DFW

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.

This Just In: I'm Full of Shit!

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.

Musical Thoughts

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.

The Bank Job, The Dodos, and Stuff

Caught up with The Bank Job on Friday night. Ah, how I do love a good little British heist film. The stakes got a bit higher at the end than I was expecting, which was oddly disconcerting for such a bit of piffle, but I think that's just my own filter at work and no fault of the film's for being manipulative or anything. Plus, the five-o'clock shadow on Jason Statham ("possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era") is worth the price of admission in itself. The thing's perpetually like half an hour away from just being a full-on beard.

So, not only did the little boy in me get a bang out of the caper flick, he also started getting majorly jonesed, after a second viewing of the preview, for The Forbidden Kingdom, aka "Jackie Chan & Jet Li: Finally Together: Before One of Us Gets Too Old and Breaks Something." Ohhhh kittens, you have no idea the glee that the idea of this film brings me. It might even be worth cramming myself into a theater on opening night to see this with a crowd, just to be part of the adrenaline of the assembled mob. That can occasionally make for such a satisfying movie experience. Also, wtf, my new favorite young actor, Michael Angarano, looks to be playing one of the main characters. Good for him. Let's hope he steers his career the way of Ryan Gosling and not so much Hayden Christensen.

RIP Charlton Heston. This is probably disrespectful, but here's a link (fast forward to about 2:27) to Eddie Izzard's Circle bit wherein he proposes giving a gun to a monkey and locking it in Mr. Heston's house to test the viability of his proposed NRA slogan "guns don't kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they've got a gun)."

I promise I'm not getting blogger payola or whatever to keep linking to Saturday Night Live sketches, but this is just such genius character comedy, I can't even handle how funny it is. Viva Fred Armisen.

The Dodos' new album Visiter (yeahyeahyeah, best new music, whatevs) was the perfect soundtrack to the two long walks I took this weekend in the first of Chicago's springtime warmth and sunshine. All sort of melancholy and hopeful and dreamy and earthy. It didn't quite pull me out of my own skin the way a similar walking-and-listening experience with Animal Collective's Sung Tongs did a couple years ago--an experience that rearranged my molecules so thoroughly I didn't even feel like I was in my own city anymore--but it kept me good company, as I hope it might continue to do as the season progresses.

Movie-wise, Music-wise, RIP-wise

Movie-wise: I cried like an idiot through a large chunk of The Savages. In a good way! I really heartily enjoyed it. Performances are great, it deals with race in a lot of subtle and interesting ways I wasn't expecting at all, and, yes, it totally nails the swirling vortex of emotional hysteria one feels when one is forced to care for an infirm, belligerent parent.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was extraordinarily aesthetically pleasing. I don't really care how accurate it is or isn't in its portrayal of the events that transpired after Jean-Dominique Bauby's stroke, but all the arty, impressionistic stuff it's doing does sort of stake a flag in the territory of his life in a way that turns the story, as it's presented here, into this irreducible unit that has to be swallowed whole if it is to be swallowed at all. Which is kind of a weird way of saying I found myself curiously emotionally unaffected by it, though it was inarguably beautifully made. I don't believe it was built to be a tearjerker by any means, but I feel like I spent a fairly significant portion of the movie thinking about what a risky move it would be for a publisher to put out the autobiography of a person with locked-in syndrome when, instead, I should have been contemplating the catastrophic personal ramifications of actually having locked-in syndrome and what that medical condition means for the essential nature of one's own humanity, blah blah blah. (Not to turn this blog into a Javier Bardem fan site or anything, but I remember loving The Sea Inside when it came out a few years ago. It goes for a more straight-ahead narrative treatment of a similar situation and, while probably a bit more talky, it's also certainly no less poetic and, for me, quite a bit more touching and thought-provoking.)

Be Kind Rewind was, perhaps inevitably, a bit of a letdown. For as much as I love him, Gondry needs equal-strength creative opposition. He needs a Bjork or a Charlie Kaufman to keep him sharp and to give his whimsy more of a solid central point from which to spiral out and back and around. He can't continue to direct the movies that he's also written, no matter how much he allows the actors to improvise. It just ends up being fluff on top of fluff. Highly enjoyable fluff, but fluff nonetheless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most intense reaction Be Kind Rewind elicited in me was a desire to finally see the Block Party concert film he did with Dave Chappelle. (Equal. Strength. Creative. Opposition.) There's all this cool stuff Be Kind is doing (or, attempting to do) with ideas of the importance and vitality of self-made, self-sustaining, improvised street-corner culture that seems like it was probably directly inspired by his experience of directing that film. Also, Mos Def is sooo ridiculously charming it left me convinced that he's one of the most underutilized actors in Hollywood right now. I don't know if I actually believe that in the cold light of day, but I definitely believed it during the film's 101-minute running time. And, all of my griping to one side, the final few minutes of the movie, when you see the crowd's faces illuminated by the reflected flickers of the film they're watching projected on a bed sheet hung across the wall while some faintly jazzy piano tinkles on the soundtrack, fucking destroyed me. Beautiful stuff. Oh, and as predicted, Gondry's hilarious self-made version of the trailer has popped up on YouTube here.

Music-wise: I was listening this morning to a mix that J. Ward made me last spring, and wow, Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" still sounds really great. Remember when everybody was still excited about that album? Good times.

Also, I've finally found the perfect way to enjoy Bloc Party: put the albums on my iPod, forget they're there, then flip out with excitement when some pounding drums and burbling bass come up on shuffle, and I'm all "holy crap, this sounds great, who the fuck is this? Oh, it's Bloc Party--awesome!"

RIP Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons. There was a nice piece on Gygax and the D&D gaming systems in The Believer back in September 2006. Check it out.

While perusing my bookshelves this weekend, I noticed that my Virginia Woolf section was looking a little thin. Does anybody out there in Wrestling Entropy-land have my copies of Jacob's Room and/or Mrs. Dalloway? It's no big deal; just let me know so I don't start putting ads on milk cartons.

RIP Heath Ledger

Whoa.

All Quick-Like

Yes, I discovered this outside my apartment building as I was on my way to work earlier this week. It gave me quite a shock--the kind of shock that can only truly be registered with the immediate involvement of my cameraphone. It's going to be a nutty year, kittens!

RIP, Bobby Fischer, you crazy-ass bastard.

"Musical theater just somehow got a whole lot gayer!"

"Unless he's using 'ironic' ironically, which is so meta it just blew the trucker cap off my mustache."

Top Ten Best Ever (via)

Eat shit and die, Doomsday. The RTA funding (fucking finally) went through.

In other local news, apparently it was first revealed way back in the fall, but I finally just saw the revised Chicago 2016 logo on the wilds of the city streets while I was out and about a few days ago. I think it's quite nice and worth noting.

Did you all watch the Tom Cruise video this week (via)? It's creepy, sure, but hardly unexpected. Gawker rightly points out that he's speechifying with "all the wide-eyed fervor that he brings to the promotion of a movie," but, rather than providing that "aha!" moment for me, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the depth and vigor of his commitment to Scientology, it actually unseats it all a little bit for me. All his vague, repetitious rhetoric about helping people and "doing more" doesn't really sound devout, it sounds hollow, like he's giving the Scientologists the sound bites they want, the same way he'd give entertainment journo-parasites a few easily quotable words about how great it was to work with a certain director or actor. Obviously, this is all just performance, that's no shock. But, it makes me more curious about what it is in him (or perhaps isn't in him, alternately) that makes it so easy for him to hire his still considerable charisma out to these shadowy, monolithic entities. Is it something as predictable as the daddy issues that get rehashed in the controversial-to-exactly-no-one unauthorized biography that just came out? Is it just one more example of his shrewd business acumen, knowing how to hitch himself to the rocket power of the highest bidder? But, if that's the case, Hollywood is understandable, but why Scientology? Anyway. These are all ponderables to be pondered.

Baby Teeth!!!!!! In my brain, they're now having a sexy musical cage match with Bound Stems for the honor of being my fave-rave local band.

Best Music of 2007

Allrightallrightallrightallright. I've made you wait for this long, so let's just get straight to the good stuff, eh? Below I give you notes on my 2007 year-end mix, which I'm calling Minus the Drama and the Fraud. As it was in 2004, 2005, and 2006, the CD version is a gift, and the list version is a simplified but fairly accurate summary of my year in music.

Oh, and number one album: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (After the Pitchfork Music Festival, is it any surprise?)

*

Minus the Drama and the Fraud

1.) Unless It's Kicks--Okkervil River
I love this song. True, I would still mostly prefer reading interviews with Will Sheff to listening to Okkervil River's albums, but this has absolutely got to be one of the most perfect songs I heard all year. I think it's the strain in it that really gets me--there's a hyper-jubilance there that's so intent on embracing and celebrating and affirming life that it almost becomes abrasively defiant, like a wild-eyed street-corner prophet who has seen the truth, man! The drum work, in its intelligence, is right up there with what Jim Eno's doing all over Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (dig the way the rhythms layer themselves across those first few verses), and Sheff's lyrics about the girl in the stands with her heart in her hands unexpectedly speaks to a question about fandom I've been wrestling with for years, namely: where does that love go when I experience a particularly strong reaction to a book or a movie or a piece of music? "I wanna tell her 'your love isn't lost'." I'd have to be a tone-deaf moron not to believe him when he proclaims it like that.

2.) Chores--Animal Collective
Ah, the epic decision of 2007's mix-making endeavors: run a cut from Strawberry Jam or from Person Pitch? Ultimately, I tried to split the difference by going with one of Panda Bear's songs off the Animal Collective album. All the different movement in this song has somehow become associated in my mind with riding the El around the Loop, especially at night, especially across the river (as Panda puts it: "At the end of the day, when there's no one watching"). The sense of peace and release after the frantic, tribal intensity of the first half of the song feels warm and liquid and mature.

3.) Fumes--Aesop Rock
As Aesop Rock friend and collaborator John Darnielle wrote of a similarly cinematic hip-hop track last year, "I spent much of the summer listening to this over the headphones trying to see if the narrative ever ran out of new developments. Not yet!" This cut freaks me out a little bit with how good it is. Sure, it was probably my nerd attack when I first heard that crackly recording of Newton's first last of motion being used as the hook that first attracted me to this cut, specifically, out of all the equally dense tracks on None Shall Pass. But the more I listened to it, the more I thrilled to the pitch-perfect storytelling on display here. These are about the five most rich and rewarding minutes of music I've encountered in recent memory.

4.) Boyz--M.I.A.
I get sort of irrationally annoyed when I hear or read older, overeducated white men raving about M.I.A. and Kala. Something about it just rankles, like their praise is somehow attempting to give her permission to be as good as she is. This is not to say I have some sort of special access to a deeper or, heaven forbid, more "pure" enjoyment of her music, of course; my not-insignificant whiteness and middle-classness are certainly factors in it, probably over and above my femaleness. But still, I do love the way the schoolyard taunts of "Boyz" throw that permission back in all of our faces with a punishingly funky wall of drums, a cheering crowd, and calculatedly casual disses to not just gender but financial solvency and war-mongering impulses as well.

5.) Middlenight--The Sea and Cake
If I'm going to get nostalgic about any time period of my life, I generally lean more toward high school than I do college, but for some reason I found myself thinking a lot about my IU days over the course of this year, and no music triggered those thoughts more dependably than the Sea and Cake's excellent Everybody. I'm sure a large part of it is that I first encountered their albums (along with Archer Prewitt's solo stuff) during the years I volunteered at the student-run radio station, but it's also due in part to the emotional jumble of the songs themselves. Like here in "Middlenight"--when taken together, that elegant, afro-pop-tinged guitar, that low, breathy flute line that's so moist it almost sounds like a Rhodes piano, and of course that devastatingly sexy shrug in Sam Prekop's voice all carry a conflicted kind of insouciance that's just as full of clear-eyed hope as it is bullheaded confidence.

6.) Don't You Evah--Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is another predictably immaculate album from Spoon, full of career-defining corkers like "The Underdog" and "Black Like Me." But somehow "Don't You Evah" comes across as one of the Spooniest songs of the bunch--and Britt didn't even write it. Much has been made of the "Jim, can you record the talk-back?" meta playfulness here, but, for my money, their familiar sonic palette of guitar, snare, bass, tambourine and shaker, and Britt's hoarse yelp becomes its own kind of self-referentiality as they continually find ways to whittle those elements down to even finer, cleaner points. That drum snap that pops about a sixteenth of a beat before you'd anticipate it in the brief instrumental bridge blows my mind with how effectively it both teases and educates you: rather than delaying a harmonic resolution the way a melismatic trill might, the rhythmic pattern is actually giving you what you want before you're expecting it. It gratifies you before you've properly braced yourself for the pleasure of its fulfillment, thereby only fueling and even heightening your craving for the next go-round. It's teaching you how to listen to these songs, laying bare their discrete elements as if to say, "see, there's no magic here; we're working with the same ingredients everyone else has access to." Which, of course, is what makes the magic truly magical. This is why we listen to pop music, kittens.

7.) Shake a Fist--Hot Chip
The nuttiness of the vocal breakdown and "sounds of the studio" bleepy freakout in the middle section are entertaining as hell, to be sure, but also wouldn't mean a thing without the epically beguiling bookends on either side of it. The deep bass bats you around like a cat toy between its massive, fuzzy paws, and the archly coy vocal goes straight for the trick that never fails to work on me: the nearly chromatic melody line. (No matter if it's ascending or descending--and even better if the bass plays it too--it's one of those things I just can't resist in a song. You can hear it, for example, in Radiohead's "Optimistic" and I think I once traced the origins of this fetish back to my lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ Superstar, but regardless: there it is and there it shall remain.) In a year full of vibrant, sensual, and emotionally affecting dance music, this cut instantly stood out for me upon downloading for its wiliness and its willingness to be simultaneously dead-serious about its appeal to your ass and utterly full of shit as it tickles your ears. I'm also rather amused by the way the spoken segment sounds a little bit like Owen Wilson talking directly to the camera in the best music video Wes Anderson hasn't made (yet).

8.) Innocence--Bjork
Smarter people (and bigger fans) than I have gone to the mat during this end-of-year list-making season defending Wilco's Sky Blue Sky against its various and sundry detractors, but I've yet to encounter anyone who's done the same, at length, for Bjork's Volta. (Though, I do have to give a hale-n-hearty "fuck yeah" to Owen Pallett's deliciously snotty bon mot on Pitchfork aimed at the "asshats" who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't appreciate the album: "You just want her to be digestible. I want to hear her make an all foghorn and ocean record." I wish I'd said it first!) Which is a shame because, well, damn--listen to this track: that fat, barking cough in the beat, the squidgy keyboard bit, and some of Bjork's best, most direct lyrics in her career-spanning sub-catalog of personal accountability songs. In a weird way, Volta feels similar to last year's Divine Comedy album Victory for the Comic Muse in that they both pick up bits and pieces of sounds and themes and lyrical conceits from all different corners of their respective careers, almost daring us to make sniffly comparisons to their earlier work. The comparisons are inevitable, of course: it's just that they're actually favorable and colored by the recognition that, oh, this is what precocious artists sound like when they grow up and into their talent and learn to really luxuriate in it.

9.) Someone Great--LCD Soundsystem
Why, yes, I do tend to think an awful lot about loss. Why do you ask? Recipients of last year's mix will remember M. Ward's "Requiem" giving us a joyful, boozy, fingerpickin' tribute to the memory of a good man, where, with this track, James Murphy gives us a more stunned and mellow and eventually resigned take on trying to swallow the enormity of a dear companion's passing away, whether by death or other irrevocable circumstance. And, come to find out, once swallowed, it tastes almost insultingly like a decent cup of coffee. Such is the brilliance of this brilliant song on a most brilliant album: the nearly revolutionary simplicity of the hard-won truth that it keeps coming and it keeps coming and it keeps coming til the day it stops.

10.) Plasticities--Andrew Bird
I'm a city person. I love living in a city, I love traveling to new cities, I love pouring over the peculiarities that give cities their own unique style and vibe. I love them the way I love books--just being around them is often good enough, and when you get to know a few of them really well, it can be downright magical, though in lieu of quality, quantity can often make for an extremely satisfying substitute. And so Bird's inclusion of "dying cities" in his binary attached to music halls as a unit that must be defended touches me deeply. I've praised this album elsewhere for the way it so beautifully dramatizes the collision of the Self with the Empire, and I think it's a sensitive and sophisticated and nuanced point that he's making here, that it's our neural walls Big Brother is after now. The city walls really belong to us, the people contained within them, and they're ours to do with as we see fit. We'll fight, we'll fight.

11.) Just Friends--Amy Winehouse
I feel a little lame and/or bad for gravitating to this one sorta reggae-tinged track on an album most celebrated for its Motown revivalism. I'm going to make it even worse for some of you by admitting that I think part of the reason I love it is because it sounds like it could have appeared on the Jackie Brown soundtrack, which I adore tremendously. But, gah, it's just so nice and warm and easy with its sparkling electric piano, sultry horns, and spacious woodblock accents. It's got a pleasantly fuzzy Sunday morning feel to it, and everybody needs a little Sunday morning sometimes. Especially Amy herself these days, it seems. (Yeah, I went there.)

12.) Weird Fishes/Arpeggi--Radiohead
Both Bjork and Radiohead tracks on my year-end best-of mix? What decade am I in? Thom is in downright incredible form here, as are the rest of the boys. The whole song, in fact, sounds like a dream, like exactly the kind of track I might have hoped Radiohead would come back with after their three-year absence from recording, if only I could have figured out how to articulate what I was looking for. And, for me, with my well-documented and often joked-about fear of/fascination with the ocean and its creatures, the imagery of the sublimity of the deep is, really, the only proper context in which to present a lyric as devastating as "everybody leaves, if they get the chance / and this is my chance." Which, in turn, is almost literally buoyed by the closing lines (that I'm sure Kevin Barnes is kicking himself for not having written this year): "I hit the bottom and escape."

13.) Apartment Story--The National
I don't know how many times I must have listened to Boxer before this song slowly started revealing itself to me as one of my favorites on the disk. But the more I listened to it, the more I felt a twitchiness rise up through the bottoms of my feet and a smirkiness pull at the corners of my mouth; I think we used to call it having bugs in our bones, that spazzed out inability to sit still, the compusion to wiggle around in your chair and maybe throw paperclips or some other small objects at someone you love until they either get fed up and leave the room or start throwing the shit back. Really, it's the sound of cabin fever--"stay inside til somebody finds us," "sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave." It may be a romanticized, movie montage version of cabin fever, but I'll gladly take the fictional romance of Berninger's warm vocal burr and the Dessner brothers' churning guitars and Bryan Devendorf's steady, radiator-clang drum work over my own small, hateful, crabby, late-winter desperation any day.

14.) Gronlandic Edit--Of Montreal
Or I suppose I could take Of Montreal's grandiose, florid, and completely unhinged version of internalized, pent-up despair. Man oh man, I just never saw Hissing Fauna coming this year, until it had completely wrapped itself around me like the sparkliest, most sexually ambiguous and unrelenting boa constrictor out of some sort of Jan Svankmajer jungle. I love everything about this track--the plainspoken yet archly self-critical lyrics that feel like so much familiar internal monologue, the longing for religious deliverance tossed out to fend for itself among the most hedonistic booty-shaking bass grooves, and especially the way Barnes's vocals are layered on top of themselves to harmonize in a kind of aural equivalent of a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley nightmare dance sequence where all that cheerful precision becomes its own kind of horror.

15.) She's Fantastic--Sondre Lerche
I've been a pretty ardent fan of Sondre Lerche for the past few years (now's when you cue up my mix from '04 and go, "ah, yes, 'Stupid Memory,' with the kick drum and the theremin, right, I remember"), but after the minor disappointment of the trad jazz drag of Duper Sessions (which mighty cheeseball Robbie Williams did better with Swing When You're Winning a few years back anyway), Phantom Punch really blew me away in the early part of '07. It's no secret that I'm something of a pop classicist or purist or formalist or whatever you want to call it--if given the choice, I'm generally going to gravitate to virtuosity and "chops" over experimentation or "challenging" music most days of the week--and so it should be no surprise that I'd be reduced to barely restrained swooning by the sophistication of Lerche's songwriting. I don't want to bore anyone by repeating myself, so, for the sake of them what's interested, I'll hastily point you in the direction of a feature-length gush I wrote about the album as a whole, while I spend just a few more moments getting rapturous about this one song in particular. Just . . . just listen to how in the pocket everything falls in these two minutes and twenty-three seconds. The precision is exceedingly tasteful without ever feeling cold or polite. The vocals and the drum fills and the guitar lines all interlock so snugly, they kind of vibrate in your ears the way houndstooth or seersucker vibrates in front of your eyes. And . . . and when that six-note pattern gets repeated in the breakdown at 1:40, it's . . . it's like some Cole Porter shit up in here. It's phenomenal. Where else in indie rock are you, basically, going to get a little soft shoe routine? And don't even get me started on the Hitchcock references. Aside from, uh, some easily extrapolated personal reasons, I called this comp (and the above-linked review) Minus the Drama and the Fraud very intentionally--it's raising a glass to the idea that great art and great beauty doesn't necessarily have to be tethered to an equal amount of angst.

16.) Landmines--St. Vincent
I like Feist and The Reminder just fine, but Annie Clark gets my vote for the best honey sweet, playfully soulful, and quirkily gorgeous female vocalist of the year. Marry Me was an absurdly assured debut. I know I've said it before, and I know the comparison probably doesn't mean much to that many people aside from myself and my family and my friends I've forced to listen to Time and Love over the years, but she sounds, to my ears, like nothing so much as our demographic's Jackie Cain. I was instantly drawn to this song with its dreamy vibe, which feels oddly evocative of WWI (which is, OMG, like totes my fave war), and those gut-punching lyrics. I challenged myself to do a lot of dating throughout the second half of this year, and I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I found myself identifying with the lines, "I'm crawling through landmines / I know 'cause I planted them." Ouch.

17.) Heatherwood--Deerhunter
It was really difficult to decide on one song to highlight off Cryptograms; it just works so well as an album taken as a whole. I'm still not really sure what made me pull the trigger on "Heatherwood" specifically, other than it simply fits really nicely in the flow of the tracklist here. I never would have predicted I'd like Deerhunter as much as I do. I guess I'm still surprised as how, pardon the term, accessible even their noisiest and most violent stuff is.

18.) The Waking--Kurt Elling
Yes, it's the Roethke poem. Elling's albums can really be all over the place, between pretentiousness so stultifying it makes Joanna Newsom sound like Andrew W.K. and corn-laden gimmickry that would give even the most middlebrow of easy-listeners cause to sneer, "really, isn't that a bit much?", and this year's Nightmoves was no exception. But sometimes, as here, he just fucking nails it. His vocal is sweet and deeply felt, and Rob Amster's bass only confirms my estimation that he's absolutely one of the best young jazz guys out there right now. Taken as a whole, no other song I listened to repeatedly over the course of this year allowed me as much perspective on, well, on how OK I'm really and truly doing after all.

Other musics I enjoyed this year: the Shins' Wincing the Night Away (fuck y'all hataz--Mercer's still got it), Laura Veirs's Saltbreakers (Laura + Tucker Martine = 4evah!), Kings of Leon's Because of the Times (it was a late-breaking discovery, but wow, what a doozy), Baby Teeth's The Simp, Caribou's Andorra (both likewise late-year discoveries that certainly would have squeezed something onto this mix if I'd had enough time to digest them), Panda Bear's Person Pitch (of course; it killed me not to be able to use "Take Pills" or "Good Girl/Carrots" on here), Field Music's Tones of Town, and Les Savy Fav's Let's Stay Friends.

(Also, RIP Oscar Peterson, a true legend and giant of both his instrument and the genre.)

Cassette Culture and Weekend Movies

I'm not really one of those people who overly fetishizes cassette tapes and cassette tape culture. I like tapes, especially mix tapes, just fine, and I'm glad to have somewhat recently salvaged a bunch of them from my childhood home, but there's no part of me that harbors too many romantic feelings about their extra-musical significance/signifiers. That being said, however, finally listening to Voxtrot's self-titled full-length album made me kind of wish I'd encountered it first on tape. There's a kind of slick 1980s listlessness to it that would have felt and sounded perfect on the plastic-smelling clackety-clack of a cassette. I think I mean that as a compliment?

Caught up with both Once and Broken English this weekend, two movies that made me pine for the simple joys of just hanging out with someone new and special whose company intrigues and delights you. Of course Once also folds in the thrill of actively doing something creative with a group of like-minded (but not too like-minded) individuals, which is its own kind of seduction, but it was those shots of the couple just wandering through the city streets, chatting, or sharing music and a meal in someone's dingy apartment that seemed most compelling in their simplicity. Broken English loses points for lifting, basically wholesale, the explosively dramatic final two or three lines from Before Sunset ("you are gonna miss that plane") and using them for essentially the same purpose--but the same purpose without ten additional years of backstory and tension and longing. Some of the dialogue is plenty stilted and some of the scenarios strain credibility, but the casting was impeccable (though I do wish they'd given Michael Panes--one of the best and most memorable and sexiest things about The Anniversary Party--more to do as Glen, instead of just being the dorky/schlubby coworker), and its preoccupations with how hard it is to find and keep and sustain romantic love seem right.

As much as I enjoy his work, why does it seem like Romain Duris is suddenly everywhere right now? The posters for his movies Dans Paris and Moliere were practically hanging side by side at the theater this weekend, and there seems to be a real publicity push for Moliere in particular, based on how often I've seen the trailer by this point. It seems especially suspect to me that these French movies are being more or less actively promoted in the U.S. Why has this handful of movies, specifically, been annointed as appropriate for Amurr'can consumption, and what is it about Duris that has turned him into the new go-to leading man for crossover appeal? It's probably a tricky stew of his looks, talent, and charisma and the surprise (?) stateside success of L'auberge espagnole, Russian Dolls, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (my review here), but it is something to be pondered at any rate.

New rock and roll photo crush! Kirstiecat is Chicago-based, apparently goes to a lot of the same shows that I do, and keeps a totally groovy music blog. Be sure to check out her sets from this year's Pitchfork fest (day one, day two, day three) to get a better sense of the personality of the weekend than I was able to manage with my (relatively) crappy point-and-shoot.

Shit, I'd just assumed he was dead already. Anyway, RIP, Ingmar Bergman.

UPDATE: Also RIP, Michelangelo Antonioni, who apparently died on the same day as Bergman. I'm bummed that I pretty much missed this summer's Antonioni retrospective at the Siskel.

1966-1997

RIP, Old White Guys

Both Boris Yeltsin and David Halberstam in the same 24-hour period? That's not a news story; that's a term-paper anxiety dream I had in college.

They Never Came Close to Guessing

I know I'm a day late at this point, but RIP, Mr. Vonnegut. I've never been the biggest fan, but that's nothing more than a simple error of omission on my part. One of my fondest memories of non-assigned reading during college is of the weekend I spent pouring over Breakfast of Champions, after reviewing the execrable film version for the IU newspaper. I've inscribed this much cherished quote from the novel on the inside covers and in the margins of many notebooks since then: "Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne."

"It's much work, measuring turtles."

Come rock out at the Subterranean with me tonight, kittens, and catch the Bound Stems, some of Chicago's finest, in action. (Eight o'clock rock shows are very appealing to my creaky old lady bones these days.)

RIP Richard Jeni

RIP Richard Jeni. Wow, that's a shitty thing to hear about first thing on a rainy Monday morning. One of my greatest pleasures during summer vacation as a smallish child and middle schooler was being able to stay up late on weeknights to watch A&E's Evening at the Improv. This was just as the art of American stand-up comedy was cresting the peak of its 1980s heyday and beginning its subsequent decline into endless "stand-up gets a lackluster sitcom loosely based around his/her material" territory. And, like any impressionable youngster in a foreign country, I subconsciously absorbed the cadences of their speech and the "what is the deal with [pop culture artifact of your choice]?" sensibility. (OMG, there's a reason the Saturday Night Live sketch "Stand Up and Win" is one of my favorite segments of television ever.) I fondly remember many of Jeni's routines, esp. the bit about the football referee abusing the power of his microphone to voice some personal concerns best left to his therapist's couch, and am saddened to know one of the mainstays of that comedy epoch is gone.

(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)

Cintra on Anna

I love Cintra Wilson for her sublime snark, but when she occasionally tamps it down just enough to reveal sympathy for the most maligned objects of pop culture obsession, she can take my breath away. Some of the best writing I've ever read on Michael Jackson is in the essay "Jacko, the No-Nosed Man from Motown (A Morality Fable)" in her collection A Massive Swelling, and she does it again today in Salon with her brief piece on Anna Nicole Smith's death.

Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:

What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty.

Seriously, it's a really great piece with some really great writing. Please do check it out if all the other unavoidable, sour-tasting memorializing floating around in the ether today has left you feeling scummy.

Music Notes and a Dear, Departed Monster

Squee! There's a new Clientele album in the works! Even though most of their back catalog is available on eMusic, I haven't really explored any of it yet because I'm still pretty stuck on Strange Geometry. It's just such a beautiful collection of songs. I'm not alarmed about the prospect of their doing a "groovy, disco song" at all; it's probably just going to be, like, bouzouki with beats. Sign me up.

"Casino Noel"? Oh, Mikey Skinner. Why are you so effortlessly witty?

The Onion A.V. Club has released their best music of 2006 list, and . . . it locks up pretty neatly with mine. I didn't give Fishscale the fair shake it deserved this year, and Jenny Lewis doesn't really interest me at all, but Midlake, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists--it looks like a typical recently played smart playlist on my iPod!

RIP, Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond kind of bugs the crap out of me, but it's nearly impossible not to love the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein.

The Prestige

Gapers Block recently informed me that Jonathan Rosenbaum and J.R. Jones are now blogging for the Reader. Filmies rejoice! Just in time for the year-end smackdowns.

Speaking of J.R. Jones, he got it all wrong in his capsule review of The Prestige. I wouldn't ascribe any "elegant contours," other than those belonging to the distractingly young-looking Jessica Biel, to the utterly lightweight Illusionist. Sure, The Prestige's plot might be cluttered, and, as with Nolan's Memento, I'm not altogether convinced it's going to hold up over repeated viewings, especially when you know what the big reveal at the end is, but I was transfixed by every minute of the movie just the same. I've joked here previously about people who go into ecstasies about what a great actor Christian Bale is, as if they've just discovered what the rest of us have known for about half our lifetimes, but fo rizzle? The man absolutely devours everything (and everyone) around him with this performance. It's shocking how good he is. I mean, I'm about as big a fan of Hugh Jackman as one can be without being an X-Men fan-girl, but Bale is just so, so good, he makes Jackman's performance seem flat and dimensionless by comparison. Michael Caine is really the only actor who doesn't get eclipsed by Bale when they share the screen, and, fair play to him, y'know, seeing as how he's Moykle blaady Cayne and all. Dare we even mention the non-splash that Scarlett Johansson makes, outclassed as she is here? I've carped before about the "jittery informality" (to, embarrassingly, quote myself) of this generation of younger actors, but her lack of poise, especially in her scenes on stage as the magician's assistant, just made me really sad. Why do we no longer expect our movie stars to be able to move with any semblance of grace? Her shoulders were all scrunched and her neck was all giraffey when she was trying to make these grand voila! gestures. It was like she had no control at all over the way she was moving her body through space. And she's held up as a paragon of womanly excellence among screen actors? Whatever charms she possesses (and she can be a fine performer--she was truly winning in Lost in Translation) were just not well suited to even this relatively unimportant role. It was made abundantly clear that she was cast in the film as a gambit to bring a certain demographic of moviegoers into the theater. (This is a bad habit I'd like to see Nolan break before it's too late. From the fierce strength and intelligence of Carrie-Anne Moss and Hilary Swank he goes to the whiny schoolgirl prettiness of Katie Holmes and Johansson?) Anyway, the first entrance of David Bowie as Nikola Tesla alone might have been worth the price of admission, and what would a holiday-season blockbuster be without Andy Serkis? Sure, there are some tonal missteps that tend toward the cheesy and on-the-nose, but, for the most part, the movie is deliciously tense without being jump-out-and-give-you-a-heart-attack scary, and as far as plot complications and sleight-of-hand intrigue go, it more than made up for what I wished The Illusionist had been. And, if nothing else, it's worth it to see in Bale an actor really hitting his stride.

Slate does a noble job of looking into the so-called Pitchfork Effect.

Insofar as I can be said to have heroes or role models of any kind, Betty Comden would certainly have to be one, and I was greatly saddened to read that she died last week. Well, yeah, at age 89, so she clearly lived a long, full life. A long life full of wit and music and movies and the theater and Leonard Bernstein. (If memory serves, my dear MLBO'D actually got to meet both Comden and Green before they died, when she was performing in IU's production of On the Town in the spring of 2000.) Elisabeth Vincentelli has more, and some MP3s to sample, over at The Determined Dilettante.

RIP, Robert Altman

One of the masters has left the building: Robert Altman passed away on Monday night. I, somewhat irrationally, inherited some anti-Altman bias from one of my favorite film professors, but his talent and influence are of course undeniable. The elegiac qualities of A Prairie Home Companion, which I pretty much cried straight through when I saw it this summer, will only become more poignant with time and in their newly revealed context as his final farewell.

RIP Spymaster Wolf

When the time comes, I can only hope my own obit will feature the word "spymaster" as prominently and frequently as it is used here. Somewhere, Colin Meloy is writing a song about this guy right now.

RIP, Steve Irwin

THE OCEAN WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH, BITCHES.

RIP, Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. A stingray fucking stabbed him in the heart while he was filming in the Great Barrier Reef today. That's a pretty badass way to die, and also, y'know, the stuff of nightmares.

RIP, Mickey Spillane

If you've seen Kiss Me Deadly, then you know what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. RIP, Mickey Spillane, you crazy old bastard.