"Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass." I can't think of any better way to bring out the undercurrent of redonkulousness inherent to the months I spent getting up before dawn last fall to monitor with the CBCM than with this article from The Onion (via). Classic. The graphics are outstanding.
That's Dyer pride, bitches. Get shot at, shrug it off, continue on your drive to Michigan. Hometown, represent!
Steely Dan's "Peg" has to be one of the most perfect songs I can think of, so I was pleased as punch when Stereogum pointed me in the direction of this short making-of video. Minute after minute of brilliance, from Rick Marotta discussing how he got that spine-tinglingly perfect cymbal sound to Becker and Fagen openly sneering at guitar solo outtakes. Also, be sure to head over to Steely's web headquarters and read their bloody brilliantly funny open letter (also via the 'Gum) to Luke Wilson, asking him to convince Owen to publicly apologize at one of their concerts for stealing the plot idea for You, Me, and Dupree (serial comma, bitches) from their song "Cousin Dupree." If you don't immediately start giggling at the opening (all caps) salvo, "OPEN LETTER TO THE GREAT COMIC ACTOR, LUKE WILSON," you might be a little bit dead inside.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Wolverine vs. Shark
What's that you say? You haven't had enough Hugh Jackman in your life lately? Well, check the previews for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (via) and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (via). Now I know why I'd been getting those films confused every time I read about them for the past year or so. I hate, hate, hated Requiem for a Dream, but thought Pi was kind of nifty, and, though I haven't seen it in years, I'm still fairly confident that Nolan's Insomnia is not just criminally underrated and under-seen but also much better than Memento. I'll be eager to see what these young turks have got up their sleeves this time around. The IMDB says we're looking at October release dates for both.
Also, this is going haunt my nightmares for weeks to come:
Also, this is going haunt my nightmares for weeks to come:
Thursday, July 20, 2006
One, Two. One, Two, Three, Four!
OMG, boner alert: Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman are doing a movie together. And not just any movie, but a bona-fee-day high-class period pitcha for the Beeb, based on CRP go-to foreword-writer Philippa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl. Natalie will play Anne, and Scarlett will play her sister Mary. Get yr kleenex boxes ready! (I was talking to the historical romance fans who, y'know, get emotional about all the torrid romance and tragedy and such. Ahem.)
Fred Armisen, thank you for taking to task the annoying douchebags who rock out to their music, oblivious to their surroundings, on the bus or train or in other public spaces. "I can't deal with other people making their musical tastes known to everybody else. I don't like people bobbing their heads or getting into stuff at all. It should be private....I don't even tap my feet. I hate that." This has long been a pet peeve of mine in the city. I couldn't agree more.
Can anyone confirm for me that Danger Mouse really is only 28, as this New York Times Magazine profile claims? I can't find a birth year listed on either allmusic or Wikipedia. I guess it really doesn't matter; I just find the realization that he's, like, my age kind of remarkable. Also, I can't stand Chuck Klosterman. That line "There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty" is just beyond offensive.
S/FJ's "oily pec-off" turn-of-phrase made me laugh out loud here.
Space + ancient Egypt = GeekOverload.com. Loves it.
"Slap Your Knee and Say Ouch" is sososo funny. Bonus points, too, for some Ben Kweller love. (Stereogum has a new Kwellah MP3, "Penny on the Train Track," from his forthcoming self-titled disk.)
I'm obsessed this week with that new Girl Talk album Night Ripper. Listening to it feels like compressing a cross-country road trip down into 42 frenzied minutes, that feeling of speeding, exhausted but wired on caffeine, down unfamiliar highways, cramped but kind of giddy, switching radio stations as you drift in and out of reception, wondering if driving over the next state line is going to bring oldies, hip-hop, or the best indie rock programming you never would have expected to find just outside Tulsa city limits. Your favorite tracks will largely be determined by how many of the samples you recognize and how much you're amused by their juxtaposition; right now I'm all about "Minute by Minute," which, as the Pitchfork reviewer mentions, samples Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945," but also sneaks Sophie B. Hawkins and Steely Dan in there, among many (many, many) others.
Fred Armisen, thank you for taking to task the annoying douchebags who rock out to their music, oblivious to their surroundings, on the bus or train or in other public spaces. "I can't deal with other people making their musical tastes known to everybody else. I don't like people bobbing their heads or getting into stuff at all. It should be private....I don't even tap my feet. I hate that." This has long been a pet peeve of mine in the city. I couldn't agree more.
Can anyone confirm for me that Danger Mouse really is only 28, as this New York Times Magazine profile claims? I can't find a birth year listed on either allmusic or Wikipedia. I guess it really doesn't matter; I just find the realization that he's, like, my age kind of remarkable. Also, I can't stand Chuck Klosterman. That line "There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty" is just beyond offensive.
S/FJ's "oily pec-off" turn-of-phrase made me laugh out loud here.
Space + ancient Egypt = GeekOverload.com. Loves it.
"Slap Your Knee and Say Ouch" is sososo funny. Bonus points, too, for some Ben Kweller love. (Stereogum has a new Kwellah MP3, "Penny on the Train Track," from his forthcoming self-titled disk.)
I'm obsessed this week with that new Girl Talk album Night Ripper. Listening to it feels like compressing a cross-country road trip down into 42 frenzied minutes, that feeling of speeding, exhausted but wired on caffeine, down unfamiliar highways, cramped but kind of giddy, switching radio stations as you drift in and out of reception, wondering if driving over the next state line is going to bring oldies, hip-hop, or the best indie rock programming you never would have expected to find just outside Tulsa city limits. Your favorite tracks will largely be determined by how many of the samples you recognize and how much you're amused by their juxtaposition; right now I'm all about "Minute by Minute," which, as the Pitchfork reviewer mentions, samples Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945," but also sneaks Sophie B. Hawkins and Steely Dan in there, among many (many, many) others.
Monday, July 17, 2006
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.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(Over a month ago, I was contacted by a representative from M80, a company that provides "online grassroots marketing" services for big companies like the Gap, Miramax, Comedy Central, House of Blues, and Interscope Records who are trying to figure out how to harness the power of blog-buzz for their products. Based on my mention of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my dual write-up on The Proposition and Lady Vengeance, they asked if they could send me a gratis copy of the recently released two-disc Collector's Edition DVD of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to review here. I said yes.)
I find myself growing bored with collectors' editions and endless amounts of special features on DVDs. My ever-decreasing attention span to one side, I think a large part of it is nothing more than the fact that the novelty of having easy access to all that behind-the-scenes footage is just wearing off. (Whither the heady excitement of the early days of building my DVD collection?) Not to mention that, as pointless and predictable EPK interviews become ubiquitous on DVDs, online, and in multiplexes, the quality-to-quantity ratio is discouraging enough that I simply don't have the patience anymore to slog through it all at home on my relatively crappy TV for one interesting observation from the fight choreographer. The amount of the drug I have to consume to get that same old high just isn't worth it for me anymore.
All that being said, it's curious to spend time with two discs' worth of special features for a movie I don't really care about one way or the other. I think I'd only seen it once before, a couple years ago when I was at the height of my irrational hatred for Robert Redford (I've subsequently crested that wave and seem to be settling down into a kind of bemused annoyance), and pretty much felt the same about it then as I feel about it now. I respect its popularity and influence on cheekily self-aware deconstructions of genre flicks, but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't touch or resonate with me at all.
So, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of the whole experience was some satisfaction for my curiosity about director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy is the only film on his resume that I've seen, but unlike, say, Sam Peckinpah or Peter Bogdanovich, whose work I am similarly ill-versed in, I had gleaned essentially no generalized, even stereotypical, sense of his auteur's fingerprint from the pop-culture ether over my years of watching movies. On the first page of my notes from the day I started watching one of the supplemental documentaries, I even wrote, "who is George Roy Hill? I know he's the director, but what else has he done?"
I think part of the reason my ignorance about Hill, and perhaps also my ambivalence toward the film as a whole, bothered me as much as it did was because of my knee-jerk assumption that since this movie came out in 1969, in the early days of the American New Wave, I should have been able to identify it in terms of its director's authorial voice, yet couldn't. And the more I mulled it over, the more I began to realize that my tendency would be to identify this movie as anybody's but the director's. It's easy to credit the film to Newman and Redford, whose sexy, insouciant acting style set the bar for four subsequent decades of similar performances that often nail the sex and insouciance without the actual acting chops to back it up. (I mean, for only one example, Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11 are pretty much direct descendants of this exact buddy movie energy.) It's equally easy to call the film Goldman's, still one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood who we can identify by name and general style, or Bacharach's, whose minimal yet insidiously memorable score defines a huge part of the feel of the film. In my geekier moments, I would even venture to claim that the film actually belongs to Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers who helped us as an audience become aware of what the camera was doing, who recognized that beautiful shooting wasn't always flawless shooting and made it safe for us to relish lens flares, sudden in-camera zooms, and other idiosyncracies that would have been unthinkable in the classical Hollywood style. But never would I have said, "oh yes, this film's got George Roy Hill written all over it."
Yet, as soon as I started watching the special features, I found a deluge of anecdotes and testimonials to Hill's strong personality and artistic vision. Just remark after remark about how instrumental he was in the construction of the final project, how he creatively and respectfully sparred with the actors over their choices and opinions, how he orchestrated a two-month-long practical joke on Redford, how his commitment and energy held the entire shoot together even after his back went out and he spent a good portion of it directing laid out on a pallet, and how he went to the mat defending the more iconoclastic, and now iconic, aspects of the film (casting a then relatively unknown Redford opposite Newman at the height of his popularity, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" musical sequence, the tweaking of traditional Western conventions by showing Butch and Sundance running away from the law rather than standing firm and fighting, the tonal mingling of comedy and tragedy throughout).
And this impression doesn't just come from others' accounts. There's a wonderfully retro-feeling making-of documentary from 1994 included on one of the two discs that illustrates, in his own words, the gruff veteran's demeanor everyone else kept going on about. It gives a great sense of Hill's gloves-off approach (complete with f-bombs flying). And it makes his deceptive invisibility even more puzzling. Is that his actual innovation here, the actual proof of a true auteur's hand--that he exerted control so assured that it gave a strong and unselfish frame that would allow ample space for the other contributors' work to be actively noticed and appreciated? If so, that's some amazing fucking ninja stealth, that kind of ability to lead from behind, to make it look like everyone else is doing the work when it's only through his (luckily, benevolent) master plan to grant them the latitude to labor under that perception. Of course, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I might be reading all this through my own ignorance and lack of context for his body of work; he did win the Best Director Academy Award for The Sting just a few years later, beating out--get this--Bergman, Bertolucci, a young George Lucas, and William Friedkin. Perhaps I'll feel differently if I ever get around to seeing The Sting or Slap Shot or The World According to Garp. (See, though, did any of you know he directed those movies? Or did you just mentally categorize them as that other Newman/Redford movie, that Newman hockey movie, and that Robin Williams/John Irving movie with John Lithgow in drag?) I dunno; I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument. At any rate, it's a neat little mystery to puzzle out, reconstituting the boundaries of an unfashionable American movie master.
And, of course, as often happens to me when I spend some considerable time with a movie I may have been ambivalent about before, I've developed a begrudging affection for Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman is a nearly perfect human; anything I have to say on the matter is going to pale in comparison to watching his movies or doing a Google image search and drinking in the dreaminess. (I know it's all about the baby blues, but has anybody taken a look at this man's nose recently? Just beautiful.) You can see Redford working really hard to be worthy of this career-making role, but I can forgive him almost anything in this movie for the sake of the moment when, before the ball-kicking knife fight, Butch tells Sundance, "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him," and Sundance drawls in response, "Love to," then looks up with that little wave and slowly breaking homicidal smile. I could just watch that exchange on repeat for hours. And, unlike the bon mot from my hypothetical fight choreographer, I'm totally willing to watch, and rewatch, a demonstrably well-made movie I may not happen to like for the sake of coming across a gem like that.
I find myself growing bored with collectors' editions and endless amounts of special features on DVDs. My ever-decreasing attention span to one side, I think a large part of it is nothing more than the fact that the novelty of having easy access to all that behind-the-scenes footage is just wearing off. (Whither the heady excitement of the early days of building my DVD collection?) Not to mention that, as pointless and predictable EPK interviews become ubiquitous on DVDs, online, and in multiplexes, the quality-to-quantity ratio is discouraging enough that I simply don't have the patience anymore to slog through it all at home on my relatively crappy TV for one interesting observation from the fight choreographer. The amount of the drug I have to consume to get that same old high just isn't worth it for me anymore.
All that being said, it's curious to spend time with two discs' worth of special features for a movie I don't really care about one way or the other. I think I'd only seen it once before, a couple years ago when I was at the height of my irrational hatred for Robert Redford (I've subsequently crested that wave and seem to be settling down into a kind of bemused annoyance), and pretty much felt the same about it then as I feel about it now. I respect its popularity and influence on cheekily self-aware deconstructions of genre flicks, but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't touch or resonate with me at all.
So, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of the whole experience was some satisfaction for my curiosity about director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy is the only film on his resume that I've seen, but unlike, say, Sam Peckinpah or Peter Bogdanovich, whose work I am similarly ill-versed in, I had gleaned essentially no generalized, even stereotypical, sense of his auteur's fingerprint from the pop-culture ether over my years of watching movies. On the first page of my notes from the day I started watching one of the supplemental documentaries, I even wrote, "who is George Roy Hill? I know he's the director, but what else has he done?"
I think part of the reason my ignorance about Hill, and perhaps also my ambivalence toward the film as a whole, bothered me as much as it did was because of my knee-jerk assumption that since this movie came out in 1969, in the early days of the American New Wave, I should have been able to identify it in terms of its director's authorial voice, yet couldn't. And the more I mulled it over, the more I began to realize that my tendency would be to identify this movie as anybody's but the director's. It's easy to credit the film to Newman and Redford, whose sexy, insouciant acting style set the bar for four subsequent decades of similar performances that often nail the sex and insouciance without the actual acting chops to back it up. (I mean, for only one example, Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11 are pretty much direct descendants of this exact buddy movie energy.) It's equally easy to call the film Goldman's, still one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood who we can identify by name and general style, or Bacharach's, whose minimal yet insidiously memorable score defines a huge part of the feel of the film. In my geekier moments, I would even venture to claim that the film actually belongs to Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers who helped us as an audience become aware of what the camera was doing, who recognized that beautiful shooting wasn't always flawless shooting and made it safe for us to relish lens flares, sudden in-camera zooms, and other idiosyncracies that would have been unthinkable in the classical Hollywood style. But never would I have said, "oh yes, this film's got George Roy Hill written all over it."
Yet, as soon as I started watching the special features, I found a deluge of anecdotes and testimonials to Hill's strong personality and artistic vision. Just remark after remark about how instrumental he was in the construction of the final project, how he creatively and respectfully sparred with the actors over their choices and opinions, how he orchestrated a two-month-long practical joke on Redford, how his commitment and energy held the entire shoot together even after his back went out and he spent a good portion of it directing laid out on a pallet, and how he went to the mat defending the more iconoclastic, and now iconic, aspects of the film (casting a then relatively unknown Redford opposite Newman at the height of his popularity, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" musical sequence, the tweaking of traditional Western conventions by showing Butch and Sundance running away from the law rather than standing firm and fighting, the tonal mingling of comedy and tragedy throughout).
And this impression doesn't just come from others' accounts. There's a wonderfully retro-feeling making-of documentary from 1994 included on one of the two discs that illustrates, in his own words, the gruff veteran's demeanor everyone else kept going on about. It gives a great sense of Hill's gloves-off approach (complete with f-bombs flying). And it makes his deceptive invisibility even more puzzling. Is that his actual innovation here, the actual proof of a true auteur's hand--that he exerted control so assured that it gave a strong and unselfish frame that would allow ample space for the other contributors' work to be actively noticed and appreciated? If so, that's some amazing fucking ninja stealth, that kind of ability to lead from behind, to make it look like everyone else is doing the work when it's only through his (luckily, benevolent) master plan to grant them the latitude to labor under that perception. Of course, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I might be reading all this through my own ignorance and lack of context for his body of work; he did win the Best Director Academy Award for The Sting just a few years later, beating out--get this--Bergman, Bertolucci, a young George Lucas, and William Friedkin. Perhaps I'll feel differently if I ever get around to seeing The Sting or Slap Shot or The World According to Garp. (See, though, did any of you know he directed those movies? Or did you just mentally categorize them as that other Newman/Redford movie, that Newman hockey movie, and that Robin Williams/John Irving movie with John Lithgow in drag?) I dunno; I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument. At any rate, it's a neat little mystery to puzzle out, reconstituting the boundaries of an unfashionable American movie master.
And, of course, as often happens to me when I spend some considerable time with a movie I may have been ambivalent about before, I've developed a begrudging affection for Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman is a nearly perfect human; anything I have to say on the matter is going to pale in comparison to watching his movies or doing a Google image search and drinking in the dreaminess. (I know it's all about the baby blues, but has anybody taken a look at this man's nose recently? Just beautiful.) You can see Redford working really hard to be worthy of this career-making role, but I can forgive him almost anything in this movie for the sake of the moment when, before the ball-kicking knife fight, Butch tells Sundance, "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him," and Sundance drawls in response, "Love to," then looks up with that little wave and slowly breaking homicidal smile. I could just watch that exchange on repeat for hours. And, unlike the bon mot from my hypothetical fight choreographer, I'm totally willing to watch, and rewatch, a demonstrably well-made movie I may not happen to like for the sake of coming across a gem like that.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Coming Soon
Snakes on a Plane
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.
"Get these mothafuckin' snakes offa this mothafuckin' building!"
This is the first billboard ad I've seen for Snakes on a Plane, and it's conveniently located in the 'hood, just off the Western brown line stop. This makes me so happy.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
I Can't Believe You Care
Oh, fuck me in the ear and call me Sally: the Guillemots performing "Made Up Love Song #43" on Top of the Pops (via Stylus). Just an unbelievably great performance. Their new full-length Through the Windowpane is out now in the UK and will be released in the US on July 20.
Dear Brown Line: what is the deal with the morning delays? Seriously. I left early today and was still only just barely on time. Get yr act together, bitches.
Pitchfork reviews Victory for the Comic Muse in its entirety today. It's a decent write-up; I can't really complain.
RIP, Syd Barrett.
Dear Brown Line: what is the deal with the morning delays? Seriously. I left early today and was still only just barely on time. Get yr act together, bitches.
Pitchfork reviews Victory for the Comic Muse in its entirety today. It's a decent write-up; I can't really complain.
RIP, Syd Barrett.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Kottke, Gondry, Grizzly, Comedy
Jason Kottke helps spread the word that the trailer for the new Michel Gondry film The Science of Sleep is bopping around online now. Too much hype, too much anticipation, and too much familiarity with a director's previous work can be a dangerous thing (and I am nothing if not if not overly familiar with Eternal Sunshine), but damn if I'm not already guessing that it's going to end up on my top ten movie list at the end of the year. According to the IMDB, we're looking at a late September release date. Get excited.
Via Stereogum, check out La Blogotheque's videos of the Grizzly Bear boys singing two of their songs in Paris on the street and in the bathroom. The band is new to me, but I really like the sound of what they've got going on here. Bonus points for their apparently close musical friendship with Owen Pallett, who remixed their song "Don't Ask" for last year's rerelease of debut full-length Horn of Plenty and arranged some strings for their upcoming album Yellow House.
Pitchfork gives an almost-perfect 4.5 star score to The Divine Comedy's "A Lady of a Certain Age" (off recently released ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse) in one of the worst descriptive write-ups of a song I've ever read on the site. The Scott Walker comparisions are apt (even though, ahem, "Mathilde" is technically a Jacques Brel composition), but the writer ends up with a mouthful of mush as he (perhaps?) tries to reflect the richness of Hannon's best work by turning his prose-hose on full gush and then manages to flatten the poignancy of the thrice repeated "no, you couldn't be" line by overexplaining it. I know I probably sound like a jet black pot criticizing the Fork's kettle over here, as my own piled on superlatives have occasionally been known to crumble under the weight of their own floridity when I get excited about something, but I just want the music bloggers to do right by Neil, especially now that he seems to be getting more attention than ever on this side of the pond. Whatevs. At least it was the last track they reviewed at the end of the day on Friday, so Neil's pensive, black and white visage has been left up on the front page of the site all weekend (right underneath Sufjan!), which hopefully has led the indie kids over to The Hype Machine or elbo.ws looking for some downloady goodness. I hope they like what they find.
Apropos of the new DC album, I finally had a chance to listen to it in its entirety a few times over the course of this past week, and I'm absolutely tickled with it so far. It feels the closest of any of his recent work to merging the epic sweep of the big orchestra albums like Fin de Siecle and A Short Album About Love with the fanciful eccentricity of early classics Liberation and Promenade. "The Light of Day" is a sappy, adult-contemporary snoozer and album-closer "Snowball in Negative" succumbs to the dreaded musician-singing-about-the-process-of-
recording-the-song-you're-listening-to faux pas with the line "smoking my six-hundredth last cigarette out of the studio skylight," but those are relatively minor quibbles. Neil's growing into the lusciousness of his voice with sure, steady grace, the wit is as sharp and subtle as ever (the "oh, did I tell you I love you?" in "To Die a Virgin" never fails to kill me), and he's grown bolder with the funkiness of his grooves (again, "To Die a Virgin" stands out with that leisure-suit lecherous bass, and the oh-oh-oh bongo/bell interludes in "Diva Lady" just make me grin). Old fans will also love the reemergence of familiar DC tropes like the horse's gallop rhythm in his cover of the Associates' "Party Fears Two" (on the special edition DVD that came with the version of the album I purchased, Neil sheepishly suggests that that rhythmic pattern should be carved on his gravestone) and the overlapping voices playing cat and mouse as they narrate and sing the same lines in personal favorite "Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont." I love that Neil still has the ability to make records under the Divine Comedy moniker and that they're still artistically sophisticated endeavors. I could get quite sappy now about how much this band and its body of work means to me, but if that's not already abundantly clear, anything else I might attempt to say at this point would probably sound disingenous.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Final Fantasy at the Lakeshore Theater
A regular diet of mid-tempo, mid-range, guitar-based indie rock can only sustain a person for so long until she starts to feel glutted with whimsy and melancholy, so I think I've been somewhat intentionally trying to balance myself out with a little more active hip-hop consumption recently. Bass feels good. In-your-face rhythmic intensity feels good. However, as the old adage goes, you can take the indie rock out of the girl's iPod, but you can't take the indie rock out of the girl, which is how I found myself irresistibly drawn to the Lakeshore Theater on Friday night to take in Final Fantasy's last show in the U.S. before returning home to his native Canada. I've been keeping a cautious eye on young Mr. Pallett, mostly thanks to the thoughtful rantings at Zoilus and Said the Gramophone and gushing show reviews like the ones excerpted at Brooklyn Vegan (and, of course, also thanks to that Bloc Party cover I keep going on about), and I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't catch him while he was in town. Owen--who, violin and bow in hand, surrounded like Gulliver by an army of Lilliputian looping pedals, started his set with the droll pronouncement "thanks for coming to the Final Fantasy rock 'n' roll show. I am Final"--certainly didn't disappoint, but his performance was almost more satisfying thanks to the way the night's three acts operated as counterpoints to each other and the way the venue itself contributed to the overall pacing and atmosphere.
I love Chicago, and I love visiting venues in the city I've never been to before. From what I gather, the Lakeshore Theater usually hosts live theater of the Defending the Caveman variety, but it seems that the Empty Bottle has started scheduling acts there, too. (Em-effing Jello Biafra in the hizzouse today.) Kittens, it's amazing what actually sitting down in an actual theater can do for your interaction with and appreciation of a show. Maybe it was also because I'd just read the interview with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) in the June/July Believer earlier that morning, but I felt like I was more sensitive to the music as music and was listening more actively to it than I have at a show in longer than I'd realized. Chalk it up to feeling feeling lovingly enveloped by the decent sound system or not needing to bob and weave to see the performers around the slopes of other people's shoulders or not having to will my ears not to be distracted by the banal, beer-fueled, self-important scenesters' conversations that are usually a consequence of attending buzzworthy shows or whatever, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perfect for the kind of music we were there to hear.
Alex Lukashevsky was billed as Final Fantasy's touring partner and opener, but before he came on, we were treated to unbilled local boys Baby and Hide. (The few times they announced their name from stage, I kept thinking they were saying "Baby in Hide," which I didn't understand and thought was weird and kind of stupid, but when I got home later that night and tried to Google them, I realized it was in fact "Baby and Hide," which immediately made me think, "oh my God, what a fucking great name!") They came off like Yo La Tengo's dorky younger brothers, these three terribly dressed, pasty looking white dudes with their guitars and keyboard and drum set containing nothing more than two toms and a sizzle cymbal, and at first I couldn't tell if they were truly awful or if they just might be diamonds in the rough. The group's mastermind Jeremy Keller especially seemed like the painfully shy, crippingly socially awkward kid who lived down the dorm hall from you during your freshman year in college, that kid who never seemed to worry too much about his neuroscience or astrophysics classes, that kid who you discovered much later spent most of his time that year secretly building robots that could compose their own symphonies, that kid who you discovered even later than that had been dating an unstoppably hot biochem/performance studies double major that whole time because she recognized his true inner beauty and unlimited potential. Anyway, all this sort of made me not want to look at them while they were playing. I fought myself for being shallow and judgmental for a while, but eventually just gave up and sat through about the last third of their songs with my eyes closed. Which is when I was finally able to give in to what they were trying to accomplish with dynamics and noise and subtle sonic shifts. They were teasing some really gorgeous stuff out of droney keyboard bits and minimal yet apocalyptic drumming and earnest, high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals like the unholy spawn of Neil Young and Ben Gibbard. I ended up being really impressed. Their recent full-length Normal People is available to download for free at their website, and, though the MP3s might not do to you what seeing them live live did to me, it's deffo worth checking out. (Try either "Black Delicatessen" or "In Sails.")
Alex Lukashevsky is one of those old-soul acoustic guitar players with a whisky stained oak barrel of a voice and conversational, rather than confessional, lyrics. (Some of my favorite lines--such as "gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says" and "even if she's an alcoholic, an impossible genius like Jackson Pollock"--come from "Nun or a Bawd," which can be found on his band Deep Dark United's album Ancient and can be downloaded here.) Though not as ostentatiously exuberant as Jonathan Richman, there was something in his approach that reminded me of everyone's favorite Modern Lover, a similar kind of gentle, highly literate playfulness and the beautiful, quietly powerful stage presence of a performer who's completely comfortable in his own skin. The way his music and persona seamlessly supported and fed into each other provided the perfect bridge between the avert-your-eyes quality of Baby and Hide and Final Fantasy's aesthetic magnetism.
And, oh yes, aesthetic magnetism is the term for what Owen Pallett has going on in spades. With that beautiful profile of his--which should be chiseled out of marble or etched on a vase in a museum somewhere--a voice almost too pure for mass consumption, musical chops that go on for miles, and an intimacy with his instrument that I think I've only ever seen between Ben Folds and his piano, it was all I could do to give myself permission to even blink while he was on stage, lest I miss an ounce of the magic he was conjuring out of thin air. But even for all of that, it was his proficiency with the looping pedals that put the performance over the top. He cocked up the loops in one song toward the middle of the set ("I don't usually mess up," he apologized. "It sounds like boasting, but...but, it feels great!"; the sarcasm could have flattened the skyline), but his virtuosity with the technology really gave us way more than our money's worth. I'm completely won over. (Buy He Poos Clouds or explore some choice MP3s here.)
(Also, for those of you who aren't busy enterting my name and URL into Technorati every few days, you may have missed my shout-out on Green Pea-ness last week. Thx, James.)
I love Chicago, and I love visiting venues in the city I've never been to before. From what I gather, the Lakeshore Theater usually hosts live theater of the Defending the Caveman variety, but it seems that the Empty Bottle has started scheduling acts there, too. (Em-effing Jello Biafra in the hizzouse today.) Kittens, it's amazing what actually sitting down in an actual theater can do for your interaction with and appreciation of a show. Maybe it was also because I'd just read the interview with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) in the June/July Believer earlier that morning, but I felt like I was more sensitive to the music as music and was listening more actively to it than I have at a show in longer than I'd realized. Chalk it up to feeling feeling lovingly enveloped by the decent sound system or not needing to bob and weave to see the performers around the slopes of other people's shoulders or not having to will my ears not to be distracted by the banal, beer-fueled, self-important scenesters' conversations that are usually a consequence of attending buzzworthy shows or whatever, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perfect for the kind of music we were there to hear.
Alex Lukashevsky was billed as Final Fantasy's touring partner and opener, but before he came on, we were treated to unbilled local boys Baby and Hide. (The few times they announced their name from stage, I kept thinking they were saying "Baby in Hide," which I didn't understand and thought was weird and kind of stupid, but when I got home later that night and tried to Google them, I realized it was in fact "Baby and Hide," which immediately made me think, "oh my God, what a fucking great name!") They came off like Yo La Tengo's dorky younger brothers, these three terribly dressed, pasty looking white dudes with their guitars and keyboard and drum set containing nothing more than two toms and a sizzle cymbal, and at first I couldn't tell if they were truly awful or if they just might be diamonds in the rough. The group's mastermind Jeremy Keller especially seemed like the painfully shy, crippingly socially awkward kid who lived down the dorm hall from you during your freshman year in college, that kid who never seemed to worry too much about his neuroscience or astrophysics classes, that kid who you discovered much later spent most of his time that year secretly building robots that could compose their own symphonies, that kid who you discovered even later than that had been dating an unstoppably hot biochem/performance studies double major that whole time because she recognized his true inner beauty and unlimited potential. Anyway, all this sort of made me not want to look at them while they were playing. I fought myself for being shallow and judgmental for a while, but eventually just gave up and sat through about the last third of their songs with my eyes closed. Which is when I was finally able to give in to what they were trying to accomplish with dynamics and noise and subtle sonic shifts. They were teasing some really gorgeous stuff out of droney keyboard bits and minimal yet apocalyptic drumming and earnest, high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals like the unholy spawn of Neil Young and Ben Gibbard. I ended up being really impressed. Their recent full-length Normal People is available to download for free at their website, and, though the MP3s might not do to you what seeing them live live did to me, it's deffo worth checking out. (Try either "Black Delicatessen" or "In Sails.")
Alex Lukashevsky is one of those old-soul acoustic guitar players with a whisky stained oak barrel of a voice and conversational, rather than confessional, lyrics. (Some of my favorite lines--such as "gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says" and "even if she's an alcoholic, an impossible genius like Jackson Pollock"--come from "Nun or a Bawd," which can be found on his band Deep Dark United's album Ancient and can be downloaded here.) Though not as ostentatiously exuberant as Jonathan Richman, there was something in his approach that reminded me of everyone's favorite Modern Lover, a similar kind of gentle, highly literate playfulness and the beautiful, quietly powerful stage presence of a performer who's completely comfortable in his own skin. The way his music and persona seamlessly supported and fed into each other provided the perfect bridge between the avert-your-eyes quality of Baby and Hide and Final Fantasy's aesthetic magnetism.
And, oh yes, aesthetic magnetism is the term for what Owen Pallett has going on in spades. With that beautiful profile of his--which should be chiseled out of marble or etched on a vase in a museum somewhere--a voice almost too pure for mass consumption, musical chops that go on for miles, and an intimacy with his instrument that I think I've only ever seen between Ben Folds and his piano, it was all I could do to give myself permission to even blink while he was on stage, lest I miss an ounce of the magic he was conjuring out of thin air. But even for all of that, it was his proficiency with the looping pedals that put the performance over the top. He cocked up the loops in one song toward the middle of the set ("I don't usually mess up," he apologized. "It sounds like boasting, but...but, it feels great!"; the sarcasm could have flattened the skyline), but his virtuosity with the technology really gave us way more than our money's worth. I'm completely won over. (Buy He Poos Clouds or explore some choice MP3s here.)
(Also, for those of you who aren't busy enterting my name and URL into Technorati every few days, you may have missed my shout-out on Green Pea-ness last week. Thx, James.)
Pitchfork Music Festival 2006
It came and it went, kittens, and now we're left to contend with the sunburn, dehydration, and exhaustion that the Pitchfork Music Festival has left us with--not to mention the digital pictures, posters from Flatstock, calluses on our thumbs from refreshing our favorite music blogs this morning to see when and how they'll weigh in on the weekend, and a hankering to dust off our copies of Alligator, Destroyer's Rubies, and The Tyranny of Distance.
Sure, this fest was more hot, more crowded, and had more stuff to be taken in than Intonation last month, but the sheer scale of it all pretty much forced me to focus my attention on the acts that I was really and truly psyched in advance to see. You just can't fake that shit in 90+ degree heat.
We arrived on Saturday to the stompy, circusy sounds of Man Man. I had hoped to catch some of their set based on Pitchfork's insanely glowing concert review from last week, but from many accounts, their live show is better served by a more intimate club setting than an outdoor fest anyway.
Band of Horses was up next, and after three different people have made a specific point to tell me that I'd really dig them, I had no choice but to catch up with the end portion of their set, after bearings (and snackables and beer) were gotten.
Bed Bridwell's vocals made more sense to me live than they ever have on the few MP3s (incl. "The Funeral") I've downloaded, and the band's stonerish good nature was just as appealing as their meaty guitar sound. I'm looking forward to checking out the album.
I've been surprised by the handful of negative remarks about the Mountain Goats' set that I've read on the interweb, as I've recently landed like an anorexic Ukrainian gymnast firmly and triumphantly on the John-Darnielle-can-do-no-wrong side of the mat.
I can understand how some might have thought his banter went on a little long for an outdoor show, but dude is so witty, what with his self-flagellation about the stupidity of writing up a set list that included a brand new song in the second slot and rants about enduring a '70s Californian upbringing that brought endless rounds of singalongs with fuckin' guys in the fuckin' park with fuckin' acoustic guitars and his jokey fake-out that we were all going to join together to sing "Imagine" (we sang "No Children" and "Terror Song" instead), I don't know how anyone could not have been won over, even if his music wasn't someone's usual cup of tea.
Destroyer was the band I was most excited to see on day one. (Also, Dan Bejar is the indie rock musician I would most like to hug. I'm pretty sure this is not the normal reaction elicited by such an intensely cerebral songwriter, but, gah, brutha just seems to me like he could use a friendly squeeze around the ol' midsection.)
A propos of Zoilus's quoted observation that Bejar is the "hardest working music critic today," even the bloody stage banter during his set was meta. I was warning my companions not to expect pretty much any talking at all, based on his comment in this June interview in Pitchfork that "I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them," but when he eventually approached the microphone, with air-quotes nearly visible around his head, and asked "is this thing on?" I felt like I was watching some Andy Kaufman-level performance art. He later went on to introduce a new song by proclaiming, then trailing off, "this song is about...ahhhh...", summarized another with "one quarter of that song was a protest song" (one of his band members--I couldn't see which--waited a beat before sallying, "protesting what? The other three-quarters of the song?"), and he bid farewell to the crowd before finishing up with "Looters' Follies" by mock-apologizing, "I know we've taken up a shitload of time with witty stage banter." But because he wasn't sneering behind any of those bons mots, the intellectual pleasures yielded by this acknowledgment that he was self-consciously Performing the Act of Playing an Outdoor Summer Concert merged with and buoyed the sumptuousness of his melodies and arrangements. (Though, I do have to wonder how it feels to be a grown man in his band belting out an alternating series of "la-di-das" and falsetto "wah-wah-wahs." That shit is funny, and intentionally so.) They went heavy on material from Destroyer's Rubies, which suited me just fine, but the few he played from earlier albums (the set list on Fluxblog cites "Crystal Country," "Modern Painters," and "It's Gonna Take an Airplane") only served to confirm that I need to start delving into his back catalog.
Because Ted Leo is so consistently solid, and because I'd already seen him play live twice before, I made the foolish, foolish mistake of stepping away from the stage about halfway through his set.
Yes, which means I heard "Biomusicology" from inside a porta-potty and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" with a palmful of the interesting paste created when baseball diamond dust and hand sanitizer meet. Damn, damn, damn.
There has been so much hating on the Walkmen recently that seems so excessive and so, well, wrong, that I thought surely their tight set here would serve to bring some back into the fold. Nope.
I honestly don't get it. They seem a little less manic than they used to, but isn't that a good thing? A sign of becoming more assured, more mature musicians? Which is not to say that their songs lacked immediacy or energy or whatever. Matt Barrick was missing in action due to the impending arrival of his firstborn child (congrats!), but the secret of their success certainly can't be tied that directly to his propulsive drumming. I was nothing but impressed with what I heard on Saturday. Paul Maroon's confident guitar work especially stood out for me.
I'm a newcomer to the Silver Jews' output and only know Tanglewood Numbers, but I was certainly excited to see the notoriously reclusive David Berman live.
He was marvelously smart and droll, bidding us to mind our manners as the crowd started getting squirrely during emcee Tim Tuten's overly long intro, and confessing that he doesn't really like Brian Wilson at all. But, he also ended up, probably unintentionally, depressing the hell out of us with some of the song selections (closing with "There Is a Place"? Yowch), with his story about playing a gig in Tel Aviv a few days before things got really scary there, and, well, just with the weight of what it means for him to be here playing for us at all. I was especially taken with Cassie's presence on stage there with him. She was an amazing sight to behold with her short dress, wild hair, and enormous bass guitar, and her musicianship certainly was not to be denied, but I can't imagine the emotional gymnastics she must have to go through to be able to make it through all those songs, standing right there next to him every night. A formidable woman, indeed. The rest of the band was ace; I couldn't help commenting later in the car on the way home that it's so great to see slightly older musicians playing so well, with such ease in their stage presence.
I had every intention of making it back down to the park to see, if not Tapes 'n Tapes, then at least Danielson to kick off day two, but I was so unexpectedly wrecked the next morning that it was all I could do to arrive about halfway through Jens Lekman's set.
We heard him playing "Black Cab" as we walked over from the El, which felt like such a good omen for the rest of the day. The crowd was loving him (and, assuredly, his foxy all-girl horn section) and you could hear him sending the love right back out with his strong, smooth vocals. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing with his next full-length.
The National. Holy fuck. That is what I came to this festival for. Without a doubt my favorite act of the whole weekend.
I was distraught over missing them at the Double Door earlier this year but consoled myself with knowing I'd see them this weekend. But, as my summertime music selections have taken a turn for the breezy and sun-soaked, I'd forgotten how much the brooding, wintry songs from Alligator mean to me until I started hearing them pour out of the speakers: "Abel," "Lit Up," "Looking for Astronauts," "Mr. November," and, holy Christ, "All the Wine." This was the only band that brought me near to tears all weekend. And not just misty eyelash blinky tears either; I had to choke back a few full-throated sobs heating up the inside of my face. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Matt Berninger looks variously like a Southern Californian movie star, an Austrian Olympic athlete, and a French thug, and sings like he's dealing with some genuine mental illness (in, y'know, the best and sexiest way possible). I saw him later walking around the Flatstock tent but was way, way, way too nervous to even risk talking to him. I cannot overstate how much I loved their set and can't wait to see them live again.
I don't know how I scraped myself together afterward, but LK and I headed over to the Biz 3 tent, with a few hundred of our closest friends, to catch the waning minutes of CSS's set. It's worth exploring the cansei de ser sexy tag at Flickr or heading over to Gorilla vs. Bear to see some pictures because they were every bit as wild and fun as they're supposed to be. We were standing outside the tent, behind the stage, on the righthand side, so our view wasn't the greatest (and, personally, I had to rely on LK to narrate most of what was happening for me anyway, as I really couldn't see much over the heads of the assembled crowd), but we could definitely feel the love. It was also nice to hear the songs fleshed out with the full band and a little less in-your-face with the slickly produced bleepy-bloopiness.
My curiosity about Devendra Banhart has only increased since last fall, especially after downloading "Hey Mama Wolf" and "Quedate Luna" from Cripple Crow.
I can hardly believe it myself, but I think after taking in his set this weekend, I've pretty much been won over. He does what he does with such sincerity, and he and his band carry it off with some impressive musicianship that I wouldn't have expected from my impression of the lo-fi, we're-recording-inside-a-rusted-meat-locker wankiness of his earlier albums. As is his custom of late, he brought a kid up on stage to play a song near the end of the set, and I was just so touched by the selflessness of it all. He (Devendra) described being able to do that as an honor and one of the best things that comes out of his life as a touring musician, and I didn't doubt it for a moment. There was such an incredible beauty in the way he embraced the kid after he was done playing and held on to him like they were brothers reuniting after a long separation. Save yr e-mails, I know, I know: I'm such a hippie.
I listened to Yo La Tengo from across the lawn, as I wanted to stay put to be sure to get a good spot along the barricade for Spoon. From what little I know of YLT's stuff, they sounded pretty solid.
Spoon's roadies started trickling out onto the stage while YLT was wailing away, tuning and plugging stuff in, and eventually were joined by Jim Eno and the boys and later Britt himself. We cheered when Britt walked out, and he held a finger to his lips, politely shushing us so we wouldn't disturb the other show in progress. He assessed the crowd with a pleased look on his face, and I'm about 85% sure that he smiled at me. I was standing against the railing, facing the stage and beaming, not like a freak, but just like a perfectly content person who was looking forward to seeing one of her favorite bands for the first time. I'd like to think that that was his small way of greeting and acknowledging my happiness.
There was, perhaps predictably, a lot of material from Gimme Fiction, which, hey, I'm not going to complain about, and they also got some great stuff from Kill the Moonlight in there, including "Someone Something," "Stay Don't Go" (no beatboxing, unforch), and--wowza!--"Paper Tiger." (I love it when musicians subtly make fun of their own songs by slipping funny different lyrics in there, and Britt got away with a good one here by singing "I will no longer do the devil's dishes.") They closed with "My Mathematical Mind," and Britt absolutely played the fucking shit out of his guitar. Down on the knees, feedback shrieking into the night air, the whole bit. It was a rousing end to a set that, while solid and satisfying, didn't exactly reach transcendent heights for me. And, music aside, I salute Britt's decision to go with green pants. Come on, guys: green pants!! I don't know why I was so taken with them, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "holy shit, he's wearing green pants." And, even better, he managed to pull them off without seeming self-consciously hip or even, horror of horrors, overtly metrosexual. I mean, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising coming from a guy who wrote a song called "The Fitted Shirt," but I gotta give credit where credit is due. Green pants, man. Green pants.
I didn't have the energy left in me to push toward the front of the crowd to get a good position (or, ahem, good pictures) for Os Mutantes, so I took advantage of the pleasures that can be had from standing in the middle of a field, listening to some supremely groovy music, not elbow-to-elbow (or, in my case, elbow-to-hipbone) with a bunch of other sweaty, exhausted concertgoers: exchanged my last beer ticket for a heavenly cup of 312, chatted with my pals, danced all my kinks out, and watched people unself-consciously dancing their own kinks out as well. The bears, the seemingly out of place shirtless frat boys, the lovey-dovey couple out with their awkward single friend, the college-age kid who looked like he's probably a computer science major doing a modified poopy-pants dance--it was a joy to see them all feeling the music and having fun. The band was bright, happy, and overflowing with goodwill. They sent us out into the night in style.
Big love to LK for tolerating and even indulging my fanaticism, KP for the ride, and DS, JZ, and Nora Rocket for the laughs and the good company.
Sure, this fest was more hot, more crowded, and had more stuff to be taken in than Intonation last month, but the sheer scale of it all pretty much forced me to focus my attention on the acts that I was really and truly psyched in advance to see. You just can't fake that shit in 90+ degree heat.
We arrived on Saturday to the stompy, circusy sounds of Man Man. I had hoped to catch some of their set based on Pitchfork's insanely glowing concert review from last week, but from many accounts, their live show is better served by a more intimate club setting than an outdoor fest anyway.
Band of Horses was up next, and after three different people have made a specific point to tell me that I'd really dig them, I had no choice but to catch up with the end portion of their set, after bearings (and snackables and beer) were gotten.
Bed Bridwell's vocals made more sense to me live than they ever have on the few MP3s (incl. "The Funeral") I've downloaded, and the band's stonerish good nature was just as appealing as their meaty guitar sound. I'm looking forward to checking out the album.
I've been surprised by the handful of negative remarks about the Mountain Goats' set that I've read on the interweb, as I've recently landed like an anorexic Ukrainian gymnast firmly and triumphantly on the John-Darnielle-can-do-no-wrong side of the mat.
I can understand how some might have thought his banter went on a little long for an outdoor show, but dude is so witty, what with his self-flagellation about the stupidity of writing up a set list that included a brand new song in the second slot and rants about enduring a '70s Californian upbringing that brought endless rounds of singalongs with fuckin' guys in the fuckin' park with fuckin' acoustic guitars and his jokey fake-out that we were all going to join together to sing "Imagine" (we sang "No Children" and "Terror Song" instead), I don't know how anyone could not have been won over, even if his music wasn't someone's usual cup of tea.
Destroyer was the band I was most excited to see on day one. (Also, Dan Bejar is the indie rock musician I would most like to hug. I'm pretty sure this is not the normal reaction elicited by such an intensely cerebral songwriter, but, gah, brutha just seems to me like he could use a friendly squeeze around the ol' midsection.)
A propos of Zoilus's quoted observation that Bejar is the "hardest working music critic today," even the bloody stage banter during his set was meta. I was warning my companions not to expect pretty much any talking at all, based on his comment in this June interview in Pitchfork that "I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them," but when he eventually approached the microphone, with air-quotes nearly visible around his head, and asked "is this thing on?" I felt like I was watching some Andy Kaufman-level performance art. He later went on to introduce a new song by proclaiming, then trailing off, "this song is about...ahhhh...", summarized another with "one quarter of that song was a protest song" (one of his band members--I couldn't see which--waited a beat before sallying, "protesting what? The other three-quarters of the song?"), and he bid farewell to the crowd before finishing up with "Looters' Follies" by mock-apologizing, "I know we've taken up a shitload of time with witty stage banter." But because he wasn't sneering behind any of those bons mots, the intellectual pleasures yielded by this acknowledgment that he was self-consciously Performing the Act of Playing an Outdoor Summer Concert merged with and buoyed the sumptuousness of his melodies and arrangements. (Though, I do have to wonder how it feels to be a grown man in his band belting out an alternating series of "la-di-das" and falsetto "wah-wah-wahs." That shit is funny, and intentionally so.) They went heavy on material from Destroyer's Rubies, which suited me just fine, but the few he played from earlier albums (the set list on Fluxblog cites "Crystal Country," "Modern Painters," and "It's Gonna Take an Airplane") only served to confirm that I need to start delving into his back catalog.
Because Ted Leo is so consistently solid, and because I'd already seen him play live twice before, I made the foolish, foolish mistake of stepping away from the stage about halfway through his set.
Yes, which means I heard "Biomusicology" from inside a porta-potty and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" with a palmful of the interesting paste created when baseball diamond dust and hand sanitizer meet. Damn, damn, damn.
There has been so much hating on the Walkmen recently that seems so excessive and so, well, wrong, that I thought surely their tight set here would serve to bring some back into the fold. Nope.
I honestly don't get it. They seem a little less manic than they used to, but isn't that a good thing? A sign of becoming more assured, more mature musicians? Which is not to say that their songs lacked immediacy or energy or whatever. Matt Barrick was missing in action due to the impending arrival of his firstborn child (congrats!), but the secret of their success certainly can't be tied that directly to his propulsive drumming. I was nothing but impressed with what I heard on Saturday. Paul Maroon's confident guitar work especially stood out for me.
I'm a newcomer to the Silver Jews' output and only know Tanglewood Numbers, but I was certainly excited to see the notoriously reclusive David Berman live.
He was marvelously smart and droll, bidding us to mind our manners as the crowd started getting squirrely during emcee Tim Tuten's overly long intro, and confessing that he doesn't really like Brian Wilson at all. But, he also ended up, probably unintentionally, depressing the hell out of us with some of the song selections (closing with "There Is a Place"? Yowch), with his story about playing a gig in Tel Aviv a few days before things got really scary there, and, well, just with the weight of what it means for him to be here playing for us at all. I was especially taken with Cassie's presence on stage there with him. She was an amazing sight to behold with her short dress, wild hair, and enormous bass guitar, and her musicianship certainly was not to be denied, but I can't imagine the emotional gymnastics she must have to go through to be able to make it through all those songs, standing right there next to him every night. A formidable woman, indeed. The rest of the band was ace; I couldn't help commenting later in the car on the way home that it's so great to see slightly older musicians playing so well, with such ease in their stage presence.
I had every intention of making it back down to the park to see, if not Tapes 'n Tapes, then at least Danielson to kick off day two, but I was so unexpectedly wrecked the next morning that it was all I could do to arrive about halfway through Jens Lekman's set.
We heard him playing "Black Cab" as we walked over from the El, which felt like such a good omen for the rest of the day. The crowd was loving him (and, assuredly, his foxy all-girl horn section) and you could hear him sending the love right back out with his strong, smooth vocals. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing with his next full-length.
The National. Holy fuck. That is what I came to this festival for. Without a doubt my favorite act of the whole weekend.
I was distraught over missing them at the Double Door earlier this year but consoled myself with knowing I'd see them this weekend. But, as my summertime music selections have taken a turn for the breezy and sun-soaked, I'd forgotten how much the brooding, wintry songs from Alligator mean to me until I started hearing them pour out of the speakers: "Abel," "Lit Up," "Looking for Astronauts," "Mr. November," and, holy Christ, "All the Wine." This was the only band that brought me near to tears all weekend. And not just misty eyelash blinky tears either; I had to choke back a few full-throated sobs heating up the inside of my face. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Matt Berninger looks variously like a Southern Californian movie star, an Austrian Olympic athlete, and a French thug, and sings like he's dealing with some genuine mental illness (in, y'know, the best and sexiest way possible). I saw him later walking around the Flatstock tent but was way, way, way too nervous to even risk talking to him. I cannot overstate how much I loved their set and can't wait to see them live again.
I don't know how I scraped myself together afterward, but LK and I headed over to the Biz 3 tent, with a few hundred of our closest friends, to catch the waning minutes of CSS's set. It's worth exploring the cansei de ser sexy tag at Flickr or heading over to Gorilla vs. Bear to see some pictures because they were every bit as wild and fun as they're supposed to be. We were standing outside the tent, behind the stage, on the righthand side, so our view wasn't the greatest (and, personally, I had to rely on LK to narrate most of what was happening for me anyway, as I really couldn't see much over the heads of the assembled crowd), but we could definitely feel the love. It was also nice to hear the songs fleshed out with the full band and a little less in-your-face with the slickly produced bleepy-bloopiness.
My curiosity about Devendra Banhart has only increased since last fall, especially after downloading "Hey Mama Wolf" and "Quedate Luna" from Cripple Crow.
I can hardly believe it myself, but I think after taking in his set this weekend, I've pretty much been won over. He does what he does with such sincerity, and he and his band carry it off with some impressive musicianship that I wouldn't have expected from my impression of the lo-fi, we're-recording-inside-a-rusted-meat-locker wankiness of his earlier albums. As is his custom of late, he brought a kid up on stage to play a song near the end of the set, and I was just so touched by the selflessness of it all. He (Devendra) described being able to do that as an honor and one of the best things that comes out of his life as a touring musician, and I didn't doubt it for a moment. There was such an incredible beauty in the way he embraced the kid after he was done playing and held on to him like they were brothers reuniting after a long separation. Save yr e-mails, I know, I know: I'm such a hippie.
I listened to Yo La Tengo from across the lawn, as I wanted to stay put to be sure to get a good spot along the barricade for Spoon. From what little I know of YLT's stuff, they sounded pretty solid.
Spoon's roadies started trickling out onto the stage while YLT was wailing away, tuning and plugging stuff in, and eventually were joined by Jim Eno and the boys and later Britt himself. We cheered when Britt walked out, and he held a finger to his lips, politely shushing us so we wouldn't disturb the other show in progress. He assessed the crowd with a pleased look on his face, and I'm about 85% sure that he smiled at me. I was standing against the railing, facing the stage and beaming, not like a freak, but just like a perfectly content person who was looking forward to seeing one of her favorite bands for the first time. I'd like to think that that was his small way of greeting and acknowledging my happiness.
There was, perhaps predictably, a lot of material from Gimme Fiction, which, hey, I'm not going to complain about, and they also got some great stuff from Kill the Moonlight in there, including "Someone Something," "Stay Don't Go" (no beatboxing, unforch), and--wowza!--"Paper Tiger." (I love it when musicians subtly make fun of their own songs by slipping funny different lyrics in there, and Britt got away with a good one here by singing "I will no longer do the devil's dishes.") They closed with "My Mathematical Mind," and Britt absolutely played the fucking shit out of his guitar. Down on the knees, feedback shrieking into the night air, the whole bit. It was a rousing end to a set that, while solid and satisfying, didn't exactly reach transcendent heights for me. And, music aside, I salute Britt's decision to go with green pants. Come on, guys: green pants!! I don't know why I was so taken with them, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "holy shit, he's wearing green pants." And, even better, he managed to pull them off without seeming self-consciously hip or even, horror of horrors, overtly metrosexual. I mean, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising coming from a guy who wrote a song called "The Fitted Shirt," but I gotta give credit where credit is due. Green pants, man. Green pants.
I didn't have the energy left in me to push toward the front of the crowd to get a good position (or, ahem, good pictures) for Os Mutantes, so I took advantage of the pleasures that can be had from standing in the middle of a field, listening to some supremely groovy music, not elbow-to-elbow (or, in my case, elbow-to-hipbone) with a bunch of other sweaty, exhausted concertgoers: exchanged my last beer ticket for a heavenly cup of 312, chatted with my pals, danced all my kinks out, and watched people unself-consciously dancing their own kinks out as well. The bears, the seemingly out of place shirtless frat boys, the lovey-dovey couple out with their awkward single friend, the college-age kid who looked like he's probably a computer science major doing a modified poopy-pants dance--it was a joy to see them all feeling the music and having fun. The band was bright, happy, and overflowing with goodwill. They sent us out into the night in style.
Big love to LK for tolerating and even indulging my fanaticism, KP for the ride, and DS, JZ, and Nora Rocket for the laughs and the good company.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
All Our Little Wishes Have Run Dry
The mighty Matthew Perpetua gives some love and linkage to the Divine Comedy's "To Die a Virgin" on Fluxblog today.
Britt Daniel picks out and discusses twelve of his favorite albums that are currently available for download on eMusic. "Judging by this list, that's what moves me: heartbreak and longing." Loves it.
Please be sure to bop over to Salon's Audiofile to download Justin Roberts's so-called kindie rock song "Meltdown." LK and I heard his band play it on the kids' stage at the Printers Row Book Fair earlier this month, and I almost sheepishly have to admit that it was one of my favorite things about the whole damn fair. Insanely catchy and instantly addictive. If only I could show you the hand motions that go with it. Ahhhh!
In case you haven't read/heard yet, Sleater-Kinney are no more (via, uh, yer ma). I never got as much into them as I know I should have (and still might), but of course I recognize what a hugely huge bummer it is.
Britt Daniel picks out and discusses twelve of his favorite albums that are currently available for download on eMusic. "Judging by this list, that's what moves me: heartbreak and longing." Loves it.
Please be sure to bop over to Salon's Audiofile to download Justin Roberts's so-called kindie rock song "Meltdown." LK and I heard his band play it on the kids' stage at the Printers Row Book Fair earlier this month, and I almost sheepishly have to admit that it was one of my favorite things about the whole damn fair. Insanely catchy and instantly addictive. If only I could show you the hand motions that go with it. Ahhhh!
In case you haven't read/heard yet, Sleater-Kinney are no more (via, uh, yer ma). I never got as much into them as I know I should have (and still might), but of course I recognize what a hugely huge bummer it is.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Intonation Music Festival 2006
Thanks to the extreme last-minute generosity of two kind and well-connected friends, I was able to attend the Intonation Music Festival at Union Park this weekend.
The weather was perfect, and, though I'm still struggling to connect the dots of what I actually did and heard for most of those two days thanks to the 48-hour haze of beer and motherfucking Sparks I was operating under, I'm fairly certain I enjoyed the hell out of the whole circus.
I'm sure I'll be in turbo must. hear. every. note. mode when the Pitchfork Music Festival rolls around next month, but it was easy for me to be chilled out about not seeing all the acts this weekend since I didn't pay for the passes and had much less invested, personally and emotionally, in the artists collectively appearing on the bill. I'm sad I didn't arrive in time to catch Jose Gonzalez (who by most bloggers' accounts was fantastic), but I kept an ear open for High on Fire, Roky Erickson, and Boredoms from afar, I wiggled into the crowd toward the back to check out the end of Ghostface's set (he was so instantly charismatic that it didn't take long for me to have my fist raised in the air, cheering my lungs out as part of the collective, chanted homage to "Oh! Dee! Bee!"), and I made sure to grab a good patch of grass early in the day for the Stills (I was the one clapping in annoying syncopation to "Oh, Shoplifter").
I swung around to the front stage right area for Lady Sovereign (who I'd spied earlier in the afternoon tooling around in a groundskeeper's golf cart that she'd obviously commandeered with her utter fierceness--awesome), mostly to put myself in a good position for the Streets headlining set.
Kittens, aside from perhaps Spoon, who I'll be seeing next month at the 'Fork fest anyway, I can't think of another group I would currently be as excited to catch live as Mike Skinner and his band of merry geezers. I was able to jockey myself into an exceptional position in front of the stage-right stack of speakers, thanks to the courtesy of the other (taller) members of the audience who, upon seeing me lodged up in their armpits, would invariably observe, "oh, you're really short. Why don't you stand in front of us?" Mad, mad love for good festival manners! I mean, sure, standing in front of the speakers made my esophagus vibrate at near escape velocity in my chest cavity and the fact that I forgot to pack earplugs for the day resulted in ringing ears for a good 18 subsequent hours, but it was a small price to pay to jump around like a maniac and bask in the mass of irresistible contradictions that is Mike Skinner's flow.
I honestly don't even remember much of what they played. I know they definitely took care of the big ones like "Never Went to Church," "Dry Your Eyes," "When You Wasn't Famous," and "Could Well Be In," but beyond a few other educated guesses ("Pranging Out"? "Never Con an Honest John"?), I couldn't tell you in what order or what they supplemented the set with from the album I know least well, Original Pirate Material. Regardless. There was audience participation (a jumping contest with a front row denizen affectionately dubbed The Green Man, a Decemberists-style request for everyone to crouch down and then jump back up on cue) and a general "we're all in this together so let's fucking party" vibe. I mean, it was no Radiohead at Bonnaroo or anything, but still an amazing, rewarding live concert experience.
Sunday started out a bit more subdued, thanks to the early afternoon drizzle and my general unfamiliarity with the nuances of a beer-only hangover (choosy drunks choose bourbon!), but I eased back into things with Annie and Lupe Fiasco (this guy's gonna be huge). I made sure to stop by for Jon Brion's set; though I sometimes have my beefs with his film scores, he's so clearly a musician's musician that I couldn't help but love listening to him rock out on his guitar, even if he ran on a little long. I, lamentably, never got a chance to see a Guided by Voices show before they officially disbanded, so I knew I couldn't miss Uncle Bob's set.
The only song I recognized was "Game of Pricks" (from the sound of the stage banter, I think most of the rest of the stuff they played was from From a Compound Eye) but, at a certain point, it didn't seem to matter; a Pollard tune sounds like a Pollard tune, sure, but there's also that wonderful Pollard voice. I don't think I've ever fully appreciated what a singular instrument it is, but when he ripped into his first song, I was just bowled over by how great he sounded. Love the Bob, and I did get to see one of his legendary high kicks. I missed most of the Dead Prez set, between emptying the bladder and bidding farewell to my exhausted and goosebump'd companions and getting in position for Bloc Party.
I've come a long way in my appreciation of the band since my days of casual meh dismissal. The album is still a bit too long for my attention span these days, and the lyrics can border on off-puttingly sincere ("the price! Of gaa-hass! Keeps on rize-ih-hing!"), but they really do have a knack for taking you on a journey within the world of each song with meaty textures and teasingly taut momentum. Not to mention the fact that their fluid melodies don't get nearly as much credit as they're due. (Aside from Pallett's obvious formal prowess, there's a reason that Final Fantasy cover of "This Modern Love" affected me as deeply as it did.) Their set felt like the perfect closer to the day, and the weekend, between the rapturous excitement of the audience and the band's own enthusiastic willingness to live up to the responsibility of playing their self-proclaimed first-ever festival-headlining gig.
So, yes yes. It was quite a weekend, and I give a top of the lungs shout-out to CL-II for the ticket and NI for suggesting I might want to go and Kateri (and David Geb. and Karen) for being groovy to hang with. ClusterFest '06 has only just begun! (Viddy the rest of my pics here and a hearty hail-fellow-well-met to anyone who might have ended up here from NowPublic.)
The weather was perfect, and, though I'm still struggling to connect the dots of what I actually did and heard for most of those two days thanks to the 48-hour haze of beer and motherfucking Sparks I was operating under, I'm fairly certain I enjoyed the hell out of the whole circus.
I'm sure I'll be in turbo must. hear. every. note. mode when the Pitchfork Music Festival rolls around next month, but it was easy for me to be chilled out about not seeing all the acts this weekend since I didn't pay for the passes and had much less invested, personally and emotionally, in the artists collectively appearing on the bill. I'm sad I didn't arrive in time to catch Jose Gonzalez (who by most bloggers' accounts was fantastic), but I kept an ear open for High on Fire, Roky Erickson, and Boredoms from afar, I wiggled into the crowd toward the back to check out the end of Ghostface's set (he was so instantly charismatic that it didn't take long for me to have my fist raised in the air, cheering my lungs out as part of the collective, chanted homage to "Oh! Dee! Bee!"), and I made sure to grab a good patch of grass early in the day for the Stills (I was the one clapping in annoying syncopation to "Oh, Shoplifter").
I swung around to the front stage right area for Lady Sovereign (who I'd spied earlier in the afternoon tooling around in a groundskeeper's golf cart that she'd obviously commandeered with her utter fierceness--awesome), mostly to put myself in a good position for the Streets headlining set.
Kittens, aside from perhaps Spoon, who I'll be seeing next month at the 'Fork fest anyway, I can't think of another group I would currently be as excited to catch live as Mike Skinner and his band of merry geezers. I was able to jockey myself into an exceptional position in front of the stage-right stack of speakers, thanks to the courtesy of the other (taller) members of the audience who, upon seeing me lodged up in their armpits, would invariably observe, "oh, you're really short. Why don't you stand in front of us?" Mad, mad love for good festival manners! I mean, sure, standing in front of the speakers made my esophagus vibrate at near escape velocity in my chest cavity and the fact that I forgot to pack earplugs for the day resulted in ringing ears for a good 18 subsequent hours, but it was a small price to pay to jump around like a maniac and bask in the mass of irresistible contradictions that is Mike Skinner's flow.
I honestly don't even remember much of what they played. I know they definitely took care of the big ones like "Never Went to Church," "Dry Your Eyes," "When You Wasn't Famous," and "Could Well Be In," but beyond a few other educated guesses ("Pranging Out"? "Never Con an Honest John"?), I couldn't tell you in what order or what they supplemented the set with from the album I know least well, Original Pirate Material. Regardless. There was audience participation (a jumping contest with a front row denizen affectionately dubbed The Green Man, a Decemberists-style request for everyone to crouch down and then jump back up on cue) and a general "we're all in this together so let's fucking party" vibe. I mean, it was no Radiohead at Bonnaroo or anything, but still an amazing, rewarding live concert experience.
Sunday started out a bit more subdued, thanks to the early afternoon drizzle and my general unfamiliarity with the nuances of a beer-only hangover (choosy drunks choose bourbon!), but I eased back into things with Annie and Lupe Fiasco (this guy's gonna be huge). I made sure to stop by for Jon Brion's set; though I sometimes have my beefs with his film scores, he's so clearly a musician's musician that I couldn't help but love listening to him rock out on his guitar, even if he ran on a little long. I, lamentably, never got a chance to see a Guided by Voices show before they officially disbanded, so I knew I couldn't miss Uncle Bob's set.
The only song I recognized was "Game of Pricks" (from the sound of the stage banter, I think most of the rest of the stuff they played was from From a Compound Eye) but, at a certain point, it didn't seem to matter; a Pollard tune sounds like a Pollard tune, sure, but there's also that wonderful Pollard voice. I don't think I've ever fully appreciated what a singular instrument it is, but when he ripped into his first song, I was just bowled over by how great he sounded. Love the Bob, and I did get to see one of his legendary high kicks. I missed most of the Dead Prez set, between emptying the bladder and bidding farewell to my exhausted and goosebump'd companions and getting in position for Bloc Party.
I've come a long way in my appreciation of the band since my days of casual meh dismissal. The album is still a bit too long for my attention span these days, and the lyrics can border on off-puttingly sincere ("the price! Of gaa-hass! Keeps on rize-ih-hing!"), but they really do have a knack for taking you on a journey within the world of each song with meaty textures and teasingly taut momentum. Not to mention the fact that their fluid melodies don't get nearly as much credit as they're due. (Aside from Pallett's obvious formal prowess, there's a reason that Final Fantasy cover of "This Modern Love" affected me as deeply as it did.) Their set felt like the perfect closer to the day, and the weekend, between the rapturous excitement of the audience and the band's own enthusiastic willingness to live up to the responsibility of playing their self-proclaimed first-ever festival-headlining gig.
So, yes yes. It was quite a weekend, and I give a top of the lungs shout-out to CL-II for the ticket and NI for suggesting I might want to go and Kateri (and David Geb. and Karen) for being groovy to hang with. ClusterFest '06 has only just begun! (Viddy the rest of my pics here and a hearty hail-fellow-well-met to anyone who might have ended up here from NowPublic.)
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
My World-Traveling Friends
Grinnellians, I hope you've all been telling each other "see you in India!" at least once a day for the past week. (What's that? Is that the sound of one Giddy laughing...?) As Britney would say, have an awesome time, y'all!
Though she's not down in the dirt quite yet, be sure to keep abreast of S-Money's adventures in excavation this summer at her specially created Paradise LiveJournal.
And, just for fun, the run-on sentence of the week, from Green Pea-ness: "[Lucky Soul's 'Lips Are Unhappy' is] like three solid minutes of tambourine and piano and indie blisscore and GOOD LORD IT'S LIKE HAVING YOUR URETHRA LICKED BY KITTENS JUST FUCKING DOWNLOAD IT ALREADY."
Though she's not down in the dirt quite yet, be sure to keep abreast of S-Money's adventures in excavation this summer at her specially created Paradise LiveJournal.
And, just for fun, the run-on sentence of the week, from Green Pea-ness: "[Lucky Soul's 'Lips Are Unhappy' is] like three solid minutes of tambourine and piano and indie blisscore and GOOD LORD IT'S LIKE HAVING YOUR URETHRA LICKED BY KITTENS JUST FUCKING DOWNLOAD IT ALREADY."
Friday, June 16, 2006
Lazy Friday All Link Edition
Deadwood auteur David Milch (from an old interview on Salon): "Well, I think we all are vessels of God, you know. As Saint Paul says, if the hand doesn't know, that doesn't mean it's not part of the body, that just means it doesn't know. And that's why, when I'm able to be of service to the characters, I experience God's presence more acutely than I do when I'm not working. So I try to work as much as I can."
John Roderick: "My friends and tour mates influence me a lot, so I'm writing songs in part to impress other musicians. I hope that Matthew from Nada Surf, or Charles from The Wrens, or Colin from The Decemberists, or the boys in Centro-Matic or Death Cab hear my songs and dig them, and when they congratulate me I feel gratified. Chris Walla has apparently been playing and singing the song 'Honest' during his soundchecks, which is the best kind of compliment." (via) I am sooo ready for Putting the Days to Bed to come out.
A buncha little French kids sing Laura Veirs songs. Most perfect musical match evah! (via)
From BBC News: "'Fossil' rock rat pictured alive: Images have been obtained of a live Laotian rock rat, the animal science now believes to be the sole survivor of an ancient group of rodents." I knew a fossil rock rat once; his hair was receding in front but greasy and long in the back, and he was really, really into Deep Purple.
OMG, seriously? Five amazing high-hat parts? Five thumbs up! Loves it! Esp. the Steely Dan (and Ted Leo/Rx, too).
Ah yes, I'm a sucker for the unexpected, slightly gimmicky cover song. (Awesome fodder for mix CDs.) That Boy Least Likely To cover of "Faith" sounds like a loose tooth—wiggly and gummy and delicate yet reckless. I hate it. I love it. I hate it. I love it. (She's my sister. My daughter. My daughter, my sister.) It also makes me long for Craig Robinson to pull Pete & Bob out of retirement to shimmy and flap to it.
John Roderick: "My friends and tour mates influence me a lot, so I'm writing songs in part to impress other musicians. I hope that Matthew from Nada Surf, or Charles from The Wrens, or Colin from The Decemberists, or the boys in Centro-Matic or Death Cab hear my songs and dig them, and when they congratulate me I feel gratified. Chris Walla has apparently been playing and singing the song 'Honest' during his soundchecks, which is the best kind of compliment." (via) I am sooo ready for Putting the Days to Bed to come out.
A buncha little French kids sing Laura Veirs songs. Most perfect musical match evah! (via)
From BBC News: "'Fossil' rock rat pictured alive: Images have been obtained of a live Laotian rock rat, the animal science now believes to be the sole survivor of an ancient group of rodents." I knew a fossil rock rat once; his hair was receding in front but greasy and long in the back, and he was really, really into Deep Purple.
OMG, seriously? Five amazing high-hat parts? Five thumbs up! Loves it! Esp. the Steely Dan (and Ted Leo/Rx, too).
Ah yes, I'm a sucker for the unexpected, slightly gimmicky cover song. (Awesome fodder for mix CDs.) That Boy Least Likely To cover of "Faith" sounds like a loose tooth—wiggly and gummy and delicate yet reckless. I hate it. I love it. I hate it. I love it. (She's my sister. My daughter. My daughter, my sister.) It also makes me long for Craig Robinson to pull Pete & Bob out of retirement to shimmy and flap to it.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Music from '06 and Movies from '95
"It's quite possible that if you're not interested in creating cathartic moments for the audience, both you and your audience are fucked, to which I say, 'Oh well.' No one appreciates a professional anymore. Everyone's a mystic."
Pitchfork interviews Dan Bejar.
"He [Mike Skinner] has written about his dad's death on the new album. Skinner spent months trying to get right what he wanted to say about it. 'Months. On one three-minute song. It was very, very, very constipated, very difficult to write because of what I'm talking about.' The song that eventually emerged, Never Went To Church, has been the most highly praised of the album, particularly the last line, which Skinner addresses to his father, 'You left me behind to remind me of you.' He wanted to make it good, he says, because 'I wasn't going to say it again. And I already feel a bit like... it's a bit cheesy.'"
Mike Skinner talks shop with the Guardian (via) and reinforces the point I was trying to make last week. I fuckin' love this geezer.
Thanks to all of you who've been sending me links about Rufus's Judy Garland homage at Carnegie Hall tonight. (Sayeth Trent at PItNB: "Just when you thought that Rufus couldn't get any gayer he goes and attempts to out-gay himself.") It's going to be exquisite. Wish I could be there. I'm really hoping they make a DVD or CD available at some point.
JWard (not Jay Ward) and I caught Elvis Costello on his River in Reverse tour at Ravinia on Sunday night. I was thrilled to get to see him live. (Um, OK, mostly hear him live; we were on the lawn and couldn't see a damn thing except a parade of Crocs, little kids dancing like maniacs, high-school aged ushers swishing their white skirts to the beat, and drunk folks grabbing each other's asses.) The band was fucking amazing. They played straight through for about three hours, including two extremely generous encores. Elvis even intimated that they'd run out of prepared material and simply couldn't play any more. His voice is currently enjoying the best of both worlds; he's still got most of his full range of notes, but they're only getting richer and more resonant with middle age. In addition to all Allen Toussaint's arrangements and material, the set included both "Alison" and "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," so I'd say we got way more than our money's worth.
At Nikola's incredulous behest, I sat down and watched Clueless for the first time ever with him last weekend. Ah, high-waisted jeans and ska music. Mid-90s culture, we hardly knew ye. It holds up as respectably as it can, considering what a time capsule it is, and, I gotta say, only reconfirms how much I like Brittany Murphy in spite of myself. Call it presence, call it charisma, call it what you will, but she blindingly outshines everyone she's on screen with at any given moment. Though, yeah, you ultimately want to get to a point where you can control that shit and use it to your advantage without making your fellow actors look bad, there's something undeniably appealing about her and her ability to just plow through her scenes balls-out.
Happy birthday to Nora Rocket today!
Pitchfork interviews Dan Bejar.
"He [Mike Skinner] has written about his dad's death on the new album. Skinner spent months trying to get right what he wanted to say about it. 'Months. On one three-minute song. It was very, very, very constipated, very difficult to write because of what I'm talking about.' The song that eventually emerged, Never Went To Church, has been the most highly praised of the album, particularly the last line, which Skinner addresses to his father, 'You left me behind to remind me of you.' He wanted to make it good, he says, because 'I wasn't going to say it again. And I already feel a bit like... it's a bit cheesy.'"
Mike Skinner talks shop with the Guardian (via) and reinforces the point I was trying to make last week. I fuckin' love this geezer.
Thanks to all of you who've been sending me links about Rufus's Judy Garland homage at Carnegie Hall tonight. (Sayeth Trent at PItNB: "Just when you thought that Rufus couldn't get any gayer he goes and attempts to out-gay himself.") It's going to be exquisite. Wish I could be there. I'm really hoping they make a DVD or CD available at some point.
JWard (not Jay Ward) and I caught Elvis Costello on his River in Reverse tour at Ravinia on Sunday night. I was thrilled to get to see him live. (Um, OK, mostly hear him live; we were on the lawn and couldn't see a damn thing except a parade of Crocs, little kids dancing like maniacs, high-school aged ushers swishing their white skirts to the beat, and drunk folks grabbing each other's asses.) The band was fucking amazing. They played straight through for about three hours, including two extremely generous encores. Elvis even intimated that they'd run out of prepared material and simply couldn't play any more. His voice is currently enjoying the best of both worlds; he's still got most of his full range of notes, but they're only getting richer and more resonant with middle age. In addition to all Allen Toussaint's arrangements and material, the set included both "Alison" and "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding," so I'd say we got way more than our money's worth.
At Nikola's incredulous behest, I sat down and watched Clueless for the first time ever with him last weekend. Ah, high-waisted jeans and ska music. Mid-90s culture, we hardly knew ye. It holds up as respectably as it can, considering what a time capsule it is, and, I gotta say, only reconfirms how much I like Brittany Murphy in spite of myself. Call it presence, call it charisma, call it what you will, but she blindingly outshines everyone she's on screen with at any given moment. Though, yeah, you ultimately want to get to a point where you can control that shit and use it to your advantage without making your fellow actors look bad, there's something undeniably appealing about her and her ability to just plow through her scenes balls-out.
Happy birthday to Nora Rocket today!
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Put Out the Fire, Boys, Don't Stop, Don't Stop
Through the miracle of the internet, I'm able to bring you my Tapes 'n Tapes/Cold War Kids concert review an astonishing three days after the show!
OK. So, I've been really high on Tapes 'n Tapes for a while now. I'd guess that, on average, I've listened to The Loon at least once a week for the past two and a half months (not that you'd ever know it from looking at my Last.fm/Audioscrobbler page, since I've still not been able to figure out how to get it to tally the playcounts from my Nano even with the supposedly handy free plug-ins--grr). It's a totally great album, I've been recommending it to friends left and right all spring, and I was really psyched to see them play the show at the Abbey on Friday night, especially after all the post-SXSW praise heaped on their performances by Stereogum and tons of other music blogs. Well, I hate to be a hater, but I was a little disappointed by their live set. It was totally competent, sure, but nowhere near transcendent. They sounded very loose, and not loose in the good way, when they first rolled out with "Just Drums." The keyboard was up way too hot in the mix, and the should-have-been-thrilling rhythmic interplay between the drums and guitar just couldn't seem to settle down into the pocket. They played through the entire album basically in running order with only a little variation and one new song. They sounded a little better, a little more confident with each passing song, but I was left resoundingly underwhelmed. The disproportionate amount of cheering, hooting, and applause from the audience certainly didn't help, either. It seemed like the packed house was celebrating their hipster cred via their own recognition of the tunes after the fewest number of introductory notes possible way more than they were celebrating the quality of the performances. I have a big problem with this kind of audience slut factor--giving it up too quickly and too easily--in general, though, so maybe I was just being overly sensitive. But, I don't think any of this changes the fact that they're still a great young band with great promise. On stage, they do have a very earnest, very goofy Minnesotan charm. Lead singer and guitarist Josh Grier seemed genuinely happy to be there, and, as far as diminutive yet powerful drummers go, though my heart will always belong to the Walkmen's Matt Barrick, TnT's Jeremy Hanson more than did his part to keep the set aloft. (Speaking of the Walkmen, why have there been so many mediocre reviews of A Hundred Miles Off? I think it's quite good.)
Openers for the openers, local group Moxie Motive, were way better than I expected them to be, and, if lead singer Matt Duhaime can shake the unfortunate Adam Duritz influence on his vocals, especially on the ballads, they'll be a band to watch. Plus, you just gotta love any indie rock group with the balls to pull out the upright bass and rock some 6/8 time signatures.
The night, however, absolutely belonged to the Cold War Kids. These guys are not fucking around. They put on a stellar set full of noise, jumping, sweating, percussing, and, perhaps most exciting of all, space. They possessed the confidence and the true musicianship to be completely unafraid to leave things a little ramshackle, a little unformed, a little unadorned. They intuitively knew that the notes they weren't playing and the empty corners they weren't filling were every bit as vital as the bluesy riffs and piano vamps hanging thick in the hot, smoky air. Nathan Willett, with his yelping, keening vocal delivery and old bluesman's hunch over the microphone, is a perfectly charismatic, even hypnotic, frontman, the kind who could conceivably convince impressionable young shepherdesses to abandon their flocks and slip off over the hillside to drink blackberry wine and howl at the moon all night. Bassist Matt Maust and guitarist Jonnie Russell wrestle their instruments like men possessed, pacing like caged animals, high-kicking at demons. Drummer Matt Aveiro lays it down nice and smooth, with nothing but impeccable fucking taste. Knowing, as many of you do, my love for Spoon's minimalist strut, which only produces more enticing friction the more elements it takes away, it's really no wonder that I feel myself falling for these Cold War Kids. Look for 'em on my 2006 year-end list.
I'm sure you've already read on Pitchfork that the Decemberists' major label debut and fourth full-length, The Crane Wife, is coming out October 3. Don't let us down, Colin. We're all counting on you to bring it.
New York Doll is an incredibly touching little film. Actually, I should say, Arthur "Killer" Kane's story is incredibly touching, and dumb-fucking-lucky documentarian Greg Whiteley just happened to be around to catch an extremely poignant part of it. There's a slight bit of condescension in his approach, but enough of Kane's heart shines through to redeem the whole project. Recommended.
Teleporting fish in Atlanta. Which eeriness brings me to
6.6.06!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whether you're heading to Hell, spending the day with Slayer, or taking in the "supremely unnecessary" remake of The Omen, I wish all of you all the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil you can handle!
OK. So, I've been really high on Tapes 'n Tapes for a while now. I'd guess that, on average, I've listened to The Loon at least once a week for the past two and a half months (not that you'd ever know it from looking at my Last.fm/Audioscrobbler page, since I've still not been able to figure out how to get it to tally the playcounts from my Nano even with the supposedly handy free plug-ins--grr). It's a totally great album, I've been recommending it to friends left and right all spring, and I was really psyched to see them play the show at the Abbey on Friday night, especially after all the post-SXSW praise heaped on their performances by Stereogum and tons of other music blogs. Well, I hate to be a hater, but I was a little disappointed by their live set. It was totally competent, sure, but nowhere near transcendent. They sounded very loose, and not loose in the good way, when they first rolled out with "Just Drums." The keyboard was up way too hot in the mix, and the should-have-been-thrilling rhythmic interplay between the drums and guitar just couldn't seem to settle down into the pocket. They played through the entire album basically in running order with only a little variation and one new song. They sounded a little better, a little more confident with each passing song, but I was left resoundingly underwhelmed. The disproportionate amount of cheering, hooting, and applause from the audience certainly didn't help, either. It seemed like the packed house was celebrating their hipster cred via their own recognition of the tunes after the fewest number of introductory notes possible way more than they were celebrating the quality of the performances. I have a big problem with this kind of audience slut factor--giving it up too quickly and too easily--in general, though, so maybe I was just being overly sensitive. But, I don't think any of this changes the fact that they're still a great young band with great promise. On stage, they do have a very earnest, very goofy Minnesotan charm. Lead singer and guitarist Josh Grier seemed genuinely happy to be there, and, as far as diminutive yet powerful drummers go, though my heart will always belong to the Walkmen's Matt Barrick, TnT's Jeremy Hanson more than did his part to keep the set aloft. (Speaking of the Walkmen, why have there been so many mediocre reviews of A Hundred Miles Off? I think it's quite good.)
Openers for the openers, local group Moxie Motive, were way better than I expected them to be, and, if lead singer Matt Duhaime can shake the unfortunate Adam Duritz influence on his vocals, especially on the ballads, they'll be a band to watch. Plus, you just gotta love any indie rock group with the balls to pull out the upright bass and rock some 6/8 time signatures.
The night, however, absolutely belonged to the Cold War Kids. These guys are not fucking around. They put on a stellar set full of noise, jumping, sweating, percussing, and, perhaps most exciting of all, space. They possessed the confidence and the true musicianship to be completely unafraid to leave things a little ramshackle, a little unformed, a little unadorned. They intuitively knew that the notes they weren't playing and the empty corners they weren't filling were every bit as vital as the bluesy riffs and piano vamps hanging thick in the hot, smoky air. Nathan Willett, with his yelping, keening vocal delivery and old bluesman's hunch over the microphone, is a perfectly charismatic, even hypnotic, frontman, the kind who could conceivably convince impressionable young shepherdesses to abandon their flocks and slip off over the hillside to drink blackberry wine and howl at the moon all night. Bassist Matt Maust and guitarist Jonnie Russell wrestle their instruments like men possessed, pacing like caged animals, high-kicking at demons. Drummer Matt Aveiro lays it down nice and smooth, with nothing but impeccable fucking taste. Knowing, as many of you do, my love for Spoon's minimalist strut, which only produces more enticing friction the more elements it takes away, it's really no wonder that I feel myself falling for these Cold War Kids. Look for 'em on my 2006 year-end list.
I'm sure you've already read on Pitchfork that the Decemberists' major label debut and fourth full-length, The Crane Wife, is coming out October 3. Don't let us down, Colin. We're all counting on you to bring it.
New York Doll is an incredibly touching little film. Actually, I should say, Arthur "Killer" Kane's story is incredibly touching, and dumb-fucking-lucky documentarian Greg Whiteley just happened to be around to catch an extremely poignant part of it. There's a slight bit of condescension in his approach, but enough of Kane's heart shines through to redeem the whole project. Recommended.
Teleporting fish in Atlanta. Which eeriness brings me to
6.6.06!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whether you're heading to Hell, spending the day with Slayer, or taking in the "supremely unnecessary" remake of The Omen, I wish all of you all the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil you can handle!
Saturday, June 03, 2006
You Left Me Behind to Remind Me of You
Michelle Collins has been on fizz-ire this week. LK and I accidentally caught a portion of Deal or No Deal the other night, and, as we'd never seen it before, we were alternately stunned and baffled by its insipidity. The You Can't Make It Up episode summary posted the next day, complete with Celine Dion screen-captures, was like so much manna from the comedy heavens, reconfirming my perception of the show as being a vile waste of time and money. But, for all that post's hilarity, her riff on Cute Overload's alpaca footballing star was just crazy-brilliant. Didn't know it was possible to improve on something that was already wiping-away-tears funny.
The Guillemots cover the Streets' "Never Went to Church."
I've been digging on the Guillemots for a little while, and I'm big-time into The Streets right now, so what could go wrong, right? But, arrrrrrg, I just can't go 100 percent of the way with this cover. As far as the music itself goes, the Guillemots' take is more interesting than it could have been, but I have a real problem with the fade-out repetition of that line at the end. Mike Skinner's slightly treacly version is definitely not one of the sonic stand-outs on his latest album, but it's nevertheless become one of my favorites simply because of that line. The reason it works so well is that it's kind of tossed off in the middle of the song. It totally caught me off guard the first time I heard it, and my heart would have 'sploded right out of my chest from the truth and brilliance of it, that is, if my heart hadn't stopped beating entirely for a few moments. But, Skinner doesn't give you any time to dwell on it. The song just matter of factly chugs along back into the sub-Kanye's "Roses" chorus (which Pitchfork brilliantly referred to at the end of last year as his "please-don't-die-grandma" song), and then on through to the end. And, well, isn't that what it's like to have an epiphany about some irreducible aspect of the human condition? Those realizations come out of nowhere, hit you hard, then drift on by, their force a mere echo, leaving it incumbent upon you to hold the memory of them and adjust your perspective accordingly or just let them disappear into the rushing, receding current of your life. I mean, this is really emotionally sophisticated stuff. But Fyfe Dangerfield totally dilutes it both through repetition and by saving it until the end of the song, like it's some kind of summary or punchline or something. No one's ever had an epiphany gift-wrapped for them at an opportune moment and then gently repeated until they catch it and really have time to process it. Here, it just plays like the most banal pop music or processed romantic comedy cheese. Unforch.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Please Stop with the Ellipses in RomCom Titles
Aieeee! Elizabethtown has to be one of the worst films I've seen since Rumor Has It.... Truly execrable. Paul Schneider's kind of nice in his little supporting role, but, otherwise, it's a total mess. I hate Kirsten Dunst, Orlando Bloom looks sooo much better as a blond, Judy Greer's comic talents are utterly squandered, and Susan Sarandon should be ashamed of herself for the boner joke she consented to deliver on screen (you read that right). The music is great, as always, but if that's the best thing you can say about Crowe's most recent films, he needs to take the hint and just start directing music videos until he can get his groove back. I said to LK at one point, "I can't believe this thing was written by the same person who wrote Say Anything...." It's really embarrassing, but more than that, it's really a shame. Steer clear, unless you're prepared to snark it up for two hours with some pals and some drinks. Because, for reals, you're gonna need those drinks to be numb enough to handle the last little bit of montage and voice over. "A single green vine shoot is able to grow through cement." Gag!
An unexpected shout-out to Northwest Indiana's very own Town Theatre on Salon today! I was absolutely tickled to see it given its due as the Grand Pompadour of the "strangest and unlikeliest art-house theater[s] anywhere in North America." Andrew O'Hehir mentions the free cake and coffee available in the lobby during intermission, which is certainly one of its most unique and charming attributes, but I've always been partial to the rusty old suits of armor propped up near the proscenium. This theater has been a huge part of my moviegoing life, from the second semester of my senior year in high school when I was only attending classes half-day and could stay out late for showings of stuff like Swingers to the extremely uncomfortable evening I spent watching Boys Don't Cry there with my father to bored summers home during college when CTLA and I would do the aural equivalent of squinting through British gangster movies like Sexy Beast whose slangy, heavily accented dialogue was done no favors by the theater's echoey acoustics to the year of aimless desperation I spent living at home between graduating from IU and moving to Chicago when I would go see subtitled piffle like Le Placard just to surround myself with any little bit of worldly glamour I could find to keep me from giving up the hope that I'd eventually do anything of substance with my life. Cheers to Salon for saluting this suburban oasis of respectable film culture and this landmark from my own wayward youth!
Chicagoans, come stalk my sexy ass at the Tapes n' Tapes/Cold War Kids show at the Abbey tomorrow night, where nine out of ten attendees will probably be live blogging the event. Unless, y'know, the music bloggers and other denizens of elbo.ws are, like, so totally over those buzz bands already. LOL, whatevs, OKBYE.
An unexpected shout-out to Northwest Indiana's very own Town Theatre on Salon today! I was absolutely tickled to see it given its due as the Grand Pompadour of the "strangest and unlikeliest art-house theater[s] anywhere in North America." Andrew O'Hehir mentions the free cake and coffee available in the lobby during intermission, which is certainly one of its most unique and charming attributes, but I've always been partial to the rusty old suits of armor propped up near the proscenium. This theater has been a huge part of my moviegoing life, from the second semester of my senior year in high school when I was only attending classes half-day and could stay out late for showings of stuff like Swingers to the extremely uncomfortable evening I spent watching Boys Don't Cry there with my father to bored summers home during college when CTLA and I would do the aural equivalent of squinting through British gangster movies like Sexy Beast whose slangy, heavily accented dialogue was done no favors by the theater's echoey acoustics to the year of aimless desperation I spent living at home between graduating from IU and moving to Chicago when I would go see subtitled piffle like Le Placard just to surround myself with any little bit of worldly glamour I could find to keep me from giving up the hope that I'd eventually do anything of substance with my life. Cheers to Salon for saluting this suburban oasis of respectable film culture and this landmark from my own wayward youth!
Chicagoans, come stalk my sexy ass at the Tapes n' Tapes/Cold War Kids show at the Abbey tomorrow night, where nine out of ten attendees will probably be live blogging the event. Unless, y'know, the music bloggers and other denizens of elbo.ws are, like, so totally over those buzz bands already. LOL, whatevs, OKBYE.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Lordi Have Mercy!
Seriously, if my cellphone supported MP3s, I would so make Lordi's "Rock the Hell Outta You" my ringtone right now. It may not be Eurovision Song Contest winner "Hard Rock Hallelujah," but, it'll do, pig. It'll do.
I recall reading about the group on David Byrne's blog a little while back, but the curiosity ultimately came to me last night after reading S/FJ's online only New Yorker Q&A about--get this--why certain British acts have so much trouble crossing over in America. Bwah-hahahahaha! The fact that that Q&A (and his column on the same subject) exist at all strikes me as being very Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard as "punishment." It's like the editorial Powers That Be at the NYer thought the best way to address his involvement in the whole Merritt rockism/racism flap was to get him to write about, Dizzee Rascal notwithstanding, a bunch of whitey white motherfuckers! Or maybe he dreamt the idea up himself. Who knows. But still. Anyway, slight and perhaps unintentional comedy to one side, it's nice to finally hear someone with some highly acute listening skills (rightly) praise the Arctic Monkeys and (politely) explain why Coldplay used to be really quite good but now not so much.
I recall reading about the group on David Byrne's blog a little while back, but the curiosity ultimately came to me last night after reading S/FJ's online only New Yorker Q&A about--get this--why certain British acts have so much trouble crossing over in America. Bwah-hahahahaha! The fact that that Q&A (and his column on the same subject) exist at all strikes me as being very Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard as "punishment." It's like the editorial Powers That Be at the NYer thought the best way to address his involvement in the whole Merritt rockism/racism flap was to get him to write about, Dizzee Rascal notwithstanding, a bunch of whitey white motherfuckers! Or maybe he dreamt the idea up himself. Who knows. But still. Anyway, slight and perhaps unintentional comedy to one side, it's nice to finally hear someone with some highly acute listening skills (rightly) praise the Arctic Monkeys and (politely) explain why Coldplay used to be really quite good but now not so much.
Monday, May 29, 2006
The Proposition and Lady Vengeance
Went in for a bloody revenge/ties-that-bind double feature on Sunday: The Proposition at the Music Box, then Lady Vengeance at the Landmark. I'm glad I saw them in that order because the second served as a much needed corrective to the first.
I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.
It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)
I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.
Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)
Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.
The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.
Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.
It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.
On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!
"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).
"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.
"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).
And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.
I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.
It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)
I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.
Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)
Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.
The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.
Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.
It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.
On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!
"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).
"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.
"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).
And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Post-BEA Reading Material Glut
"If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn't pick Jose. Nehru, he's nearer the mark. Wendell Willkie. I'd settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or--listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o' War, I'd respect your feeling. No, I'm serious. Love should be allowed. I'm all for it. Now that I've got a pretty good idea what it is." --Breakfast at Tiffany's
"I had this whole history with [David] Byrne. In New York, I used to get mistaken for him all the time....Then at some point I saw 'Burning Down the House' and I remember something in me just twitched when I saw Byrne because he was this fully realized version of myself. We're both these uptight white guys trying to stumble into grace....
"You know, there are two kinds of singers: those who sing about who they are, like Townes Van Zandt, and those who sing about who they wish they are, like me. But I'll tell you, what happens sometimes is that, incrementally, you become that person you're singing about. What people see in my songs is me in my deep-focus mode. That's when I get to tear away the veil of my anxiety. If I'm holding out for anything, I guess, it's that: to become the 'me' in my songs." --Jim White, interviewed in The Believer, May 2006
"Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!" --Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street, excerpted in the 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1 sampler
"I had this whole history with [David] Byrne. In New York, I used to get mistaken for him all the time....Then at some point I saw 'Burning Down the House' and I remember something in me just twitched when I saw Byrne because he was this fully realized version of myself. We're both these uptight white guys trying to stumble into grace....
"You know, there are two kinds of singers: those who sing about who they are, like Townes Van Zandt, and those who sing about who they wish they are, like me. But I'll tell you, what happens sometimes is that, incrementally, you become that person you're singing about. What people see in my songs is me in my deep-focus mode. That's when I get to tear away the veil of my anxiety. If I'm holding out for anything, I guess, it's that: to become the 'me' in my songs." --Jim White, interviewed in The Believer, May 2006
"Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!" --Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street, excerpted in the 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1 sampler
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