The National, Live at the Vic

Man, I don't know what it is about the Vic, maybe just precedent set with the tremendously emotionally satisfying Rufus Wainwright concert I saw with CTLA way back in 2002, but now it seems like every time I catch a show there, I just want to weep tears of joy through the whole thing. It's a great feeling to have. (I also wouldn't discount the all-important seats-in-the-balcony factor. Yes, at times I can be the laziest woman alive who just can't be arsed to stand through a show, but the stress of being so short that one person's shoulder can ruin a sight line for the whole night is also a huge part of my concertgoing life, and so, being able to sit often makes up in true engagement with the performance what it loses in physically rocking out. All those overwhelming emotions tend to come out a little more readily when I'm not actively irritated by, y'know, other humans.)

Anyway. The National were fantastic on Saturday night. True, I was in a vastly better mood than I was when I saw them earlier this June, but they've also been touring behind Boxer for the better part of four months now, and it's clearly paying dividends at this point. They're playing those songs more confidently, the way they play the ones from Alligator. Their crashing waves of crescendo at the end of stuff like "Mistaken for Strangers" and "Start a War" feel earned and organic now, not just "might as well" to get off the merry-go-round, and their ability to change up the feel and stylistic groove of something like "Racing Like a Pro" (which they cranked down about two notches into this shuffling Pink Panther slinkiness that just about stopped my heart with its gorgeousness) is respectful of the audience's expectations while providing just enough variation to thrill. And--beware the rockist/classicist that lives in me now--I always forget that these guys are musicians. It reads even in something as deceptively simple as their stage postures. Except for Matt, roaming around like a mental patient, and Padma Newsome, occasionally, rightfully, taking his place center stage when he gets on a particularly good tear with his violin, there isn't much visible interaction between these guys. They're not getting up in each other's faces or doing scissor kicks or whatever. They're mostly just hunched over and isolated on the little islands near their monitors. But, there's something in the quality of their hunched over postures--you can tell they're listening. They're almost like old jazz guys in that way. They're listening to the space their instruments are taking up in relation to everyone else's, and they're confident that, as individuals, if they really fucking bring it on any given end-of-song build, the rest of the guys can be trusted to do the same, to spectacular effect. "Start a War," the last song before the encore, was so epic, in fact, that Matt, with nothing else to do once he was done singing the final chorus, picked up a drum stick and started beating the shit out of one of Bryan's cymbals as the outro was really cresting into a fabulous wall of noise. It was almost like, in that moment, he was the number-one fan of his own band and had to do something to express it. I mean, can you blame him?

A bit more on Matt, and his on-stage awkwardness: it's key. I know some people find his spazziness faked or disingenuous or merely irritating or whatever, but I feel like, if he came out and took the mic looking the way he does (about 17 different kinds of beautiful), in front of a band sounding the way they sound, crooning these devastatingly pretty love songs, and was all smoothy smooth in his presence and banter on top of that, he'd be, I dunno, the guy from Maroon 5 or something, which is to say, a bit gross. (No disrespect meant to Maroon 5, of course. The origins of this blog were effectively built on my affection for "This Love," and I very recently embarrassed myself in front of a sales rep at work by loudly declaring to RTW on the way into the building in the morning that if I ever had to make some extra money as a stripper, I would do so to "Makes Me Wonder." But, would I want Adam Levine to touch me with a ten-foot pole? No.) Anyway, even if the tortured sensitive guy thing is just another brand of shtick, I buy it. It just helps balance the band out a bit more for me, keeps them off-kilter in an interesting way.

For those of you who are interested in such things, I've transcribed the setlist here. You'll note that, with the exception of "About Today" from the Cherry Tree EP, which I'm so glad they've been working into their sets recently, the whole night was pulled from just Boxer and Alligator. Which makes sense, I guess, given the broader success that those albums have brought them, but why not encourage people to look into their back catalog with a little "Murder Me, Rachael" or "Patterns of Fairytales" action? But, when it comes down to it, I'd gladly give that up for the ecstatic, transcendent singalong that happened during "Apartment Story." Probably my favorite cut from the new album, and an easy contender for my 2007 year-end mix, I think it was the only song of the night that had every band member singing the chorus, and the crowd lifted their voices joyously as well. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I was nearly brought to tears when you've got a whole roomful of people shouting "so worry not / all things are well / we'll be all right" into the early fall night air. Pics from the show are up on Flickr.

You know what album's great (not that it should be any surprise)? The Sea and Cake's new one from this year, Everybody. I probably would have damned it with faint praise about a month ago by calling it good cooking music, which it still is, but it's one of those growers, as the kids are wont to call them these days, with a melodic sophistication that only reveals itself in unhurried increments. Recommended.

Gah! Hurry up and grab this Hot Chip song before Matthew takes it down! It's so good you'll kind of need to lie down in a darkened room for a while after you listen to it a couple times.

LMAO? LMAO.

UPDATE: Remember the awesome video of the little pink-haired girl dancing to Les Savy Fav I posted here? Well, according to Pitchfork, she won whatever contest it had been originally posted to YouTube for. Congrats to Bunny! She rocks harder now than most of us ever will.

Eastern Promises

Ah. Remember when Jude Law used to be a really interesting actor? Remind yourself of those bygone days and that squandered promise with Vincent Cassel's gloriously live-wire performance in Cronenberg's new one, Eastern Promises. He's charismatic and unlikable and almost offensively gorgeous in a completely skeeved out kind of way. Plus, I'm always a sucker for the hot-and-cold interplay he has going on as an actor with Viggo Mortensen (sex on wheels, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise). The more subdued and stoic and minimal Mortensen gets, the more dangerously high Cassel lets his flame rise, pacing like a rabid hyena, skidding out of control like a gorgeous European sportscar on an icy road in the middle of the night. He does spoiled and bratty and wrathful with a Russian accent just as well as he did it with one arm tied behind his back. Inspired casting. Mega bonus round extra credit points for all those awesomely homoerotic embraces. I didn't love the film as much as I did A History of Violence--though maybe it will grow on me with time--but, regardless, Cronenberg is maturing with such ease as a filmmaker that it's a delight simply to sit there and allow yourself to be taken where he wants you to go. There's an ever-so-slight archness in the tone of the performances that I'm not sure what to make of yet. It's not quite humor and it's not quite camp; "winking" is definitely not right, and even "aware" is wrong. It doesn't even seem pronounced enough to serve as some sort of commentary on the gangster movie genre. I think the closest it gets is to the deliberateness of a song, which would work well in the world of this movie where the violence and florid emotions swirling around stereotypical ideas of Russian masculinity and familial honor seem only matched by the power of music and food and other day-to-day rituals and ceremonies to unite an immigrant community almost irrationally sentimental for a mostly brutal homeland. Also, I'm totally done with Naomi Watts these days.

Michael Haneke is apparently remaking his own film Funny Games in English with Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Michael Pitt. Filmies, is there any word on the street yet if this is going to be awesome or unfortunate? The trailer made me roll my eyes until I saw Haneke's name attached to it. I'm cautiously curious.

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8

"I have been listening to [Elvis Costello's] Trust over and over for two days. Why did people continue making albums after this was released? Emotionally, I get it, but really." --S/FJ

Work pal MS and I have decided that, based on the fact that we could do nothing but barf rainbows for hours after seeing this picture, the phrase "monkey hug" is now an appropriate and perfectly acceptable thing to say to people. Try it, for instance, when signing off an e-mail. I believe you'll find it a quite satisfactory substitute for "thank you" or "cheers."

Hideout Block Party 2007

A few thoughts on this year's Hideout Block Party:

There was a lot I missed this weekend, for a number of reasons, which is both kind of a bummer and kind of a great thing about the overwhelming casualness that the Hideout engenders in a person.

It's a super-huge pain in the ass for me to get to the Hideout without a car, but, that being said, it's always kind of great to be down there in such a grittily urban area of the city, with the warehouses and whatnot. It makes me love Chicago in a different way.

Another thing that makes me love Chicago: all our fucking kick-ass local bands. Scotland Yard Gospel Choir! The Changes! The 1900s! Had I but world enough and time, I would become a psycho groupie stalker for them all, for it is such a gift to have such awesome music being made right in one's own backyard.

Speaking of groupies, Cynthia Plaster Caster was on hand to introduce the 1900s' set with great giggliness and affection. It was adorable. Also, of course she loves the 1900s; as CJN put it, "they're like to Fleetwood Mac what the Muppet Babies are to the Muppets."

This is the second time I've seen Bloc Party as headliners in a festival setting, and this is the second time they've completely blown me away live. I'm still trying to reconcile the thing in me that fights against their albums so hard (as I've said before, it took me forever to warm up to Silent Alarm and I'm still struggling to get into A Weekend in the City lo these many months after its release this year) with the borderline transcendent experiences I've had seeing them in concert. I'm beginning to formulate a lame and half-assed theory that there's something kind of insular and locked off in their albums, that they're all about Kele's self-loathing and self-righteousness, which makes them kind of inwardly focused and impenetrable. But then live on stage, the band is nothing so much as a grandly florid, outwardly blooming flower. They just give, give, give to the audience, without any gimmicks or affectations of cultivated "showmanship" or whatever. I think they said this is their seventh (seventh!) American tour, and yet they really retain an exuberance in performance that makes them come off as the happiest kids in school who are just totally geeked to have an audience to play for. And, it bears repeating: the melodies, my God, the melodies. I nearly got choked up a couple times; they're that stunningly beautiful. And speaking of beautiful: Kele Okereke for indie rock pin-up boy of the year! Sososo cute.

I'm seriously fucking pissed off at the CTA (not you, Dr. Andrews) for making me so late on Saturday that I missed Art Brut's set. Grr.

The Frames were all Irish delightful, as one would expect them to be. Hansard's just got that thing in his voice, where it shreds a little bit when he's really going for the note, that's totally appealing. (After their set, I heard some girl behind me in the beer line saying that she never thought she'd hear another vocalist who affects her the same way that Kurt Cobain did, and I can kind of see her point.) He's also quite the raconteur, as one would expect him to be. A lot of his introductions to the songs, mostly about all-consuming young love and its attendant silly extremes of behavior and emotion, were more interesting than the songs (or at least the lyrics) themselves. In contrast to Bloc Party, they did go a bit gimmicky with their set (getting the audience to sing along multiple times, bringing two girls up on stage to sing the harmony part from "Falling Slowly," and closing out with a cover of "Where Is My Mind" complete with The Blue Ribbon Glee Club doing the "OOH-OOH!" bit), but I guess that's appropriate for a band like that playing a biggish festival show like that. I did think it was extremely classy, though, that they didn't mention the movie at all. Just came out and played the gig like a regular band, with no "you may recognize me from..." self-promotion.

Andrew Bird was, naturally, fantastic. I don't quite know what was going on with his unfortunate all-denim ensemble, but I ended up listening to most of the show with my eyes closed anyway, so it hardly mattered. He played a great mix of stuff from The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Armchair Apocrypha; there was a particularly inspired segue from a truncated version of his Dr. Stringz ditty into the full-frontal attack of "Fake Palindromes." The band was tight, tight, tight; Martin Dosh was doing some shit on the drums (I'm thinking here particularly of "Dark Matter," not to mention, of course, his Radiohead-esque composition "Simple X") that's just so gorgeous and musical and exciting and smart, and noticeably so, without being too in-your-face about it. It's always great to hear Bird and his band play, especially after releasing one of my favorite albums of 2007.

Superbad

I didn't go in to Superbad intending to watch it with my cranky feminist filter on, but, well...if the shoe fits. Look. A good crisis-of-masculinity story, at any age, is usually always going to appeal to me, and I'm generally a pretty easy target for some boys-will-be-boys silliness, but not when it's at the expense of saying some really shitty things about women. And, I wish that shitty were a less appropriate word in this instance, but this movie is seriously reinforcing some borderline medieval notions of vile womanhood here (the weaker/leaky vessel and all that). For all their effusively praised hotness and do-ability, the women in this movie seem constantly overwhelmed/personified by their own bodily fluids, doing nothing but menstruating all over the place, getting "so wet," and projectile vomiting. Even Evan's mom's rack is praised not just for its general lusciousness, but for how lucky baby Evan was to suck on it. And, need we even mention Seth's assertion that a vagina "all by itself" (ie, without a penis in it or at least nearby) is "not for him"? Ooh-kay. I guess, maybe, the argument can be made that these characterizations only reflect the adolescent male's confusion and ignorance about the opposite sex, but that confusion and ignorance seriously didn't have to be tinged with such disgust. Evan's line about how he wants to live in a world where girls weren't weirded out by boners and really wanted to see them was fantastically funny (helped by Michael Cera's typically impeccable delivery), but his feeling slighted by having to hide that one thing seems really petty in light of all the things girls have to hide (period blood and its accoutrements, body hair, and an aggressive sex drive, to name but a few) for fear of becoming undesirable in some dude's eyes.

I dunno. I mean, if the movie wants us to buy Evan as being genuinely respectful of women--and I think it really does, with the best of misguided intentions--then the authorial voice needed to be a little more consistently respectful, too. I know the screenplay was written when Rogen and Goldberg weren't much more than teenagers themselves (not that that's really any excuse), but I seriously don't believe Apatow or the director didn't step in to tone it down a little. Especially the menstrual blood bit. I kind of can't get over it. The situation itself was just so over-the-top and unbelievable, and then the characters' reactions to it were even worse. Of course no one wants to be bled on by a stranger at a party, but there was no such freak-out when that random guy got the bottle smashed over his head during the fight and started spurting blood everywhere. I know that gross-out humor is intrinsic to these kinds of raunchy high school comedies and that this is primarily a movie by dudes for dudes, but...doesn't that just kind of compound the problem? Do we need to be validating the average guy's secret (or not so secret) fears that women's bodies are actually kinda nasty by reflecting them on the big screen? I get that it's a slippery slope for a mainstream movie to feel true to the average person's experience but goose the situations for humor while hopefully not just catering to the lowest common denominator. But, this is the same problem I had last year with Talladega Nights trying to riff on homophobia in a movie aimed at NASCAR fans and frat boys, not the most historically (or, yes, stereotypically) tolerant people on earth. I'm all for going to unspeakable places for the sake of the laugh (I do love Borat, after all), but I just wish these movies could be a little more responsible with their power. Especially considering there's no way that Superbad was number one at the American box office for two weekends in a row thanks exclusively to XY chromosomes. Guys were assuredly bringing dates, girlfriends, and wives along with them to the theater, and it just breaks my heart to think of an insecure teenage girl going to see this movie and being expected to sit through and perhaps even laugh at all the ways her body probably makes her boyfriend or crush recoil.

Is this movie very funny at points? Yes. I definitely laughed a lot. Like I say, Cera is just an unimpeachably brilliant comic actor and I would probably watch him read the proverbial phone book. Jonah Hill's filthy foulmouthed dialogue was like nothing so much as Cartman brought to life (though Dana Stevens brings up a very, very good point in Slate's review of the movie re: the way Seth enacts a very dubious moral code even in respect to his male friends), and there cannot be enough fulsome praise for Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the instantly iconic Fogell/McLovin. And, the fact that this is actually a love story about two best friends was indeed sweet. (Though the faux-morning after scene at the end just reuses the same joke from the more winkingly homoerotic Hot Fuzz.) I just wish a lot of these sex problems (in all biological senses of the term) weren't clouding the good times. Hell, at least give us a female character one half as offbeat and memorable as Charlyne Yi as Jodi in Knocked Up!

My summer of movies set in Paris continued this weekend with Dans Paris. Diminishing returns, my bebes, diminishing returns. Though kind of sexy in places and infinitely easy on the eyes with its blindingly attractive cast, its totally unearned tortured tone, aimlessness, and arty pretensions are pretty much exactly what give "foreign film" a bad name.

Indie rock fatigue seems to set in most acutely for me during the late summer, so, in an effort to distance myself for a little while from sad boys and girls with guitars, lately I've been feasting on M.I.A.'s new one, Kala, and Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass, both of which are rich, rich, rich and totally appealing in their onslaught of noise and lyric and gauntlet-throwing.

Speaking of indie rock fatigue: "the indie rock world is too polite and likable and I feel it needs the drunken uncle to show up, uninvited, to the birthday party and vomit on the couch. Not every year of course, but at least once in a while." --Kevin Barnes (via)

And, while I'm at it: "Lil Wayne. Believe the hype and then multiply it by ten. You are going to feel dumb if you realize in five years that you were too cool to enjoy the dataflow." --Sasha Frere-Jones (via Sasha Frere-Jones)

Raw Oreos

Raw Oreos
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

I know I don't talk much about personal stuff here usually, but raw food has kind of consumed my life lately, so my idle moments are spent dreaming up crap like ways to re-create Oreo cookies by modding preexisting recipes. Ah, what a way to kick off a three-day weekend!

The Men Don't Know, but the Little Girls Understand

If rock and roll doesn't make you feel like this on a fairly regular basis, you're doing it wrong.



(Via Pitchfork. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure it's the same kid from this picture.)

Beyonce, Live at the United Center

Kittens, I can't remember the last time I did something so mainstream and loved it so much. The Beyonce Experience (yes, this concert tour is actually, literally called "The Beyonce Experience") was everything I could have possibly wanted it to be (right down to and including the over-the-top pompousness of the name). Bright, colorful, loud, eager to please, equal parts dance party and inspiration-fest--this was a show for people who want/expect/need a little show in their shows. It was such a relief just to be able to sit back, let the circus do its job, and be entertained. They did all the work so I didn't have to.

I've ungenerously and flippantly referred previously to my "mixed feelings" about Beyonce, when I should've clarified that I'm actually completely fascinated by her as a performer and a leading figure in pop culture. (I can't believe she's been around for about 10 years now. Girl's clearly doing something right, and I don't think she's planning on going anywhere. Unless it's up, up, up.) She's so baldly hungry for power and glory--and that's OK. The great ones have to be, don't they? I'm getting a little sick of the "they're just like us" golden handcuffs we put on our actors and musicians. I mean, the odiousness of celebrities behaving badly is clearly appalling, but I also don't want to be lied to by artists who feel the need to reassure me they "haven't changed" and are "still the same person" they were before they got famous. Um, no, Beyonce's not just like me. Why on earth would it be necessary to my enjoyment of her music or her persona to think that we share some sort of common bond as people? She's a hugely successful, hugely talented pop star living a life completely unimaginable and undesirable to me. And I'm cool with that. Why shouldn't she be a bit of a megalomaniac? Anyway. There was something almost dorky in the abandon with which she was plainly reveling in being the center of so much attention. Yeah, she was quite obviously having fun on stage, but underneath the joy, you could also see the bossy little girl shrieking "mine! mine! mine! all mine!" in her smiles and twirls. She loved sharing the spotlight with her dancers and her foxy female band members because it was her spotlight to share. And hell, when you look at the enormity of the operation she's responsible for--the stage set-up, the crew, the musicians, and all the necessary logistics along the way--you kind of can't begrudge her the pleasure of the spotlight because that's a major load to be carrying, emotionally and financially, on one's shoulders.

And let us not overlook the not insignificant fact that she's eminently worthy of said spotlight because she's really, really fucking good at what she does. On the level of endurance alone, what she's doing is impressive, with the singing and dancing and costume changing and keeping the crowd fired up for two hours straight. And her voice. was. impeccable. All the melisma and showboating might get tiresome after a while, sure, but I was completely blown away (and willing to be blown away) that night by her powerhouse instrument. Because, when it comes down to it, that's really what we all paid all that money for--that voice and those songs and what that voice can do to those songs. The most stunning example of this was probably her performance of "Flaws and All" from the deluxe edition of B-Day. It's one of those "I don't know why you love me, but I love you because you do" songs (in fact, I think those might actually be some of the lyrics), and people went bananas for the fact that she had herself in tears by the end of it. I can't decide whether I feel slightly dirty about this or not, whether there's a tinge of whorishness in the way she contrived to work herself up into this fever pitch of emotion for our viewing/listening pleasure. (I'm just sayin'...it can't have been coincidence or simply good timing that the camera operator for the jumbotron knew to stay focused on her face for a tight closeup during the whole thing; I don't think there was a cutaway to a single full-length or torso shot until the end...when she was embraced by one of her obscenely--and I do mean obscenely--ripped male dancers who descended the staircase behind her wearing angel wings.) But, I also think she could never have found so much success as a singer without her ability to emote like that--to be both the mouthpiece for her audience's insufficiently/ineloquently expressed emotions and a sacrificial lamb, going through those tears night after night in order to bring us to some kind of point of catharsis.

This is all not to mention the big "Irreplaceable" singalong that just about closed the night. Talk about music doing work in people's lives. Of course, people probably would have been singing along regardless, and the organic nature of a spontaneous eruption of group song would have been infinitely more powerful, but B's control freakiness couldn't possibly leave something like that to chance, so it was that faux-graciousness again, not letting us forget that she was granting us permission to belt it out en masse while she looked on approvingly. But, it worked. This anthem of individual agency and self-sufficiency in the face of attempted displacement from the spotlight of one's own life hit its mark and got everyone, in accordance with B's whole musical project concerning "the dynamics of heterosexual relationships in the context of late capitalism" (as Matthew Fluxblog so brilliantly once put it), feeling better about their reasserted emotional net worth as individuals.

After the astonishingly average opening set of paint-by-numbers white boy R&B grooves from Robin Thicke (yes, son of Alan), I was sooo ready to sink my ears into some music with some actual substance, and it felt really good to have it (re)affirmed for me that, yeah, I ignore or discount Beyonce at my own peril and detriment. All in all, an incredibly fun night. Big love to my concertgoing companion Nick for taking those hairpin turns from snark to fan-girl freakout and back again with me without blinking an eye.

(Happy birthday, DS! Miss ya like hell, buddy.)

Great Writing by Other People

Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker (via).

James Green Pea-ness on why the Nintendo DS game Elite Beat Agents is a stunning piece of interactive pop criticism.

And, though only an excerpt is available online, Nick Hornby's interview with David Simon in the August '07 issue of The Believer is so good it's just unreal. Luckily, the bit that is available on the web is absolutely one of the high points of the whole exchange ("Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions"). Do yourself a favor and seek out the issue for the full thing.

Women in Music and Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Is it just me or have the past two years been really outstanding for music made by women? In 2006 we had insanely great albums from Regina Spektor, Camille, My Brightest Diamond, Kaki King, Christine Fellows, CSS, Joanna Newsom, and Neko Case (not to mention Cat Power, the Pipettes, and Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife), and this year has already (already? the year's like more than half over, AF--ed.) brought new stuff from Bjork, Laura Veirs, Amy Winehouse, Lucky Soul (featuring the chirpily powerhouse vocals of Ali Howard), the Long Blondes, Tracey Thorn, Feist, Polly Paulusma, and St. Vincent (who comes the closest I've ever heard in contemporary indie rock to emulating/channeling/updating the great Jackie Cain's playful yet mournful yet musically sophisticated singing style). I have no hypothesis or commentary about this or anything, I'm just sayin'. It's awesome. (Alt: "I'm just saying it's awesome!")

One-liner of the week month year decade? Be sure to explore his site for a bit while you're clicked through, especially the running tally of films seen in '07. I couldn't agree more on the point that the pleasures of Ocean's 13 (and 11 as well, I suppose; 12 remains dead to me) are largely tangled up with ideas of work. Of course, sexiness and silliness abound in these trifles, but it's also nice to get lost in a place where people are really good at what they do, confident in their abilities, eventually rewarded for their effort, and surrounded by equally talented and supportive associates. I mean, Vegas and Brad Pitt's bone structure to one side, this is the dream, right? This is what we're all looking for in one way or another?

Finally had a chance to catch Sunshine this weekend (the new one on the spaceship, not the older one with Ralph Fiennes's soapy D). Despite my affection for Danny Boyle, or maybe because of it, I'm willing to concede it was a swing-and-a-miss. It was ambitious as hell, which not enough movies are anymore (at least intellectually), and I have a feeling a lot of the visuals are going to stick with me for a while (esp. the many times we see the wonderful Cliff Curtis standing in the observation room, silhouetted against the glowing mass of the sun). But, the plot was giving me a serious case of the "huh?"s (and not in the good way), especially toward the "climactic" ending, and the script was laden with way too much dumbed-down exposition, a fact which was not helped by the bafflingly miscast crew. Now, my feelings about Cillian Murphy perhaps need not be stated, but come on--he's the one you're going to choose as your shipboard physicist on your suicide mission to the sun? Please. Likewise the rest of the beefy, generically handsome dudes, especially Chris Evans with his almost comically needless and situationally inappropriate perpetual huffiness. Michelle Yeoh gets a pass because, well, she's Michelle Yeoh, but the role was a joke and she was clearly doing everything she could to redeem it, and Rose Byrne was essentially doing a pale imitation of the genuinely sweet, smart strength of Jewel Staite as Kaylee in Serenity/Firefly. I'm sure most of these actors have their charms, but, on the whole, everyone was just too damn good looking. I longed for the sight of a few of those gloriously lumpy Scottish mugs in Trainspotting, or Brendan Gleeson from 28 Days Later. And while a years-long mission through the solar system with a tiny crew in constant contact and constant awareness of their own mortality should have been a perfect vehicle to examine Danny Boyle's usual interest in the ways that social groups break down under the weight of their own entropy, there was nothing about the degradation of the crew's relationships that seemed earned or organic. From the start, they were nothing more than walking representations of the most sophomoric ideas of character conflict, and without any lingering past affection established between them at all (Yeoh's deep connection to the plants in the greenhouse being the one possible exception; Murphy and Byrne's sleepytime discussion of their surface-of-the-sun nightmares decidedly not), there was no room to move within the realm of cynicism and distrust. The rot had already infected everything on screen, and not in an interesting or nuanced way, and so the only stakes left seemed to be vague, lofty ideals about their duty to the rest of the human race. Reverse those two, and then maybe you have a movie worth caring about and not an inadvertent dramatization of our current administration's rhetoric. Anyway, there's no way I'm giving up on Danny Boyle; I criticize because I care!

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.

Someone to Take Care Tonight

Here's the trailer for Wes Anderson's new one, The Darjeeling Limited (via Kottke). Squee! Aside from the easy/obvious nose jokes, I think it's brilliant that he's working with Adrien Brody. Polanski doesn't get acknowledged often enough as an influence on Anderson's style, and Brody hasn't really done much work worthy of his talent since The Pianist (I know I've kind of come around in my estimation of The Village and loved King Kong when I first saw it, but it's not like either of those are the best showcases for what he's capable of). I'm really eager to see what they're going to pull out of each other. (Or, more likely, how they're going to be kind of melancholicly stoic together.) Plus, I didn't realize the movie was coming out so early in the fall. Even if the limited release schedule doesn't bring it to Chicago until October, that's still, basically, right around the corner. Get excited.

It's a deceptively simple gag, but it slays: in response to the whole Boing Boing-ified Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks thing, Carl Wilson shares a pal's take on William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" as it perhaps would have been written by Jonathan Richman. It's, of course, called "Hey! Little Red Wheelbarrow!" and it's brill.

Foodies and Chicagoans (and Chicago foodies), have you heard the sad news about Grant Achatz? Not to make light or anything, but, goddamn, it's like something straight out of fucking O. Henry. How awful.

I read the first sentence of this review, rolled my eyes, and clicked away to a new page. Fuck that shit.

In continuing to think and talk about Spoon's new one, I love how we can all agree they're one of the best bands out there, but not on what that means and why. There are the old school Telephono and Series of Sneaks devotees, the ones who view Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight as the dead-center of the current indie rock canon, and those (incl. myself) who think they're doing their most vital and exciting work now with Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. How can that not be a sure indication of their surpassing brilliance?!

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga continues to stun, and album-closer "Black Like Me" is so good it just makes me want to puke all over the place. I'd been so blinded by the beauty of that broken fourth wall at the end of the song ("all the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want") that I'd kind of mentally glossed over the actual final line, "someone to take care tonight" (which I've been somewhat willfully mishearing as "someone should take care tonight"). It feels to me like one of the Streets' personal accountability songs collapsed into one line. Linking his own desire to be taken care of by an absent someone with a more universal longing to be taken care of that we all feel, he's also, I think, stepping up to the plate in that moment to become someone who will take care. (Assuming, that is, that the weird kids up front are clamoring for a piece of him, their beloved rock idol.) Masterful. I quite like Matos's review of Gax5 (via Largehearted Boy), especially for his reading of Gimme Fiction, but I'd call that last line of "Black Like Me" anything but an obscure angle.

Avoiding the Inevitable Pun

I am approximately as sick of hearing about Bush's colon as I am of hearing about Harry Potter.

That is all.

Pitchfork Music Festival 2007

Whoops. So, I guess this is coming, like, a week too late, huh? Anyway. Um, Pitchfork. Right, so that happened.

I kind of can't believe it's over already. The weekend came earlier in the month than it did last year, and, as such, it really snuck up on me and then whizzed by fairly breathlessly. So let's just jump right into it, shall we?



Because that's pretty much what it felt like last Friday night, taking the train down to Union Park after a full workday: jumping right into it. I felt like I'd landed in a foreign country when I arrived there, dizzy and out of sorts and nowhere near as drunk as I needed to be to get loose and have fun. I'm not really knowledgeable at all about any of the three albums that were being played front-to-back that night as part of the Don't Look Back thing, so I guess it was kind of refreshing to walk in without any expectations to manage. Slint were very cool, and I can only imagine how great that album would sound if I were suddenly sixteen and full of suburban angst again. GZA's performance of Liquid Swords got a weekend full of hip-hop highlights rolling in fine style. The epically geeked enthusiasm of all the white boys approx. ages 25-32 in the crowd who very clearly spent a large portion of their early adolescence listening to and loving the Wu-Tang Clan was utterly adorable. From where I was standing, there were a lot of supremely patient and indulgent girlfriends/spouses in the house that night, sweetly feigning (and/or being swept up with) enthusiasm as they watched their otherwise mature and responsible bfs throwing up some Wu. As far as my day-to-day listening habits go, I've totally missed the ball on getting into Sonic Youth--because, as with my similar intimidation of Yo La Tengo's or even Pixies' back catalogs, where does one even begin listening?--but I was, of course, thrilled to get to see these legends perform live that night. The passion and energy and pure physicality that these grand elders of rock put into their show made me feel slightly ashamed of how tired I was just standing there watching. Thurston Moore may, in fact, be the coolest man alive.

I had hoped to make it down to the park last Saturday for the Twilight Sad and Califone, but the public transportation situation was atrocious that day, so I rolled in later than I would have liked, to the sounds of Voxtrot giving off a sugar-rush of good cheer. Seriously, I think I started laughing out loud, in that good and happy way, when I got swept into the whole circus and saw Ramesh Srivastava bouncing around on stage in his black-and-white stripy shirt. I still have to make a point to pick up their first full-length.



I've never fallen in love with Grizzly Bear the way I thought I might, but, that being said, I was way more excited about seeing them on Saturday than I thought I would be. The harmonies really are everything they're cracked up to be, and when they start getting those wonderfully dense thunderstorms of sound rolling...wow. The only drawback was the fact that their time slot was at 3, when the sun was high and their tendencies toward cough-syrupy soporifics started putting everyone in the mood for a nap. Subsequent acts Beach House and Iron and Wine suffered the same kind of pacing troubles, which, I dunno, the pessimist in me feels like may have been intentional on Pitchfork's part, just to make the weekend feel like it had some sort of arc or build to it over the course of the three days. No one wants to peak in the middle of the afternoon on the second day, though, right, so I guess I get it. But still, it did kind of feel like the dumping ground for acts that they maybe didn't quite know what else to do with. I mean, going from Grizzly Bear to Battles? Then from Battles to Iron and Wine to Mastodon? Just kind of awkward. Anyway.

I had been told by JWard in no uncertain terms to be sure to catch some of the Beach House set in order to witness the awesome charisma of her former schoolmate, lead singer Victoria Legrand, but the side stage area where they were performing was quite crowded by the time I was able to get over there, so I was squeezed in at a sufficiently bad angle that only allowed me brief glimpses of Alex Scally's head. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to really sink into the mood they were creating, so the whole thing just kind of came off sounding like an underwater roller rink. And I'm bummed that, for all that, I didn't even get to hear "Tokyo Witch."

Having been burned in the past by seeing other technique-driven spastic freakout bands perform live (Niacin, I'm looking at you), I didn't feel much need to get too close to the stage for Battles, despite my passing interest in John Stanier's drumming. (I must be getting soft in my old age: I should have been annoyed by the whole four-foot-high ride cymbal thing, but instead I just found it kind of cute.) I got as much of them as I needed watching the monitor on the other side of the lawn and listening with one ear.

Tim Tuten, Hideout main man and repeat-offender MC for the fest (along with ex-Trenchmouth and current Eternals member Damon Locks), kept his shambling intros much shorter this year, but was definitely long on the funny. Going into his rant about staying hydrated to the crowd assembled for Iron and Wine's set, he stopped himself and said, "What am I saying? You guys are Iron and Wine fans, not Iron and…Vomit. I should be making this announcement before the Mastodon set." Again, maybe I'm just getting soft, and maybe I was more forgiving since there weren't as many acts at the fest this year I was already rabid about, but I found this all wonderfully amusing. Go Tim!

I really don't give too much of a shit either way about Iron and Wine, and even tend occasionally toward the suspicious (seriously, Beam, man, let the beard go), but I think I was one of the few people in the crowd that day who wasn't bored to tears by their set. (Well, maybe I should modify that to "one of the few bloggers in the crowd who wasn't bored to tears," based on some of the sniping I've read online this week.) The whispery lo-fi-ness I usually identify as a hallmark of their sound couldn't really be sustained in a live festival setting like that, which for me was a good thing, in that it allowed the pleasantness of his songs not to get overshadowed (undershadowed?) by his usual wind-in-the-trees crooning. Not to mention that the new, versatile band members beefed up their whole sound with a little more heft and variation. It felt kind of nicely hippiesque.

Again, not to harp on the bad scheduling that day, but putting Mastodon on stage around 6, when a lot of folks were experiencing crashing blood sugar levels and were in need of some dinner, was just kind of sadistic. Standing in line, caked in dust and sweat, with slaughteringly loud and intense metal shredding seeking me out across the park grounds like some sort of malevolent, low-lying fog, made me feel despairing, hateful, and slightly homicidal. (Um, the pad thai was worth it in the end.)



But, fucking Clipse, man. These guys were awesome. Standout set of the day, by far. The sort of standard hip-hop "we're the best" trope wasn't just posturing on their part that night; they knew they were lighting the place on fire. Maybe it was just that the sound coming out of the speakers was finally loud enough, maybe it was the exquisite tension of the minimalism in their beats (ohhhh man, that single tambourine shake in "Mr. Me Too" just sounded like the best thing in the world to me at that point), maybe they were just a little bit more willing to hustle for the crowd's appreciation rather than relying on previously established goodwill, but they truly owned the attention of anyone within earshot--no small feat in a setting so full of fickle, easily distracted indie rock kids.



From there, unfortunately, Cat Power was just a big snooze. I never warmed much to The Greatest (why would I not just listen to Dusty in Memphis instead?), but I know an awful lot of people who find her awfully marvelous, no matter where she happens to be on the spectrum of crazy at any given point, so I was keen to check out what she was doing. The set wasn't bad, it just wasn't right for that second-to-headliner slot. She must have been having sound problems in her monitors on stage that weren't translating out into the crowd because she kept apologizing after every song ("I'm really sorry, y'all!"), and the band was content to just lay back, all noodly-spoodly tasteful. Not that tastefulness is a bad thing, of course, it just wasn't what the overall vibe needed at that point. By all accounts, Girl Talk should have been on that main stage instead. We tried to head back there to the third stage to watch him do his thing, but we couldn't get near enough to see what was happening, or even hear all that well, much less dance, so we just headed back to the main part of the field, letting Chan's vocals kind of wash over us.

God bless Yoko for being a million years old and still being willing and able to shriek her lungs out on stage in front of a rock band--there's no denying that's just kind of unassailably rock and roll of her. But…ugh. I have no problem with "challenging" music in a slightly more controlled climate when I'm really able to ponder why something's challenging me in a particular way, but I was just not up to those mental/aesthetic gymnastics in that environment at that point in the day. So we fled, along with many other folks who were assuredly less forgiving in their assessment of her than I.

After using the day on Saturday to basically regain my festival-going sea legs, I was ready for action on Sunday. And action--thy name is Deerhunter.



I have no eloquent defense for what I like about this band. All I know is it's clear they're having a moment (as declareth the 'Gum), and I find them totally intoxicating. This comparison might be sacrilege to some, but I imagine that the kind of feeling I get listening to and watching them must be akin what it felt like to see Iggy and the Stooges in their prime. (In fact, when people start griping about Bradford Cox's behavior, I always think of this Lester Bangs quote: "I'd just like to ask some of these spikedomed little assholes if they think when Iggy formed the Stooges he sat down and said, 'Okay, boys, let's be punks: we'll get fucked up all the time and act like assholes and make a point of not knowing howta play our instruments! It'll make us famous!'...Iggy was just a fucked-up kid who took too many drugs and wanted to have the most fucked-up band in history so as to externalize his own inner turmoil.") Nothing really scandalous happened on stage, though I think most of us assembled there on that bright and beautiful afternoon were secretly hoping for at least a little of something. But, more importantly, they sounded fantastic. For all the hype and notoriety surrounding them, they really do play some remarkably well-crafted music, too. I'm consistently amazed at how relatively accessible their stuff is. The nearly seamless blend of droney, psychedelic swirl, buoyant basslines, and sweet-and-salty melodies is addictive, in the best way possible. Please be sure to check out Cryptograms if you haven't yet.

I spent a good chunk of the middle of the day bouncing from stage to stage, enjoying solid sets from bands I didn't have the burden of feeling emotionally connected to in any way. (This was a good thing.) Local kids the Ponys ran up against the technical difficulties with the sound system that seemed to be hanging like a cloud (one of the only clouds, both literal and figurative) over the weekend, but the audience was patient and stuck it out, which I was mildly surprised by. Maybe I was just craving a more stereotypical festival experience, but their brand of fairly straightforward rock 'n' roll was exactly what I wanted to hear that afternoon. Although I still don't think I'm quite ready to jump on the Menomena bandwagon, I did like them about 700x more on Sunday than I did last fall when I heard them open for the Long Winters. I have to admit my inner band geek always gets a bit of a thrill when they pull out that baritone sax. I mean, that's just not something you joke around about. Junior Boys brought the funk a bit later--who knew they were Canadian? Not me. I didn't stick around for much of their set, but was impressed when they got the audience clapping 3 against 4. Took a detour over to the side stage where I was utterly delighted to stumble upon the jazzy afrobeat groove of Nomo, improbably hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan. A cute blonde chick on trumpet, a bald, female, black, left-handed singing bass player, resilience to power through a shit-ton of feedback that was no fault of their own, and the chops to throw down some Sun Ra shit? What's not to love?



In an example of remarkably appropriate pacing/programming, the Sea and Cake took the stage in the glow of the late afternoon, and their sunshiny 60s pop never sounded better. I was standing next to a skinny young superfan who completely flipped out when they kicked into "The Argument" off '97's The Fawn. "This is, like, my favorite song!" he crowed to a small, dark-haired girl standing next to him. His enthusiasm was such that it was difficult for me to determine if they even knew each other before that moment.



Who the fuck is Jamie Lidell? I don't mind admitting that I thought this to myself pretty much every time I saw his name on the roster for the weekend. I even scribbled it down in my notes right as he took the stage. I think I'd been getting him confused with one of those James Blunt-y wet noodle singer-songwriters and was expecting some acoustic guitar bullshit out of him. I was surprised, then, when he started crooning some Otis Redding-style soul. Notes: "He looks weird, but he sounds great." I was temporarily unimpressed by the fact that he turned out to be singing to a prerecorded track rather than with a live band. But then...he let loose his looping, beatboxing, scatting aural assault on the masses, and I became an instant fan. Seriously. Notes again: "British blue-eyed soul to RULE THE WORLD." He was def the revelation of the fest for me. Like the other best acts of the weekend, he was reaching out beyond the lip of the stage, really connecting with the audience and completely filling the space with energy and sound. (Right before, perversely, kicking into a subdued and gentle ballad, he declared, "there's nothing I love more than making a NOISE!") I think one of the things I found most interesting about him is how this good-looking British guy with such an appealing, powerful, soulful voice turned into such a...well, such a freak of a performer. (The same can be asked of Kevin Barnes, but more on that later.) I don't know anything at all about his background, but it strikes me that he probably could have taken the wet-noodle easy-choice career path if he'd wanted to. Dudes who can croon like that don't have to be interesting musicians. Lucky for us, then, that he turned into the type of maniac who'll wear a gold lamé robe/smoking jacket and a crown of flowing metallic streamers on stage while laying down his own beats, live, and igniting us with the thrill of experimentation supported by some seriously sophisticated melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sensibilities. According to his post-fest Pitchfork interview (scroll down), he's currently in the studio working on a new album (his first since '05's Multiply); can't wait to see what those sessions yield.



Aaaaand, Malkmus. He didn't blow me away or anything, but he didn't have to. He's Stephen fucking Malkmus. He came out wearing a pink polo shirt and making Jimmy Buffett jokes, fer chrissake. But with the sun beginning to set, the planes passing silently overhead, the trees swaying and rustling, the dust gently kicking up around our feet, the summertime warmth on our arms and faces, and the kids blowing up for the first notes of the Pavement tunes, there was a way that we, collectively, seemed to be saying to him, "tell us about our youth, Stephen." And he obliged, mostly. Full of that signature shambling charm, shrugging off his forgotten lyrics and flubbed chord changes, he didn't have to act important to respect and respond to the fact that it was an important moment for so many of us. (Myself sort of dubiously included.)



Which brings us to--oh God--Of Montreal. If Jamie Lidell was the new-discovery revelation of the weekend for me, then Of Montreal was the "holy shit, I thought I liked them before, but do I ever plan on becoming a superfan now" mind-blower. There is just nothing about their set I didn't like. From the hugely orchestral entrance music to the costumes and silly props to the ineffably catchy songs from Hissing Fauna, the whole thing came off like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Cabaret. Not to mention that, cross-dressing and all--hell, especially considering the cross-dressing--Kevin Barnes is like the sexiest thing in indie rock right now. It's almost difficult to quantify the number of places, psychically and emotionally and intellectually, the band hits you all at once. I usually don't need my favorite musicians to do too many things for me; play a nice song with some nice lyrics and show some awareness of how you're using your stage presence and that's usually enough to satisfy me. But I was completely entranced by the multiple levels they were operating on here: cute as hell with the sugary melodies and childlike wonder in the brightly colored costumes, face paint, and balloons, but also deeply perverse with a twinge of pure fright, bolstered by a strong undercurrent of anything/everything-goes eroticism aiming to turn you on almost in spite of yourself. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that last point seems to be the main difference between the Flaming Lips' stage show and Of Montreal's. I find Wayne Coyne terribly attractive and charismatic, but he's not playing with different notions of sexuality much beyond putting a bunch of hot chicks on stage in alien masks, am I right?) I'm sure much of this is born of pure instinct and the kind of freaky outsider sensibility that seems part and parcel of the whole E6 scene, but Barnes is also very clearly an extremely smart dude (blah, blah, blah, Story of the Eye, yadda yadda), just now coming into the full power of his talent and stage personae, and it would be a disservice not to acknowledge it as such. It shows even in something as simple as the balloons they brought out as props: not content to merely let them flutter around as signifiers for "party" or "whimsy," they recognized that the most interesting thing about balloons is usually popping those fuckers. Impish and mischievous, darkly childlike, mildly violent, and kind of implicitly sexual with the very tangible representations of "tension" and "release." Then, you put paper cut-outs of Kevin's face on a bunch of them, enacting with kind of a wink and a nudge the psychological and neurochemical trauma that forms the core of Hissing Fauna, and, goddamn, if they haven't instantly leapt beyond most of their music-making peers with a simple, wordless gesture. And then to encore with a cover of the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night"? I probably would have cried at the perfection of it all, if I hadn't just lost my mind. I've been dimly aware of these guys at least since The Gay Parade ("Fun Loving Nun" was a staple on my college radio show) and have, of course, been loving Hissing Fauna like everyone else this year, but, like I said, I'm planning on really digging into their catalog now. Thanks, Pitchfork!



I'd kind of half-seen the New Pornographers twice before their Sunday set, so I was looking forward to finally seeing/hearing them with my full attention yet also relieved not to have to get into "OMG, must savor every moment!" mode. There's not really much to say about them that you couldn't assume on your own; consummate craftsmanship, songs perfect for singalongs at dusk, and a hefty dose of anticipation for LP4 Challengers (for those of us who haven't already preordered and digitally downloaded it, that is). No Neko, and of course no Dan, but Carl was surprisingly funny (and also surprisingly snarky; if you haven't already, see also his hilariously meta Pitchfork interview) and Kathryn Calder ably handled female vocalizing duties. They also gestured toward the kind of bombast a band usually needs to play one of these big outdoor festivals by interpolating "We Will Rock You" into the outro of one of their new tunes that they weren't sure how to finish. It delighted the crowd, and myself as well, but I also sensed a bit of (unintentional?) cynicism in it. If nothing else, though, they went out with "The Bleeding Heart Show," which was a real thrill to get to hear live. Hey la, hey la indeed.

If I hadn't already been trending toward increased hip-hop fandom (or at least awareness) for the past year or so, then this weekend definitely would have confirmed that desire in me, and no act moreso than headliners De La Soul. With no other sets to line up for by that point in the night, the entire assembled crowd was focused on their stage and they just showered the place with energy and goodwill. Seeing the magnitude of the audience, right from the get-go Maceo announced, "I like these kind of events because we can learn so much about each other, and that's what hip-hop culture's all about." I dunno, call me cheeseball or call me the exact target for the kind of sentiment needed to gloss over the clear racial disparity between the largely white festivalgoers and a Long Island-born black hip-hop group, but I just felt like that was a nice way to get us all on the same page for the duration of their performance. I danced like an idiot by myself near the midpoint of the grounds, shouted when they asked us to shout, threw my hands up when they asked us to get our hands in the air, and just generally felt awed to be in the presence of these dudes who are so in command of their craft and so willing to really put on a balls-out kind of show. Maybe it's just because I've had some experience performing myself, but I'm always fascinated by performers who can stay in control of what they're doing while also modulating their stage presence to meet the demands of the space they're in. And the fact that they, especially Posdnuos, were able to not just project their charisma and skills out into, but to own the attention, ears, and rears of an entire park full of people totally blew me away. They were, quite simply, the perfect cap to the weekend.

The rest of my pictures from the fest can be found here, and, as ever, big thanks to the pals who hung out with me and tolerated my geekery for any portion of the weekend, and to those of you who've been eager to hear my impressions.

Gimme Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

The new Spoon album is so good it's like it's always been there. I can't imagine it never having existed. I can't imagine myself having existed without it. A stunner. An instant classic. A step away from Gimme Fiction. A step back toward Girls Can Tell perhaps. But also a defiant step forward. I don't want to overstate the case for fear of raising expectations beyond reason, but damn. (Be sure to check out this illuminating interview with Britt Daniel about Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga over at eMusic.)

The new Interpol is also quite good. Stabs at honest-to-God warmth, both in Paul's voice and in the production. I only got through it once before Ga(x5) entered my life, so I don't have much else to say about it at the moment. But it shows promise. My enjoyment of these albums seems to be inversely proportional to everyone else's: I like Turn On the Bright Lights the least of the series and each subsequent release has surprised and excited me more.

Pitchfoooooooooooooork! Hope to see some of you kids out there this weekend.

Recent Items of Interest

So, I just discovered this great little band that goes by the name of the White Stripes. Perhaps you've heard of them? There's an iTunes-exclusive track called "Baby Brother" that came bundled with my Icky Thump download, and it's the stupidest and most wonderful thing I've heard in a while. Makes me think of Lilo and Stitch with its Elvis/rockabilly nods and the "although your head is blue / think the world of you, baby brother" line. Recommended. (Speaking of which, be sure to check out 29 Thoughts on the New White Stripes Album over at Nerve. Chockful of comedy gold, I says! I wish I were sharp enough to have written most of it, but #16 most especially.)

I think Sasha Frere-Jones is right in his uneasiness (fourth paragraph down) about Feist's current vogue among the indie-rock set and how that relates to their stereotypical unwillingness to give the time of day to "commercial pop like the Bee Gees or Sade." (John Roderick also hints at this in his Bonnaroo blog: "I didn’t hear cheering anywhere else like the cheering for Leslie Feist — she’d arch her eyebrow and the place would blow up — which always makes me wonder what the heck is going on....She must be code for something that I haven’t figured out.") I'd go even deeper, though: in some of those plaintive, back-of-the-throat notes she holds at the end of a phrase, she sounds like nothing so much as the indie rock Ani DiFranco, a singer the hipsters definitely aren't rushing to rally around. How does she do it? How does she make it work for her? She's damn cute, and the songs do lilt damn pleasantly. Is it the Canadian factor? Anyway, many thanks to MS for loaning me The Reminder. It feels like a good summertime album right now.

Need to catch up on a bunch of music you may have missed so far this year? Then be sure to check out Marathonpacks's midterm mixes (1, 2, and 3). If nothing else, worth it for "Josh Homme: 'Hey where's my mojo' / Liars: 'WE ARE HAVE YOUR MOJO'."

Did everyone else miss James Green Pea-ness like I did? Well, he's back, motherfuckers, and ready to sear your eyeballs all over again with his epic flights of prose.

Happy Spoon day tomorrow, kittens. Here's the video for "The Underdog" in case you haven't seen it yet.

And the hits just keep on coming over at Daytrotter: an outstanding session with the National (including a slightly funkier, up-tempo take on Boxer stand-out "Slow Show") and some quiet, melancholy ruminations on the band's after-midnight appeal from the estimable Mr. Moeller: "It’s a land where the talking stops and men and women take their relationships to the mattress, to die or to galvanize them against all possible contrivances and conditions. It’s usually the former that takes shape and burns through the superficialities of the daytime hours. A night – a midnight – tolerates no bullshit." Interview, apparently, still t/k. Interview up now. Read all about Matt Berninger getting mowed down by a Lincoln Town Car in front of a bus full of little kids!

I broke my camera, but then I got a new one.

Joe Meno continues to rule my early-July reading habits. Just polished off The Boy Detective Fails. Reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums with its sickly dread of adulthood and unwillingness to grow past early childhood triumphs, it's maybe slightly over-long, but brings us, among other sweetness, this lovely little bit of weirdness from one of its tiny, almost apologetic, interstitial chapters:

"In our town, we feature a variety of adult-themed bookstores; we think you may be familiar with the kind. Along the narrow and dusty aisles are thousands of doe-eyed women caught in the most mysterious of poses. Why are there so many terrible places like this in our town? Because the heart is terrible--like a rotten tooth, it is small and soft and weak. It has a terrible requirement, and that terrible requirement is mystery. For example, there is one particular magazine in one particular aisle in one particular dirty bookstore in our town called Girls in Turtlenecks. That is all there is: shot after shot of blushing gals in tight-fitting turtlenecks, naked from the waist down. We stare at a copy and feel flush. And somehow, silently, we know the truth: Airbrushed and honeyed, they are still no match for the feeling we get waiting to kiss."

The Ground Is So Proud Just to Hold Us Up

It's been a Roderiffic week for us Long Winters fans. J.Rod's Bonnaroo blog for MSNBC is worth its weight in pull-quotes, and now Daytrotter has posted an interview with the man and an unbelievable live session to go along with it. "Clouds" has always quietly been one of my favorite songs on Putting the Days to Bed and it just sounds so free and nice and loose here. And, hearing a live take on "Scared Straight"--a song that I could barely make a mix CD without for a span of about two years--makes me so excited I could just puke. I swear, as days go by, I'm becoming less an eloquent defender of my favorite movies, books, and music and more a hysterical, squealing, geeked-out fangirl.

Speaking of Bonnaroo, I've been obsessed for a while now with the Flickr page of a wonderful New York-based photographer, Elizabeth Weinberg (surprise, surprise--I was first introduced to her stuff thanks to her lovely portraits of the Long Winters on tour), and she's got a KILLER set from this year's 'Roo. They're all gorgeous, but be sure to check out what she has for the Hold Steady, the Flaming Lips, and Spoon.

Happy solstice, my bebes.

'Fork & Spoon

Ohhh, you know what's awesome? Go lay in a tanning bed for a while and crank up Deerhunter's Cryptograms while you're in there. You'll feel like you're in a David Lynch movie or something.

Pitchfork previews The Underdog off Spoon's forthcoming new one Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm sure the Jon Brion fan-boys and -girls will be geeking out about his production work here, but I'm of the mind that the specialest special effect that's going to be found anywhere on the disk is Britt's voice. Love that howl. Get excited.

LOL, that's my hand.

I didn't have a chance to write up anything about the Animal Collective show I went to at the Metro a few weeks back, but Pitchfork has a great short review and some representative shots from that night, and Stereogum caught a show last weekend in New York that sounds every bit as good as the one I saw here. I'm definitely turning into a big Collective convert.

"Enough With This Cicada Bullshit"

From the brilliant and twisted mind of Dr. Benji Kelnardo, a few thoughts on cicadas:

This has to stop. Every single fucking day I turn on the news and some jackass from Schaumburg is fryin' up a pan of the little fuckers or covering them in chocolate and arranging them on a silver platter. People keep sending in pictures of cicadas doing all sorts of gross things. They are making cakes in the form of cicadas and finding dead ones and dressing them up like a rock band and then freezing them (seen on channel 5, worth checking the website). They have made their appearance in Crown Point and buzz and hum all day long (this is actually kinda neat, it echoes through the whole neighborhood). However, they are so fucking hideous I don't even know where to begin. This is some biblical shit. They are big, ugly, stupid creatures that fly haphazardly into windows, screens, cars, etc. And they shed their exoskeletons. Um, just in case you didn't get that the first time--"they shed their exoskeletons." And they leave them wherever they feel like, driveways, bushes, porches. Yuck. And, matters got much worse today and yesterday as the filthy fucking sea-chickens discovered them. It looks like our neighborhood is a beach or the Southlake Mall parking lot, covered in the flying rats as they peck at the ground and fight each other for the creatures. It is Mother Nature at her ugliest. This sea-chicken phenomenon is apparently happening all over the area according to the
news. That's some sick shit. Fuck them. All of them.

LOLsploshun

Inspired by: Laughing Squid
Rolled by: Snakeface
Using my: Flickrstream
So much: awsum

1966-1997

Boxer, and Other Bits & Bobs

Required reading: Joss Whedon's short and impassioned essay about the Dua Khalil murder.

Great interview at the Onion A.V. Club with one of my fave contemporary comedians, Louis C.K.

My opinion of Boxer hasn't really crystallized yet, which is as it should be, considering the way Matt and the brothers like to hide little time bombs of feeling throughout their songs that are designed not to explode on you for months. But, man. I just hear those opening piano chords of "Fake Empire" and instantly feel like I want to burst into tears. That's got to be a good thing. So far the album seems to breathe best over actual stereo speakers, rather than through headphones. All the empty space around Matt's vocals comes through a little more clearly, and poignantly, that way. And, though I take exception with the way Pitchfork asserts that this is "a drummer's album" with the phrase "Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here" (emphasis mine), as if he's suddenly gotten good out of nowhere, as if the previous albums aren't chockful of brilliant drumming, the point is well taken. Those snare snaps and other fills in "Mistaken for Strangers" are every bit as likely to get stuck in your head as the chorus.

Happy Towel Day, everybody!

And, of course, happy 30th to my girl HLo-M. (That looks like the symbol for some sort of chemical compound.)

Enjoy your holiday weekend, my kittens!

Save S/FJ's Photos

I've linked so often, and with so much joy, to Sasha Frere-Jones's blog in the past, I would be completely remiss if I didn't post a link today to his online collection plate. Apparently he had a major hard drive crash this weekend and has lost a great quantity of his beautiful photos. A hard drive recovery service will be charging him an exorbitant fee to recover said photos, and he's looking for some help to defray this cost. Throw a little love brutha's way, wouldja?

Bjork, Live at the Auditorium Theatre

Nice Village Voice write-up on the National's recent stint opening for Arcade Fire in New York (via). I'm just bouncing off the walls with anticipation for Boxer next week and the show at the Metro next month. (Also, LOL: "grandma-throttling enthusiasm". This reminds me of J. Rod's classic line in his report from last year's Bonnaroo about his previous perception of Cat Power's music: "[this girl I was dating] would play Cat Power on her car stereo at a really low volume whenever I was in the car, so that it sounded to me like a field recording of the rape of a thousand grandmas. Bleah.")

OMG, even as a non-Pumpkins fan, I am totally in love with the blinding brilliance of these LOLCorgs (via) and I CAN HAS CORGAN?. "Mah cred, i mournz it!"

I was planning on reading the 33 1/3 book on Steely Dan's Aja anyway, but if we're getting (according to this excerpt, at least) witty wordsmith Donald Fagen dropping Don Ellis references 'n shit, I may have to bump it a little further up the queue.

Um, yeeeah, and I also saw Bjork live for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre on Saturday. Best concert ever? Pretty close to it. I have never heard a group of people cheer that loud, outside of a sporting event perhaps. Everyone in the place was freaking out left and right, and she was just shockingly good. (Or perhaps unshockingly, depending on how you want to look at it.) If I were going to make a mix-CD sampler of her stuff for the uninitiated, I could do worse than copping from that night's set list. It was a nearly perfect representation from all her previous full-lengths. The stuff from Vespertine (one of my top-five all-time-fave albums) brought the tears to the eyes. The only technical difficulty of the entire night was, unfortunately, some feedback at the beginning of "Unison," which did ruin the mood a bit, though. The most impressive technical achievement of the night, on the other hand, would have to be the GREEN LASERS OF DOOM that shot across the hall like lightning bolts during those awesome horn stabs in "Army of Me" ("and if you complain"--wham!--"once more..."). Obvy, I'm sure rigging all that electro-stuff up takes great skills, but the effect was staggeringly perfect in its simplicity. I'm not sure how else I can gush creatively or interestingly about the show other than to say that, aside from every minute of music that filled the theater, perhaps the best thing I heard on Saturday night was a little girl, probably about nine or ten, walking into the lobby behind me with her parents, saying "Mommy, I've got butterflies!" because she was so excited to be there. Me too, kid. Me too.

Amy Winehouse, Live at the Vic

I don't know what show all these cranky reviewers were at, man, because it def wasn't the one I was at last night. I mean, really. I went in to this show with insanely high expectations, and it pretty much met every one.

I have no pictures for you, my kittens, because they made me relinquish my camera to the coat check girl after the kind and gentle and patient and sensitive [not so much--Ed.] doorpeople saw my humble point 'n' shoot in my messenger bag, but, honestly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it in my hands as a distraction. I could focus all my attention on the stage, and the show I found there was white hot.

Amy was backed by eight-piece band The Dap Kings (two saxes and a trumpet, two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards) and accompanied by two gorgeous (male) back-up singers. The dudes all wore three-piece suits, the horn section had some subtle but perfectly effective choreography, and the drummer was doing rim-shots when Amy started throwing candy out into the audience. The whole thing would have seemed straight out of central casting if it wasn't, well, right on the money. I felt like it totally transcended its own Motown revivalism by going straight for the heart of the sound, without mucking it up with too much with self-consciousness or self-satisfaction. Not to mention that these guys were all consummate professionals, just jamming away like they were born with their instruments in their hands.

The folks who are whinging about Amy's stage presence clearly wanted some sort of polished professional, and, the way I understand it, that's just not her steez. Even though she didn't throw a tantrum or snort some coke off the mic stand like I was kind of secretly hoping she would, she was a little bit snotty and a little bit spacy--in short, everything I wanted her to be. I read her body language less as insecurity and more as a casual don'tgiveafuck that didn't have to actively demand our attention. It seemed like she just instinctively knew that she deserved it. Not to give her a free pass on the anorexia front or anything, but, she looked fantastic in her jeans and midriff-bearing shirt, white hoop earrings, and huge mound of jet-black hair extensions. (The top of her head seriously looked like some sort of evil cupcake gone to seed.) They played most of Back to Black and, I'm assuming, a few more off Frank (I only knew "Fuck Me Pumps"), and even snuck in a little bit of Lauren Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."

Of course, there were big, big cheers for "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," but the audience was basically losing their crackers before a note was even played. It was amazing. Most rock shows I go to, there's a sense that the audience is cheering for the frontman/woman because they view him/her basically as a more fully realized version of themselves; it's like, I think a lot of kids idolize Colin Meloy or John Darnielle because they fancy "yeah, those are the kinds of songs I would write if I could write songs; they're speaking directly to my experience as a certain kind of consumer of a certain kind of music." But Amy's appeal is so much more nebulous and intangible. (Which is maybe why the cookie-cutter reviews aren't quite able parse it in the familiar vocabulary of the average rock show?) I mean, she's got the sexiness, the voice, the attitude, the Britishness, the notorious reputation, the songwriting skills, but, really, none of those things, even working as a unit, are big enough to contain her. You can't really pin down the thing that inspired such an explosion of love in the room. I dunno. I'm bummed that the haters are hating today, 'cause I had a blast.

The jury's still out for me on opener Patrick Wolf. I'm not overly in love with his songs, but the specific kind of glammy, hammy lllllllllllllllookatme! musk he was giving off on stage reminded me of this time, I think it was last summer, when I saw three friends, two girls and a boy, get on the brown line at Armitage. They were clearly coming home from summer school or summer camp or somesuch, and they each had a plastic spoon and were sharing a white styrofoam cup of strawberry ice cream. The boy, all loose, rangy Jacob's ladder limbs and joints, at one point, a propos of nothing as far as I could tell, leaned all the way over so that he was about an inch away from sticking his nose in one of the girl's ears, the girl he clearly fancied best of the two. There was this obscene, hormonal, yet completely innocent intimacy in the whole exchange. That kind of sexy, sweet, gummy bear gesture of affection (both Merriam-Webster's definitions 2 "fondness" and 7 "the state of being affected" intended/appropriate here) more than made up for what I just wasn't getting out of the music itself.