with a mature kind of confidence and self-awareness (in the best possible sense of the word) that I just wasn't seeing in any of the other younger bands. Obviously, because they're a two-piece (with a Bob Mapplethorpe look-alike occasionally popping up as a third member to bang on a trash can), it's probably easier for them to adapt their set-up to different stage sizes and shapes, but they were really smart to push their gear all the way down front to minimize the dead air space as much as possible between them and the crowd. They also totally availed themselves of the volume levels at their disposal in a festival-grade sound system, which, again, is an important thing for a two-piece that's basically just guitar and drums to be aware of, but there was a vitality and urgency to it that seemed somehow really fresh and surprising. Being pummeled by the sound in that way got me moving and dancing way more than I thought I would during their set--after all, this is music that I've been emotionally associating with taking quiet, melancholy walks by myself around the neighborhood--which, y'know, is never exactly the worst way to heighten feelings of goodwill toward a band. Mostly I was just proud of them for bringing it. They got promoted to one of the main stages, and they definitely made sure they earned it with plenty of mojo to spare. Plus, they make ridiculous faces while they play, which makes them super-fun to photograph.

M. Ward. Le sigh. I love this man. What more can I say? He looked truly pleased to be playing throughout his entire, pitch-perfect set, his band was ace (was that the estimable Rachel Blumberg on drums? does anybody know?), and if the beefier, more rocked-up sound of all those wonderful songs from Post-War are any indication of what he's going to be doing with his next solo album, I'll be one very happy kitten indeed.

The side stage area was packed for Bon Iver, and I felt super-conflicted about actually remaining there in the throng. Honestly, I didn't really want to. When I managed to weasel my way down near the front but then got crammed in at a bad angle behind a bunch of tall people, that was pretty much the only other moment of panic I experienced after nearly missing Caribou. It was a delightful little stew of panic, too: of panic for my basic personal safety (I was feeling quite claustrophobic) and panic that I was going to miss 'seeing' the show that I was suffering for. Pretty much the only thing that kept me there was a sense of duty toward the album that's shaping up to be my favorite of '08. And it's not that I begrudge him his popularity at all; the album's a true stunner and worthy of the insane flights of adulation it inspires. It's just that weird, uncomfortable conflict of holding this bedroom-intimate music so close to your heart and then being forced to acknowledge in the harsh light of day, "oh wait, all these annoying people like this music too." My relative discontent with the experience wasn't helped by an overly muddy and bass-heavy sound mix that just didn't serve the spindly grace of these songs at all. And yet--I still wept during the sing-along part of "The Wolves (Act I and II)." Going into his customary request that we chime in for the "what might have been lost" swell, he said, "the song doesn't just feature you, it needs you. We need you" which pushed all my sensitive, communal inclusiveness buttons right off that bat, and then, once we all started to sing together, I took out my earplugs for the first time all weekend. I wanted my ears to be just totally blown out by the moment, I wanted to feel consumed and obliterated, shattered into little molecules by the song, by the voices around me, by the sound of my own voice lost in the middle of it all. I also felt it was a fitting offering to make in exchange for all the comfort this music has brought me this year. I'm not going to say that catharsis was worth the hassle of fighting the crowd, but it sure felt good and it sure proved Bon Iver's resilience and strength for the way they can reach up through such a quantity of bullshit to still genuinely touch people after many months of nearly continuous repetition of the same material.

The Spoonsters sounded great and gave a much more muscular and robust show than the one I saw, for all its setlist-associated merits, last year at the Riv. Even as a pretty huge fan, though, I have to admit that a Spoon show is probably never going to change anybody's life. Professionalism has its place, of course, it's wonderful to hear their songs played live, they've had beautiful lights the past couple times I've seen them, they know just when and how to pull out a crack horn section...I just wish that everything about them excited me as much as those albums do. Those albums make me want to run around flapping my arms like a chicken and depants perfect strangers on the street and stub my toe as hard as possible on a fire hydrant. Their shows make me want to shake somebody's hand and comment obsequiously about some random local microbrew and tie a double-knot in my tennis shoes. Ah well. That being said, though, if you're one of those fans of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga that still doesn't get what "The Ghost of You Lingers" is doing on there, I would strongly urge you to find a way to hear them play it live. (To tide you over for the time being, you can check out the track on their Daytrotter session.) That song absolutely soars in live performance, which, given everything I've just said, is pretty funny and ironic considering how relatively (stereotypically) un-Spoonlike it is. No wonder it's turning out to be one of my favorite new songs. Maybe they'll get my arms flapping like a chicken yet.

So there you have it, kittens! The rest of my photos are here (and, I have to say, my new camera was definitely MVP this weekend; I think that thing would make me toast in the morning if I asked it to). I hope you've been tending to your sunburns and rinsing all the mud out of your socks and getting yourself geared up for next year. It always comes around sooner than you think. Which, when it comes right down to it, is kind of never soon enough.

WALL-E, Pavement, Muxtape, & Whedon

2008-07-14T22:49:00.002-05:00

Hey, WALL-E, way to be the best movie I've seen so far this year.

Wow, guys, I have nothing to say about the film that hasn't already been said better elsewhere, but, yeah. It's amazing. I kind of can't believe it actually got made. I was blown away by how deeply cynical it was (kittens, contra Kung Fu Panda, this is how you deal with obesity in a cartoon!) and thought the use of Hello, Dolly! throughout was inspired. There is no other praise but to urge everyone who hasn't seen it yet to do so posthaste.

OK, I give up, I guess I like Pavement now. I don't know if it's just a function of having been listening to (and loving) Real Emotional Trash all spring, but something clicked a couple weeks ago and I started to feel actively compelled to listen to Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Maybe I've been trying too hard to like them all along instead of, y'know, just liking them? First relenting with Wilco, now Pavement; can the Fiery Furnaces be far behind? (Erm, don't count on it.)

I realize I've been talking a lot about specific songs lately, so I took the opportunity to update my Muxtape with 11 songs I've mentioned directly or indirectly in the past two months and one song I haven't: King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner." The only reason it hasn't been mentioned yet is that I just downloaded it this weekend, and it's killing me right now. This song could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but his vocal performance sells the hell out of it. There's an itchy, exuberant franticness to it that doesn't make me doubt for an instant that he loves her! He loves her! He really, really loves her!

Also, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (via)?! Why am I just learning about this today? Think of all the idle moments I could have been wasting anticipating this if I'd known about it sooner!

Things That Make Me Happy

2008-07-06T21:09:00.001-05:00

The line in "My Favorite Year" on Trouble in Dreams when Dan Bejar sings "in some small way we're all traitors to our own cause." ::shivers:: I love this line. Both because it's, um, true, and also because it's such an honest and meta-fantastic description of Bejar's own working methods, especially on this album--he's so pessimistic about rock music and yet can craft a rock song that, while not completely undermining that pessimism, still has the kind of really good, gushy feeling you get from a classic, sturdy, solid song you've been listening to all your life. I look forward to hearing him spit that line the way I always look forward to hearing Ben Gibbard sing "I wish the world was flat like the old days / then I could travel just by holding a map / no more airplanes or speed-trains or freeway / there'd be no distance that could hold us back" at the beginning of Transatlanticism.

And speaking of Death Cab--I love that little tic in Gibbard's songwriting technique where his melody lines and lyrics run so long that they almost tip off the end of the bar. I'm thinking specifically here of "I Will Possess Your Heart" and its opening lines "How I wish you could see the potential / the potential of you and me / it's like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can't read just yet." It's that little "just yet" spillover that kills me, the same way his "it varies from season to season, kid" in "Why You'd Want to Live Here" does. I dunno what it is. It's kind of like, in the same way that CTLA and I have theorized that the reason why Colin Meloy's diction is so chewed is because he loves language so much that he's trying to sing all vowels simultaneously at all times, Gibbard's so enamored of his own talent for effortlessly elegant melody that he can't help trying to cram as much into every song as he possibly can.

Deadwood fans, sometimes I'll just quietly think to myself "Hang dai, fuckin' Wu--hang dai" and grin like a complete idiot for the next hour and a half.

Important Things I Learned Today

2008-07-01T21:09:00.003-05:00

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream (But That's Only Because the Earth Itself Is Screaming Louder than You Could Possibly Ever Scream, Like That One Baby in the Grocery Store, OMG, It's Burning My Ears).

Montgomery, Alabama's, minor league baseball team is called the Montgomery Biscuits.

The Long Winters are going to appear on that Huey Lewis comp Are You Still with Me?! when/if it ever sees the light of day. (In the meantime, check out Throw Me the Statue's superb take on "If This Is It.") This whole ball of wax makes me happy x one million.

Musical Thoughts

2008-06-23T09:27:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to a shitload of new music lately, kittens. So much so I can barely keep it all straight in my head.

I only brought one mix CD along with me to my long weekend in Santa Fe for use in the rental car, so, wary of growing bored with it too quickly, I picked up a copy of Death Cab's new one, Narrow Stairs. Honestly, I can't even tell if they're a good band anymore--I'm going to tend to like what they do because I tend to like the sonic palette they use and they tend to keep using it. Simple as that. It's definitely more of a piece with Plans than it is any of their pre-major label stuff in that the production's exceedingly glossy (without being soulless) and any angst it contains isn't congealing so obviously on the surface anymore. There are no real clunkers--except maybe "Talking Bird"--the band is tight as ever (Jason McGerr: MVP), and Gibbard's tenor is starting to acquire some butteriness where it used to be all citrus. Whatever the album's charms may be, though, they were magnified exponentially for me through the concentrated repetition, nearly subliminal absorption, and heightened emotional receptivity peculiar to being in a car for several hours at a stretch, listening to the same thing on repeat--a pleasure I haven't enjoyed for a very long time. I really don't think I would have given the album that much of a chance to grow on me if it hadn't been for those circumstances. At least two of my all-time top-five favorite albums ascended to that ranking the same way, so...draw what conclusions from that you will.

Apropos of bands whose sonic palettes I tend to like, I'm slightly shocked by how much I'm actually not liking Shearwater's Rook. Maybe I just need to live with it some more, but, based on the way everybody talks and blogs about this band, I thought it would be an instant love affair--the sweeping emotion, the big dramatic swells, all the bird imagery. And yet...not so much. I'm tremendously bugged by Meiburg's falsetto, which he uses to signify importance way too often, when it's his full-on chest voice I find most affecting.

The new Raconteurs album has been a pleasant surprise after just a few spins. (Thanks, Chanesaw.) These guys could've just crapped out another album on par with Broken Boy Soldiers (which is to say, pleasant enough but ultimately unremarkable and unmemorable), but you can hear the sound of honest-to-God ambition on Consolers of the Lonely. The song forms and instrumentation are adventurous (horns!!) and the album qua album hangs together better than it would've needed to. Plus, I always forget how much I like Brendon Benson. (Though, he or whoever else had a hand in writing the otherwise stunning "The Switch and the Spur" owe former collaborator Jason Falkner some cash for lifting that opening chord progression from "The Plan" on Can You Still Feel.)

Because the CTA likes to fuck with me personally, I missed the starting times for two different movies I was trying to see on Saturday, so by the time I finally got to the theater, the only thing starting that I was even halfway interested in was, yes, Kung Fu Panda. I love a good animated romp, and this was generally amusing, lovely to look at, well voiced, etc. But, in my post-Buffy brain, I have a really hard time swallowing "chosen one" story lines that aren't exceptionally well done, not to mention that, ultimately, this film is a valorization of incompetence and gluttony so long as they're accompanied by ebullience and joie de vivre. Um, no. Obviously, I'm all for spreading the message that bodies of all shapes and sizes are acceptable, etc., but a kids' movie promoting itself with McDonald's happy meals featuring a character who both overeats when he's nervous and uses food as the only tool that will get him motivated while not being particularly skilled in anything other than enthusiasm and non sequiturs is, um, pretty frustratingly early-twenty-first-century American. Not cool.

Also, of course, RIP to the good Mr. Carlin.

Musical Musings

2008-06-09T13:27:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, for me, listening to a Wilco song with, like, half an ear open is akin to catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and being surprised by how good you look. I put "Hate It Here" on a mix I made this weekend and have been totally blown away by its, and the band's, greatness. I don't know if Tweedy's voice has ever sounded as cool to my ears as it does here. Remind me again why I don't listen to this band (or at least Sky Blue Sky) all the time?

Americans, why do we generally refuse to have anything to do with the Arctic Monkeys? I was listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare yesterday and was bowled over anew with how good they are. I kind of can't believe some of those melodies were written by a contemporary kid in his early 20s; they're so sweetly twisty, they sound like they could've come straight out of the early days of rock 'n' roll. Not to mention Turner's facility with both writing lyrics and delivering them. Even when he's spitting sarcasm and bile, there's such ease there.

Grizzly Bear's "While You Wait for the Others" is really, really fucking good. I know the song and the video have been floating around out there for a few months already, but it always takes me a while to warm up to Grizzly Bear's stuff in general, so the full weight of its greatness is finally just hitting me now. But srsly, it's like this wonderful, warm, lavender-scented bath for your ears.