It's been a Roderiffic week for us Long Winters fans. J.Rod's Bonnaroo blog for MSNBC is worth its weight in pull-quotes, and now Daytrotter has posted an interview with the man and an unbelievable live session to go along with it. "Clouds" has always quietly been one of my favorite songs on Putting the Days to Bed and it just sounds so free and nice and loose here. And, hearing a live take on "Scared Straight"--a song that I could barely make a mix CD without for a span of about two years--makes me so excited I could just puke. I swear, as days go by, I'm becoming less an eloquent defender of my favorite movies, books, and music and more a hysterical, squealing, geeked-out fangirl.
Speaking of Bonnaroo, I've been obsessed for a while now with the Flickr page of a wonderful New York-based photographer, Elizabeth Weinberg (surprise, surprise--I was first introduced to her stuff thanks to her lovely portraits of the Long Winters on tour), and she's got a KILLER set from this year's 'Roo. They're all gorgeous, but be sure to check out what she has for the Hold Steady, the Flaming Lips, and Spoon.
Happy solstice, my bebes.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
'Fork & Spoon
Ohhh, you know what's awesome? Go lay in a tanning bed for a while and crank up Deerhunter's Cryptograms while you're in there. You'll feel like you're in a David Lynch movie or something.
Pitchfork previews The Underdog off Spoon's forthcoming new one Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm sure the Jon Brion fan-boys and -girls will be geeking out about his production work here, but I'm of the mind that the specialest special effect that's going to be found anywhere on the disk is Britt's voice. Love that howl. Get excited.
LOL, that's my hand.
I didn't have a chance to write up anything about the Animal Collective show I went to at the Metro a few weeks back, but Pitchfork has a great short review and some representative shots from that night, and Stereogum caught a show last weekend in New York that sounds every bit as good as the one I saw here. I'm definitely turning into a big Collective convert.
Pitchfork previews The Underdog off Spoon's forthcoming new one Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm sure the Jon Brion fan-boys and -girls will be geeking out about his production work here, but I'm of the mind that the specialest special effect that's going to be found anywhere on the disk is Britt's voice. Love that howl. Get excited.
LOL, that's my hand.
I didn't have a chance to write up anything about the Animal Collective show I went to at the Metro a few weeks back, but Pitchfork has a great short review and some representative shots from that night, and Stereogum caught a show last weekend in New York that sounds every bit as good as the one I saw here. I'm definitely turning into a big Collective convert.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
"Enough With This Cicada Bullshit"
From the brilliant and twisted mind of Dr. Benji Kelnardo, a few thoughts on cicadas:
This has to stop. Every single fucking day I turn on the news and some jackass from Schaumburg is fryin' up a pan of the little fuckers or covering them in chocolate and arranging them on a silver platter. People keep sending in pictures of cicadas doing all sorts of gross things. They are making cakes in the form of cicadas and finding dead ones and dressing them up like a rock band and then freezing them (seen on channel 5, worth checking the website). They have made their appearance in Crown Point and buzz and hum all day long (this is actually kinda neat, it echoes through the whole neighborhood). However, they are so fucking hideous I don't even know where to begin. This is some biblical shit. They are big, ugly, stupid creatures that fly haphazardly into windows, screens, cars, etc. And they shed their exoskeletons. Um, just in case you didn't get that the first time--"they shed their exoskeletons." And they leave them wherever they feel like, driveways, bushes, porches. Yuck. And, matters got much worse today and yesterday as the filthy fucking sea-chickens discovered them. It looks like our neighborhood is a beach or the Southlake Mall parking lot, covered in the flying rats as they peck at the ground and fight each other for the creatures. It is Mother Nature at her ugliest. This sea-chicken phenomenon is apparently happening all over the area according to the
news. That's some sick shit. Fuck them. All of them.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Boxer, and Other Bits & Bobs
Required reading: Joss Whedon's short and impassioned essay about the Dua Khalil murder.
Great interview at the Onion A.V. Club with one of my fave contemporary comedians, Louis C.K.
My opinion of Boxer hasn't really crystallized yet, which is as it should be, considering the way Matt and the brothers like to hide little time bombs of feeling throughout their songs that are designed not to explode on you for months. But, man. I just hear those opening piano chords of "Fake Empire" and instantly feel like I want to burst into tears. That's got to be a good thing. So far the album seems to breathe best over actual stereo speakers, rather than through headphones. All the empty space around Matt's vocals comes through a little more clearly, and poignantly, that way. And, though I take exception with the way Pitchfork asserts that this is "a drummer's album" with the phrase "Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here" (emphasis mine), as if he's suddenly gotten good out of nowhere, as if the previous albums aren't chockful of brilliant drumming, the point is well taken. Those snare snaps and other fills in "Mistaken for Strangers" are every bit as likely to get stuck in your head as the chorus.
Happy Towel Day, everybody!
And, of course, happy 30th to my girl HLo-M. (That looks like the symbol for some sort of chemical compound.)
Enjoy your holiday weekend, my kittens!
Great interview at the Onion A.V. Club with one of my fave contemporary comedians, Louis C.K.
My opinion of Boxer hasn't really crystallized yet, which is as it should be, considering the way Matt and the brothers like to hide little time bombs of feeling throughout their songs that are designed not to explode on you for months. But, man. I just hear those opening piano chords of "Fake Empire" and instantly feel like I want to burst into tears. That's got to be a good thing. So far the album seems to breathe best over actual stereo speakers, rather than through headphones. All the empty space around Matt's vocals comes through a little more clearly, and poignantly, that way. And, though I take exception with the way Pitchfork asserts that this is "a drummer's album" with the phrase "Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here" (emphasis mine), as if he's suddenly gotten good out of nowhere, as if the previous albums aren't chockful of brilliant drumming, the point is well taken. Those snare snaps and other fills in "Mistaken for Strangers" are every bit as likely to get stuck in your head as the chorus.
Happy Towel Day, everybody!
And, of course, happy 30th to my girl HLo-M. (That looks like the symbol for some sort of chemical compound.)
Enjoy your holiday weekend, my kittens!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Save S/FJ's Photos
I've linked so often, and with so much joy, to Sasha Frere-Jones's blog in the past, I would be completely remiss if I didn't post a link today to his online collection plate. Apparently he had a major hard drive crash this weekend and has lost a great quantity of his beautiful photos. A hard drive recovery service will be charging him an exorbitant fee to recover said photos, and he's looking for some help to defray this cost. Throw a little love brutha's way, wouldja?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Bjork, Live at the Auditorium Theatre
Nice Village Voice write-up on the National's recent stint opening for Arcade Fire in New York (via). I'm just bouncing off the walls with anticipation for Boxer next week and the show at the Metro next month. (Also, LOL: "grandma-throttling enthusiasm". This reminds me of J. Rod's classic line in his report from last year's Bonnaroo about his previous perception of Cat Power's music: "[this girl I was dating] would play Cat Power on her car stereo at a really low volume whenever I was in the car, so that it sounded to me like a field recording of the rape of a thousand grandmas. Bleah.")
OMG, even as a non-Pumpkins fan, I am totally in love with the blinding brilliance of these LOLCorgs (via) and I CAN HAS CORGAN?. "Mah cred, i mournz it!"
I was planning on reading the 33 1/3 book on Steely Dan's Aja anyway, but if we're getting (according to this excerpt, at least) witty wordsmith Donald Fagen dropping Don Ellis references 'n shit, I may have to bump it a little further up the queue.
Um, yeeeah, and I also saw Bjork live for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre on Saturday. Best concert ever? Pretty close to it. I have never heard a group of people cheer that loud, outside of a sporting event perhaps. Everyone in the place was freaking out left and right, and she was just shockingly good. (Or perhaps unshockingly, depending on how you want to look at it.) If I were going to make a mix-CD sampler of her stuff for the uninitiated, I could do worse than copping from that night's set list. It was a nearly perfect representation from all her previous full-lengths. The stuff from Vespertine (one of my top-five all-time-fave albums) brought the tears to the eyes. The only technical difficulty of the entire night was, unfortunately, some feedback at the beginning of "Unison," which did ruin the mood a bit, though. The most impressive technical achievement of the night, on the other hand, would have to be the GREEN LASERS OF DOOM that shot across the hall like lightning bolts during those awesome horn stabs in "Army of Me" ("and if you complain"--wham!--"once more..."). Obvy, I'm sure rigging all that electro-stuff up takes great skills, but the effect was staggeringly perfect in its simplicity. I'm not sure how else I can gush creatively or interestingly about the show other than to say that, aside from every minute of music that filled the theater, perhaps the best thing I heard on Saturday night was a little girl, probably about nine or ten, walking into the lobby behind me with her parents, saying "Mommy, I've got butterflies!" because she was so excited to be there. Me too, kid. Me too.
OMG, even as a non-Pumpkins fan, I am totally in love with the blinding brilliance of these LOLCorgs (via) and I CAN HAS CORGAN?. "Mah cred, i mournz it!"
I was planning on reading the 33 1/3 book on Steely Dan's Aja anyway, but if we're getting (according to this excerpt, at least) witty wordsmith Donald Fagen dropping Don Ellis references 'n shit, I may have to bump it a little further up the queue.
Um, yeeeah, and I also saw Bjork live for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre on Saturday. Best concert ever? Pretty close to it. I have never heard a group of people cheer that loud, outside of a sporting event perhaps. Everyone in the place was freaking out left and right, and she was just shockingly good. (Or perhaps unshockingly, depending on how you want to look at it.) If I were going to make a mix-CD sampler of her stuff for the uninitiated, I could do worse than copping from that night's set list. It was a nearly perfect representation from all her previous full-lengths. The stuff from Vespertine (one of my top-five all-time-fave albums) brought the tears to the eyes. The only technical difficulty of the entire night was, unfortunately, some feedback at the beginning of "Unison," which did ruin the mood a bit, though. The most impressive technical achievement of the night, on the other hand, would have to be the GREEN LASERS OF DOOM that shot across the hall like lightning bolts during those awesome horn stabs in "Army of Me" ("and if you complain"--wham!--"once more..."). Obvy, I'm sure rigging all that electro-stuff up takes great skills, but the effect was staggeringly perfect in its simplicity. I'm not sure how else I can gush creatively or interestingly about the show other than to say that, aside from every minute of music that filled the theater, perhaps the best thing I heard on Saturday night was a little girl, probably about nine or ten, walking into the lobby behind me with her parents, saying "Mommy, I've got butterflies!" because she was so excited to be there. Me too, kid. Me too.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Amy Winehouse, Live at the Vic
I don't know what show all these cranky reviewers were at, man, because it def wasn't the one I was at last night. I mean, really. I went in to this show with insanely high expectations, and it pretty much met every one.
I have no pictures for you, my kittens, because they made me relinquish my camera to the coat check girl after the kind and gentle and patient and sensitive [not so much--Ed.] doorpeople saw my humble point 'n' shoot in my messenger bag, but, honestly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it in my hands as a distraction. I could focus all my attention on the stage, and the show I found there was white hot.
Amy was backed by eight-piece band The Dap Kings (two saxes and a trumpet, two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards) and accompanied by two gorgeous (male) back-up singers. The dudes all wore three-piece suits, the horn section had some subtle but perfectly effective choreography, and the drummer was doing rim-shots when Amy started throwing candy out into the audience. The whole thing would have seemed straight out of central casting if it wasn't, well, right on the money. I felt like it totally transcended its own Motown revivalism by going straight for the heart of the sound, without mucking it up with too much with self-consciousness or self-satisfaction. Not to mention that these guys were all consummate professionals, just jamming away like they were born with their instruments in their hands.
The folks who are whinging about Amy's stage presence clearly wanted some sort of polished professional, and, the way I understand it, that's just not her steez. Even though she didn't throw a tantrum or snort some coke off the mic stand like I was kind of secretly hoping she would, she was a little bit snotty and a little bit spacy--in short, everything I wanted her to be. I read her body language less as insecurity and more as a casual don'tgiveafuck that didn't have to actively demand our attention. It seemed like she just instinctively knew that she deserved it. Not to give her a free pass on the anorexia front or anything, but, she looked fantastic in her jeans and midriff-bearing shirt, white hoop earrings, and huge mound of jet-black hair extensions. (The top of her head seriously looked like some sort of evil cupcake gone to seed.) They played most of Back to Black and, I'm assuming, a few more off Frank (I only knew "Fuck Me Pumps"), and even snuck in a little bit of Lauren Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."
Of course, there were big, big cheers for "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," but the audience was basically losing their crackers before a note was even played. It was amazing. Most rock shows I go to, there's a sense that the audience is cheering for the frontman/woman because they view him/her basically as a more fully realized version of themselves; it's like, I think a lot of kids idolize Colin Meloy or John Darnielle because they fancy "yeah, those are the kinds of songs I would write if I could write songs; they're speaking directly to my experience as a certain kind of consumer of a certain kind of music." But Amy's appeal is so much more nebulous and intangible. (Which is maybe why the cookie-cutter reviews aren't quite able parse it in the familiar vocabulary of the average rock show?) I mean, she's got the sexiness, the voice, the attitude, the Britishness, the notorious reputation, the songwriting skills, but, really, none of those things, even working as a unit, are big enough to contain her. You can't really pin down the thing that inspired such an explosion of love in the room. I dunno. I'm bummed that the haters are hating today, 'cause I had a blast.
The jury's still out for me on opener Patrick Wolf. I'm not overly in love with his songs, but the specific kind of glammy, hammy lllllllllllllllookatme! musk he was giving off on stage reminded me of this time, I think it was last summer, when I saw three friends, two girls and a boy, get on the brown line at Armitage. They were clearly coming home from summer school or summer camp or somesuch, and they each had a plastic spoon and were sharing a white styrofoam cup of strawberry ice cream. The boy, all loose, rangy Jacob's ladder limbs and joints, at one point, a propos of nothing as far as I could tell, leaned all the way over so that he was about an inch away from sticking his nose in one of the girl's ears, the girl he clearly fancied best of the two. There was this obscene, hormonal, yet completely innocent intimacy in the whole exchange. That kind of sexy, sweet, gummy bear gesture of affection (both Merriam-Webster's definitions 2 "fondness" and 7 "the state of being affected" intended/appropriate here) more than made up for what I just wasn't getting out of the music itself.
I have no pictures for you, my kittens, because they made me relinquish my camera to the coat check girl after the kind and gentle and patient and sensitive [not so much--Ed.] doorpeople saw my humble point 'n' shoot in my messenger bag, but, honestly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it in my hands as a distraction. I could focus all my attention on the stage, and the show I found there was white hot.
Amy was backed by eight-piece band The Dap Kings (two saxes and a trumpet, two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards) and accompanied by two gorgeous (male) back-up singers. The dudes all wore three-piece suits, the horn section had some subtle but perfectly effective choreography, and the drummer was doing rim-shots when Amy started throwing candy out into the audience. The whole thing would have seemed straight out of central casting if it wasn't, well, right on the money. I felt like it totally transcended its own Motown revivalism by going straight for the heart of the sound, without mucking it up with too much with self-consciousness or self-satisfaction. Not to mention that these guys were all consummate professionals, just jamming away like they were born with their instruments in their hands.
The folks who are whinging about Amy's stage presence clearly wanted some sort of polished professional, and, the way I understand it, that's just not her steez. Even though she didn't throw a tantrum or snort some coke off the mic stand like I was kind of secretly hoping she would, she was a little bit snotty and a little bit spacy--in short, everything I wanted her to be. I read her body language less as insecurity and more as a casual don'tgiveafuck that didn't have to actively demand our attention. It seemed like she just instinctively knew that she deserved it. Not to give her a free pass on the anorexia front or anything, but, she looked fantastic in her jeans and midriff-bearing shirt, white hoop earrings, and huge mound of jet-black hair extensions. (The top of her head seriously looked like some sort of evil cupcake gone to seed.) They played most of Back to Black and, I'm assuming, a few more off Frank (I only knew "Fuck Me Pumps"), and even snuck in a little bit of Lauren Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."
Of course, there were big, big cheers for "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," but the audience was basically losing their crackers before a note was even played. It was amazing. Most rock shows I go to, there's a sense that the audience is cheering for the frontman/woman because they view him/her basically as a more fully realized version of themselves; it's like, I think a lot of kids idolize Colin Meloy or John Darnielle because they fancy "yeah, those are the kinds of songs I would write if I could write songs; they're speaking directly to my experience as a certain kind of consumer of a certain kind of music." But Amy's appeal is so much more nebulous and intangible. (Which is maybe why the cookie-cutter reviews aren't quite able parse it in the familiar vocabulary of the average rock show?) I mean, she's got the sexiness, the voice, the attitude, the Britishness, the notorious reputation, the songwriting skills, but, really, none of those things, even working as a unit, are big enough to contain her. You can't really pin down the thing that inspired such an explosion of love in the room. I dunno. I'm bummed that the haters are hating today, 'cause I had a blast.
The jury's still out for me on opener Patrick Wolf. I'm not overly in love with his songs, but the specific kind of glammy, hammy lllllllllllllllookatme! musk he was giving off on stage reminded me of this time, I think it was last summer, when I saw three friends, two girls and a boy, get on the brown line at Armitage. They were clearly coming home from summer school or summer camp or somesuch, and they each had a plastic spoon and were sharing a white styrofoam cup of strawberry ice cream. The boy, all loose, rangy Jacob's ladder limbs and joints, at one point, a propos of nothing as far as I could tell, leaned all the way over so that he was about an inch away from sticking his nose in one of the girl's ears, the girl he clearly fancied best of the two. There was this obscene, hormonal, yet completely innocent intimacy in the whole exchange. That kind of sexy, sweet, gummy bear gesture of affection (both Merriam-Webster's definitions 2 "fondness" and 7 "the state of being affected" intended/appropriate here) more than made up for what I just wasn't getting out of the music itself.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Tiny Bits of Funny
I bow at the feet of the genius who wrote this tutorial on LOL Kitteh as a Second Language. This is an absolutely virtuosic display of utter ridiculousness. I could have used the help when I was making this sign. That "have" is just crying out to be a "has."
I fully support Mimi Smartypants's suggestion that we all start using "SCIENTIFIC!" as happy-exclamation slang.
LOL, "Radiohead (my generation’s Arcade Fire)".
Also, it was just announced that the Long Blondes will be touring through the Subterranean in early June. Sooo much good live music coming up this spring and summer. I can't believe Someone to Drive You Home still hasn't been released in the U.S. yet.
I fully support Mimi Smartypants's suggestion that we all start using "SCIENTIFIC!" as happy-exclamation slang.
LOL, "Radiohead (my generation’s Arcade Fire)".
Also, it was just announced that the Long Blondes will be touring through the Subterranean in early June. Sooo much good live music coming up this spring and summer. I can't believe Someone to Drive You Home still hasn't been released in the U.S. yet.
Monday, April 23, 2007
RIP, Old White Guys
Both Boris Yeltsin and David Halberstam in the same 24-hour period? That's not a news story; that's a term-paper anxiety dream I had in college.
Friday, April 13, 2007
They Never Came Close to Guessing
I know I'm a day late at this point, but RIP, Mr. Vonnegut. I've never been the biggest fan, but that's nothing more than a simple error of omission on my part. One of my fondest memories of non-assigned reading during college is of the weekend I spent pouring over Breakfast of Champions, after reviewing the execrable film version for the IU newspaper. I've inscribed this much cherished quote from the novel on the inside covers and in the margins of many notebooks since then: "Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne."
"It's much work, measuring turtles."
Come rock out at the Subterranean with me tonight, kittens, and catch the Bound Stems, some of Chicago's finest, in action. (Eight o'clock rock shows are very appealing to my creaky old lady bones these days.)
"It's much work, measuring turtles."
Come rock out at the Subterranean with me tonight, kittens, and catch the Bound Stems, some of Chicago's finest, in action. (Eight o'clock rock shows are very appealing to my creaky old lady bones these days.)
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Great Turns of Phrase and Other Witticisms for the Day
"OK," says my subconscious, "give me one more reason to be looking forward to the National's Boxer." And MySpace, surprisingly, obliges with many, many more reasons, including the fact that the band "nods toward" Wrestling Entropy fave writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jonathan Ames on the album. Oh. Em. Gee. I'm coming dangerously close to completely ruining my first listen with anticipation now. (Stereogum issues a favorable premature evalution, Boxer drops on May 22, and the band journies to Chicago on June 7.)
How much are you loving this dustup (::guffaw::) about Keith Richards snorting his dad's ashes?
I give you the genius that is Just a Little Guy. (Thx, Michelle.) Go for the otters holding hands, stay for bons mots like "[T]his baby rusty spotted genet is about to snuggle his way right into your colon so he can eat you from the inside out. What are you going to do huh, punch yourself in the colon. Good luck with that."
S/FJ issues a memo to rappers.
I don't know how many of you have, like me, gotten completely sucked into Merlin Mann's online universe, but, for those who haven't, I'd hate for you to miss his excellent, and excellently funny, recent video podcast with J-Rod of the Long Winters. The one with Mountain Goats' bassist Peter Hughes is really good, too. (Thus ends my barely restrained interweb crushing-out for the day.)
Sean Fennessey on Battles' drummer John Stanier: "Like John Bonham on oxycontin, Clyde Stubblefield on steroids, Buddy Rich on calculus."
How much are you loving this dustup (::guffaw::) about Keith Richards snorting his dad's ashes?
I give you the genius that is Just a Little Guy. (Thx, Michelle.) Go for the otters holding hands, stay for bons mots like "[T]his baby rusty spotted genet is about to snuggle his way right into your colon so he can eat you from the inside out. What are you going to do huh, punch yourself in the colon. Good luck with that."
S/FJ issues a memo to rappers.
I don't know how many of you have, like me, gotten completely sucked into Merlin Mann's online universe, but, for those who haven't, I'd hate for you to miss his excellent, and excellently funny, recent video podcast with J-Rod of the Long Winters. The one with Mountain Goats' bassist Peter Hughes is really good, too. (Thus ends my barely restrained interweb crushing-out for the day.)
Sean Fennessey on Battles' drummer John Stanier: "Like John Bonham on oxycontin, Clyde Stubblefield on steroids, Buddy Rich on calculus."
Friday, March 30, 2007
In Other Pie-in-the-Sky News
Don't forget tickets for Bjork's Chicago show at the Auditorium Theater in May go on sale tonight at 5. Godspeed, kittens.
Update: I actually managed to snag one! Sososo excited.
Update: I actually managed to snag one! Sososo excited.
Neutral Milk News?
Update: Hahaha, motherfuckers. April Fools.
Um, WTF, is this for real? Is Neutral Milk Hotel really reuniting for a one-off festival gig this summer in Minneapolis sponsored by Tiny Mix Tapes? Or is TMT just fucking with us? Perhaps I should make a call to my peeps up north just in case. If it is true, damn, Pitchfork, you got treated!
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
LCD Hexagonsystem
Space boner alert! Have you guys heard about this hexagon thing the Cassini-Huygens mission has photographed on Saturn's North Pole? Peep dis (snip):
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region....
A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.
"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." "Whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack." Fucking rad, right?! Be sure to click through to the article itself to see the ridiculously cool pictures.
My music-listening habits can get so hermetic, what with the headphones and all, that sometimes it prohibits me from enjoying what I'm hearing. I'd been kind of knee-jerk with the meh about the new LCD Soundsystem, just because it's been so hyped lately (a full 90 on Metacritic; thx for the link, Richard). But then I heard "Get Innocuous!" out at the bar last night, and it was like someone had opened all the windows and doors and let a rush of cool spring night air in. It was just what my appreciation of the song needed. Revisiting it this morning, even with my headphones on the train, just confirmed the awesomeness. When those sharp, hard strings come in sounding like a traffic jam at the end and then get pulled way up in the mix to fully reveal themselves as a string section...wow. That's some of the most exciting stuff I've heard recently.
Chicagoans, have you been out to see the Bound Stems yet? I caught them opening for the Long Winters last weekend (OMG, another fucking mind-blower of a show), and they totally come off, in the best way possible, like Chicago's answer to the New Pornographers. They seem like a bunch of genuinely nice people having fun making music together, with an adorable, hooky tunefulness that's married to their own version of the stereotypical Chicago post-rock aesthetic. I'm just starting to spend some time with Appreciation Night, and I dig it so far. (Be sure to also check out the interview and free songs from their Daytrotter session last fall.)
Monday, March 19, 2007
Amy Winehouse and More
Not that the interweb needs another post of this nature right now, but Amy Winehouse's Back to Black is still very much making my head explode with its heavily righteous holy-fucking-shit amazingness. I mean, I liked the groovy throwback quality of "Ain't No Other Man" as much as the next person, but kittens, this is how an album's worth of blindingly white-hot retro-infused contemporary R&B/soul is done. Hell, she's even inspired me to revisit Ghostface's Fishscale, thanks to the ridiculously exciting verse he spits on the alternate take of "You Know I'm No Good" (which also appeared late last year on his More Fish). What kind of fuckery is this, indeed. Highly recommended.
Finally got around to checking out The Last King of Scotland this weekend; it's much better than I thought it would be. As my previous snarky remark about The Devil Wears Prada would indicate, I generally don't go in for descent-into-madness films, but this one worked for me for some reason. There's some infelicitous editing/imagery in one of the inevitable "oh god, what have I done??" sequences (voices and images literally swirling around a despondent and drunk James McAvoy's head), and I couldn't shake the creepy feeling at the end that, before I realized what had happened, I was suddenly watching just another action movie where the African men are scary and menacing and attemping, with great relish, to physically harm the anerable little white man who will inevitably escape to the bosom of freedom in the West after his little Dark Continental adventure. But, for the most part, it does some nice stuff with narrativizing the shifting dynamics of power plays between countries, cultures, sexes, political parties, families of origin vs. families of choice, and urban vs. rural lifestyles. And, not that all descent-into-madness films need be compared to Training Day, but as with Ethan Hawke in that movie, I think much of the reason Forest Whitaker ended up with the Oscar is because of the work McAvoy is doing opposite him, making him look good. He's much more than just a blank slate waiting to absorb the corruption around him; his own spiky little agenda locks into the jagged edges of power and hedonism that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by, and he deftly inhabits some of the more repugnant stereotypes of the Westerner visiting an African country in a way that they come off as both specific character traits and broader archetypes. I was definitely impressed.
Less impressive, though enjoyable in its own way, was The Namesake. I've never read the novel and don't know as much of Mira Nair's work as I wish I did, but the evocative preview totally suckered me in. The film, though, is strangely linear. It seems it would have been natural to play with time a bit, just to goose that sense of history repeating itself with significant variations along the way, as well as to give the narrative some extra (and much needed) dramatic heft. The plot (as such) meanders in a way that keeps it from achieving the coveted "the more specific, the more universal" quality that it was definitely aiming for. Like, the big reveal about why Nikolai Gogol was chosen as "the namesake" turns out to be...hold your breath...a train crash. Just a train crash. No Nazis aboard the train, no terrorists laying explosives down along the tracks, no cherubic urchins accidentally stumbling into the path of the engine's headlight. I kept waiting for the father's speech to crescendo loud enough that we could hear some subtext folded in there, but there was nothing. The accident wasn't doing any additional dramatic work in the context of the story. Sure sometimes a train crash really is just a train crash, but then it's just a sad thing that happened to somebody and not an intellectually or emotionally engaging inciting incident that's the supposed raison d'etre of a major novel or movie. Shrug. At any rate, Irfan Khan is subtly charistmatic and slyly, magnetically sexy as the Ganguli patriarch, and, though Kal Penn struggles a bit with the heavier emotions, he's still really cute and really fun to watch. His body language in the scenes while he's still a teenager totally gives away his background in broad physical comedy; he's effortlessly funny with just one exasperated roll of his eyes.
Oh, yeah, and Daydream Nation this summer, anyone?
Finally got around to checking out The Last King of Scotland this weekend; it's much better than I thought it would be. As my previous snarky remark about The Devil Wears Prada would indicate, I generally don't go in for descent-into-madness films, but this one worked for me for some reason. There's some infelicitous editing/imagery in one of the inevitable "oh god, what have I done??" sequences (voices and images literally swirling around a despondent and drunk James McAvoy's head), and I couldn't shake the creepy feeling at the end that, before I realized what had happened, I was suddenly watching just another action movie where the African men are scary and menacing and attemping, with great relish, to physically harm the anerable little white man who will inevitably escape to the bosom of freedom in the West after his little Dark Continental adventure. But, for the most part, it does some nice stuff with narrativizing the shifting dynamics of power plays between countries, cultures, sexes, political parties, families of origin vs. families of choice, and urban vs. rural lifestyles. And, not that all descent-into-madness films need be compared to Training Day, but as with Ethan Hawke in that movie, I think much of the reason Forest Whitaker ended up with the Oscar is because of the work McAvoy is doing opposite him, making him look good. He's much more than just a blank slate waiting to absorb the corruption around him; his own spiky little agenda locks into the jagged edges of power and hedonism that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by, and he deftly inhabits some of the more repugnant stereotypes of the Westerner visiting an African country in a way that they come off as both specific character traits and broader archetypes. I was definitely impressed.
Less impressive, though enjoyable in its own way, was The Namesake. I've never read the novel and don't know as much of Mira Nair's work as I wish I did, but the evocative preview totally suckered me in. The film, though, is strangely linear. It seems it would have been natural to play with time a bit, just to goose that sense of history repeating itself with significant variations along the way, as well as to give the narrative some extra (and much needed) dramatic heft. The plot (as such) meanders in a way that keeps it from achieving the coveted "the more specific, the more universal" quality that it was definitely aiming for. Like, the big reveal about why Nikolai Gogol was chosen as "the namesake" turns out to be...hold your breath...a train crash. Just a train crash. No Nazis aboard the train, no terrorists laying explosives down along the tracks, no cherubic urchins accidentally stumbling into the path of the engine's headlight. I kept waiting for the father's speech to crescendo loud enough that we could hear some subtext folded in there, but there was nothing. The accident wasn't doing any additional dramatic work in the context of the story. Sure sometimes a train crash really is just a train crash, but then it's just a sad thing that happened to somebody and not an intellectually or emotionally engaging inciting incident that's the supposed raison d'etre of a major novel or movie. Shrug. At any rate, Irfan Khan is subtly charistmatic and slyly, magnetically sexy as the Ganguli patriarch, and, though Kal Penn struggles a bit with the heavier emotions, he's still really cute and really fun to watch. His body language in the scenes while he's still a teenager totally gives away his background in broad physical comedy; he's effortlessly funny with just one exasperated roll of his eyes.
Oh, yeah, and Daydream Nation this summer, anyone?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Two Great Tastes, Etc.
Eagle-eyed (and -eared) FoWE (Friend of Wrestling Entropy) Benji Kelnardo recently alerted me to the fact that Beyonce and Shakira have collaborated on a song, and its attendant video, called "Beautiful Liar," which will appear on the forthcoming deluxe edition of B'Day.
As many of you know, I have deeply mixed feelings about both these artists, but may I hazard here a "holy shit"??? What perfectly crazy motherfucking genius came up with this idea? This is why we follow pop culture, kittens. I think I had five orgasms when I watched this for the first time:
People, we can achieve world peace with this video. Please spread the word.
As many of you know, I have deeply mixed feelings about both these artists, but may I hazard here a "holy shit"??? What perfectly crazy motherfucking genius came up with this idea? This is why we follow pop culture, kittens. I think I had five orgasms when I watched this for the first time:
People, we can achieve world peace with this video. Please spread the word.
Monday, March 12, 2007
RIP Richard Jeni
RIP Richard Jeni. Wow, that's a shitty thing to hear about first thing on a rainy Monday morning. One of my greatest pleasures during summer vacation as a smallish child and middle schooler was being able to stay up late on weeknights to watch A&E's Evening at the Improv. This was just as the art of American stand-up comedy was cresting the peak of its 1980s heyday and beginning its subsequent decline into endless "stand-up gets a lackluster sitcom loosely based around his/her material" territory. And, like any impressionable youngster in a foreign country, I subconsciously absorbed the cadences of their speech and the "what is the deal with [pop culture artifact of your choice]?" sensibility. (OMG, there's a reason the Saturday Night Live sketch "Stand Up and Win" is one of my favorite segments of television ever.) I fondly remember many of Jeni's routines, esp. the bit about the football referee abusing the power of his microphone to voice some personal concerns best left to his therapist's couch, and am saddened to know one of the mainstays of that comedy epoch is gone.
(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)
(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)
Friday, March 02, 2007
New Music Geekery
"The record collector/taper/blogger mentality is really close to Catholicism in many people. Collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography. Show me an altar boy and I'll show you a potential record geek."
OK, the fantastic three-part Fluxblog interview with Rob Sheffield from this week totally just made me order Love Is a Mix Tape from Amazon. I was kind of casually interested in checking it out before, but dude comes off as so smart and funny, now I'm actively looking forward to spending 240 pages with him.
Prepare ye the way of the Bjork: Medulla follow-up Volta finally comes out in May.
"I don't know how much we've evolved if we still freak out before and after every show. Some shows are great, and some shows suck. And it's usually all us; it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's a big or small crowd. Sometimes we have things click for us, and sometimes we kind of fall apart. But that's part of the excitement of it, too."
You guys are probably going to get sick of me linking to stuff hyping the release of the National's Boxer, but, oh well, get used to it. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, check out the P4K interview with Matt Berninger.
2007 is seriously going to rule for new music. We've got the two mentioned above, and news comes down through both Stereogum and the Fork this week that we've got new Laura Veirs to look forward to this spring too.
OK, the fantastic three-part Fluxblog interview with Rob Sheffield from this week totally just made me order Love Is a Mix Tape from Amazon. I was kind of casually interested in checking it out before, but dude comes off as so smart and funny, now I'm actively looking forward to spending 240 pages with him.
Prepare ye the way of the Bjork: Medulla follow-up Volta finally comes out in May.
"I don't know how much we've evolved if we still freak out before and after every show. Some shows are great, and some shows suck. And it's usually all us; it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's a big or small crowd. Sometimes we have things click for us, and sometimes we kind of fall apart. But that's part of the excitement of it, too."
You guys are probably going to get sick of me linking to stuff hyping the release of the National's Boxer, but, oh well, get used to it. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, check out the P4K interview with Matt Berninger.
2007 is seriously going to rule for new music. We've got the two mentioned above, and news comes down through both Stereogum and the Fork this week that we've got new Laura Veirs to look forward to this spring too.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
On the First of March, On the Holiday
I haven't listened to Illinois in ages, but for whatever reason decided put it on my Nano this morning and ended up listening to the first half of it on the train on the way home tonight. I was just stepping off the platform in my neighborhood when I had one of those moments iPods were made for: in the chilly twilight, Sufjan was whispering in my ear "on the first of March, on the holiday."
Casimir Pulaski Day.
I know it's very popular to hate on Soof these days, but I just live for moments of synchronicity like that. The delicate melacholy of the music brought me back to the day, and the (relative) relief of leaving the misery of February behind brought me back to the music I'd temporarily forgotten I loved. I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd found myself leading a parade of bunnies and friendly foxes down the street to my front door.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Dictionaries Are Our Friends
So, we're publishing the American edition of John Peel's autobiography, and the subtitle is "Margrave of the Marshes." We acquired the rights to the book maybe a year ago, and it never occurred to me to look up the word "margrave" until today. Because of its proximity to the word "marshes," for some reason I'd always assumed a margrave was a kind of bird. Boy, was I wrong.
Main Entry: mar·grave
Function: noun
Etymology: Dutch markgraaf, from Middle Dutch marcgrave; akin to Old High German marha boundary and to Old High German grAvo count -- more at MARK
1 : the military governor especially of a German border province
2 : a member of the German nobility corresponding in rank to a British marquess
I started laughing so hard at my desk when I realized how spectacularly wrong my assumption had been that I had no choice but to start doing bird calls. My exceedingly lame bird call, "kuh-KAW!", sounded suspiciously like a combination of Steve Martin in Three Amigos and Owen Wilson in Bottle Rocket.
Duuuuuuuuuude: New. National. Album. (Thanks for the scoop, P'fork!). Boxer is out May 22. Get excited, people.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Things
Ridiculous thing:
The Bjork/Diddy animated GIF conversation (via).
Wonderful thing:
A shit-ton of obscure Divine Comedy covers.
Revoking my hipster card thing:
The second coming of Arcade Fire? Yawn.
Does it make me an asshole? thing:
Didn't really like Pan's Labyrinth at all. Or (as expected) Babel. Or (if I'm being completely honest) The Queen.
Dead rock stars in the news thing:
Happy woulda-been 40th birthday, Kurt Cobain, and oh look, Chinese Democracy is leaking (via). Wait, y'mean Axl's not...? Nevermind. (Ha.)
The Bjork/Diddy animated GIF conversation (via).
Wonderful thing:
A shit-ton of obscure Divine Comedy covers.
Revoking my hipster card thing:
The second coming of Arcade Fire? Yawn.
Does it make me an asshole? thing:
Didn't really like Pan's Labyrinth at all. Or (as expected) Babel. Or (if I'm being completely honest) The Queen.
Dead rock stars in the news thing:
Happy woulda-been 40th birthday, Kurt Cobain, and oh look, Chinese Democracy is leaking (via). Wait, y'mean Axl's not...? Nevermind. (Ha.)
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
Cintra on Anna
I love Cintra Wilson for her sublime snark, but when she occasionally tamps it down just enough to reveal sympathy for the most maligned objects of pop culture obsession, she can take my breath away. Some of the best writing I've ever read on Michael Jackson is in the essay "Jacko, the No-Nosed Man from Motown (A Morality Fable)" in her collection A Massive Swelling, and she does it again today in Salon with her brief piece on Anna Nicole Smith's death.
Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:
Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:
What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty.
Seriously, it's a really great piece with some really great writing. Please do check it out if all the other unavoidable, sour-tasting memorializing floating around in the ether today has left you feeling scummy.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Inland Empire and David Lynch at the Music Box
Not to be a snot about it or anything, but I feel fairly comfortable making the bold declaration that seeing Inland Empire at midnight in an old-fashioned movie palace with David Lynch in attendance is pretty much the only way to experience the film. OK, well, take all those factors and transpose them to L.A. and it would probably be even more mind-blowing (let me know if, as I suspect, it is, KP and DS). But still. I was really lucky to have had one of those experiences on Saturday night that didn’t just reaffirm my faith in movies, it reaffirmed my faith in moviegoing. And how appropriately ironic that at the center of the experience should be a virulently damning critique of the Hollywood moviemaking machine.
There was a long period spent waiting in line a block and a half away from the theater in the snowy, frigid January night air, but all was forgiven when the man took the stage to rapturous applause and a standing ovation. Now, I’m no big Lynch devotee; I haven’t really seen any of his stuff except Mulholland Drive and maybe the first five episodes of the first season of Twin Peaks (for shame, I know—all the more reason to take the rest of everything I have to say with a whole shaker full of salt grains). But still—I hooted. I hollered. The excitement was contagious. And the dude, for all his deceptively mild-mannered demeanor, is bad ass. With the decadent, blood-red curtain covering the screen behind him, his black and white, be-suited silhouette glowed with a sinister halo, turning him into the self-styled avenging demon of showbiz he’s evidently resigned himself to being at this point in his career. There just couldn’t have been a more fitting introduction to the film (even though his closing benediction from the Upanishads certainly was nice).
And what can I possibly say about the movie? It begins with a single light beam from a projector against the dark and eventually wends its way to a lighted match held by a homeless woman on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near where Laura Dern will soon vomit a puddle of blood. We go from the industrial technology of film back to stories being told around a fire. It seems to weep with tears of both mourning and fury for the degradations of whoring yourself as an artist to a movie studio. When one of Dern’s characters tries to explain the origins of her misery and downfall to a borderline catatonic man behind a desk (is he a private eye? a movie theater projectionist? her pimp?) and says, “it all goes back to when my little boy died; it was like I was watching it happen from the back of a dark theater,” it’s hard not to read that statement (with a little help from Jonathan Rosenbaum) as Lynch himself tracing his dissatisfaction with Hollywood back to the failure of Dune. It’s also hard not to read Dern’s other brilliant line “men don’t change; they just reveal more of what they are” as a similar, weary bon mot about the shoulda-seen-it-coming machinations of this business we call show.
Curiously, however, it’s also a pretty apt description of the peculiar internal logic of Lynch’s own film syntax—the 45 minutes or so of just barely coherent exposition that eventually begins to extract its most innocuous characters, situations, and images to fuck the charred mass of sludge where your brain used to be. And therein lies the thrill of seeing this at a midnight showing. Battling against the fatigue of the day (and the fatigue of a whiskey on the rocks, I will admit), I more than willingly rode the waves of the waking nightmare that was unfolding in front of me rather than attempting to fight the current in any attempt to piece together the plot. (And I am fairly confident there is, in fact, a plot; a coworker who’d seen it once before in New York and then again at Saturday’s 8 PM show did his best to give me his reconstruction of what was more or less happening—and I buy it.) But, the specific circumstances of the screening gave me the gift of feeling lost. Lost in the detritus of the cinema—the sets, the theaters, the people, the lifestyle, the mythology, the hackneyed old plots, the forgotten corners of the landscape, the technology—the way that Dern’s character is. And, I’d wager, the way that Lynch himself feels as a truly independent director these days.
Now, I’m not saying that, when you’re sitting at home watching the movie on DVD, the rabbit sitcom and the scenes of the naked tearful hooker in the hotel room watching television won’t make you feel like reality has just been pulled back in on itself like a tube sock. But, I am reiterating the fact that sitting in a grand old theater during those scenes when Dern walks into a grand old theater and sees herself on the screen walking into a grand old theater has a particular way of feeling, at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, like, maybe you’re dead, or the world is about to end. Seriously. It’s an existentially terrifying moment. (And don’t even get me started on the scene a few minutes later when she shoots the mean old Polish guy, who turns into the demon/deathmask version of herself—the fright-induced adrenaline of that moment is pretty much solely responsible for keeping me awake until the lights came back up and for getting me safely back home.) I think he’s implicating us in his beloved leading lady’s (ladies’?) pain here. He’s rubbing our noses in the fact that we haven’t shown up. We haven’t made the effort. We haven’t appeared where we’re needed most. And yet, we’re there. We’re fucking there in the middle of it; we’re the ghostly presence silently occupying the seemingly unforgiving absence. He’s counting on the fact that crowds will gather in grand old theaters to be taunted by our lack of a reflection, causing us to doubt the reality of our very bodies in the seats holding us up. His masterful control of the mindfuck of that moment made me feel profoundly privileged just to be there to experience it.
And, well, what of . . . most of the rest of everything else? His preoccupation with women and women’s issues seems affectionate, respectful, and genuine. Sure, he’s excoriating the way Hollywood tends to maintain a stable of kept starlets in tiny, tiny pens like veal ready for us to devour while they prance and vamp and flirt with each other (and, apparently, still groove to some Little Eva). But he also has deep, keen feeling for now-aging actresses like Dern and the shoulda-been-hugely-famous Julia Ormond, giving them the painful, bloody metaphor of the screwdriver in the gut, the artist’s abortion that cuts deep, bleeds you dry, and then kills. And, it’s not just today’s actresses that Lynch seems to want to stand up for. I may be overreaching here, but, considering his affection for Hollywood and Hollywood history, I couldn’t help but read the blonde Asian girl’s story about her friend with the hole in her vaginal wall as an allusion to one of the original Hollywood rumors/urban legends, that Fatty Arbuckle molested Virginia Rappe at a party with a Coke bottle. The movie business’s predatory tendencies as dramatized by the abuse heaped on the women who attempt to make a living working within it is a pretty goddamn heavy indictment. Whether or not Lynch is aligning or identifying himself with that level of exploitation is kind of beyond me at this point, after only having seen the movie once, but . . . if he is, that’s either unintentionally but slightly insulting to the women who really have been chewed up and spit out by the industry, without the opportunities to redeem their careers that Lynch has had, or it’s evidence that trying to work as a successful director in Hollywood has taken a far greater toll on him than anyone has probably realized.
So, yes, I think it's probably some kind of masterpiece. I generally hate the term "tour de force" to be used in film reviews, but, fuck me if Laura Dern's performance isn't a goddamn tour de force. I'd stand on a corner with a cow for her, too.
There was a long period spent waiting in line a block and a half away from the theater in the snowy, frigid January night air, but all was forgiven when the man took the stage to rapturous applause and a standing ovation. Now, I’m no big Lynch devotee; I haven’t really seen any of his stuff except Mulholland Drive and maybe the first five episodes of the first season of Twin Peaks (for shame, I know—all the more reason to take the rest of everything I have to say with a whole shaker full of salt grains). But still—I hooted. I hollered. The excitement was contagious. And the dude, for all his deceptively mild-mannered demeanor, is bad ass. With the decadent, blood-red curtain covering the screen behind him, his black and white, be-suited silhouette glowed with a sinister halo, turning him into the self-styled avenging demon of showbiz he’s evidently resigned himself to being at this point in his career. There just couldn’t have been a more fitting introduction to the film (even though his closing benediction from the Upanishads certainly was nice).
And what can I possibly say about the movie? It begins with a single light beam from a projector against the dark and eventually wends its way to a lighted match held by a homeless woman on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near where Laura Dern will soon vomit a puddle of blood. We go from the industrial technology of film back to stories being told around a fire. It seems to weep with tears of both mourning and fury for the degradations of whoring yourself as an artist to a movie studio. When one of Dern’s characters tries to explain the origins of her misery and downfall to a borderline catatonic man behind a desk (is he a private eye? a movie theater projectionist? her pimp?) and says, “it all goes back to when my little boy died; it was like I was watching it happen from the back of a dark theater,” it’s hard not to read that statement (with a little help from Jonathan Rosenbaum) as Lynch himself tracing his dissatisfaction with Hollywood back to the failure of Dune. It’s also hard not to read Dern’s other brilliant line “men don’t change; they just reveal more of what they are” as a similar, weary bon mot about the shoulda-seen-it-coming machinations of this business we call show.
Curiously, however, it’s also a pretty apt description of the peculiar internal logic of Lynch’s own film syntax—the 45 minutes or so of just barely coherent exposition that eventually begins to extract its most innocuous characters, situations, and images to fuck the charred mass of sludge where your brain used to be. And therein lies the thrill of seeing this at a midnight showing. Battling against the fatigue of the day (and the fatigue of a whiskey on the rocks, I will admit), I more than willingly rode the waves of the waking nightmare that was unfolding in front of me rather than attempting to fight the current in any attempt to piece together the plot. (And I am fairly confident there is, in fact, a plot; a coworker who’d seen it once before in New York and then again at Saturday’s 8 PM show did his best to give me his reconstruction of what was more or less happening—and I buy it.) But, the specific circumstances of the screening gave me the gift of feeling lost. Lost in the detritus of the cinema—the sets, the theaters, the people, the lifestyle, the mythology, the hackneyed old plots, the forgotten corners of the landscape, the technology—the way that Dern’s character is. And, I’d wager, the way that Lynch himself feels as a truly independent director these days.
Now, I’m not saying that, when you’re sitting at home watching the movie on DVD, the rabbit sitcom and the scenes of the naked tearful hooker in the hotel room watching television won’t make you feel like reality has just been pulled back in on itself like a tube sock. But, I am reiterating the fact that sitting in a grand old theater during those scenes when Dern walks into a grand old theater and sees herself on the screen walking into a grand old theater has a particular way of feeling, at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, like, maybe you’re dead, or the world is about to end. Seriously. It’s an existentially terrifying moment. (And don’t even get me started on the scene a few minutes later when she shoots the mean old Polish guy, who turns into the demon/deathmask version of herself—the fright-induced adrenaline of that moment is pretty much solely responsible for keeping me awake until the lights came back up and for getting me safely back home.) I think he’s implicating us in his beloved leading lady’s (ladies’?) pain here. He’s rubbing our noses in the fact that we haven’t shown up. We haven’t made the effort. We haven’t appeared where we’re needed most. And yet, we’re there. We’re fucking there in the middle of it; we’re the ghostly presence silently occupying the seemingly unforgiving absence. He’s counting on the fact that crowds will gather in grand old theaters to be taunted by our lack of a reflection, causing us to doubt the reality of our very bodies in the seats holding us up. His masterful control of the mindfuck of that moment made me feel profoundly privileged just to be there to experience it.
And, well, what of . . . most of the rest of everything else? His preoccupation with women and women’s issues seems affectionate, respectful, and genuine. Sure, he’s excoriating the way Hollywood tends to maintain a stable of kept starlets in tiny, tiny pens like veal ready for us to devour while they prance and vamp and flirt with each other (and, apparently, still groove to some Little Eva). But he also has deep, keen feeling for now-aging actresses like Dern and the shoulda-been-hugely-famous Julia Ormond, giving them the painful, bloody metaphor of the screwdriver in the gut, the artist’s abortion that cuts deep, bleeds you dry, and then kills. And, it’s not just today’s actresses that Lynch seems to want to stand up for. I may be overreaching here, but, considering his affection for Hollywood and Hollywood history, I couldn’t help but read the blonde Asian girl’s story about her friend with the hole in her vaginal wall as an allusion to one of the original Hollywood rumors/urban legends, that Fatty Arbuckle molested Virginia Rappe at a party with a Coke bottle. The movie business’s predatory tendencies as dramatized by the abuse heaped on the women who attempt to make a living working within it is a pretty goddamn heavy indictment. Whether or not Lynch is aligning or identifying himself with that level of exploitation is kind of beyond me at this point, after only having seen the movie once, but . . . if he is, that’s either unintentionally but slightly insulting to the women who really have been chewed up and spit out by the industry, without the opportunities to redeem their careers that Lynch has had, or it’s evidence that trying to work as a successful director in Hollywood has taken a far greater toll on him than anyone has probably realized.
So, yes, I think it's probably some kind of masterpiece. I generally hate the term "tour de force" to be used in film reviews, but, fuck me if Laura Dern's performance isn't a goddamn tour de force. I'd stand on a corner with a cow for her, too.
Monday, January 29, 2007
A Short Bit on Inland Empire
More on the experience soon, but I just saw that Chicagoist used the photo I took of the marquee at the Music Box in their write-up on David Lynch's appearance at the Saturday evening screenings of Inland Empire. Chicagoist: exhibiting fine taste in film, local events, and bloggers' crappy low-res photos.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Hang Me Up to Dry
The Cold War Kids are no longer mine. Now, they belong to the world.
More videos? Funny you should ask: how about Of Montreal's "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" (directed by the Brothers Chaps!) and Bowie taking the piss out of Gervais at the piano on Extras?
Say what you will about the Shins' new album--and folks have said a lot--still: it's Mercer's voice and Mercer's melodies and how could that possibly be a bad thing?
I was planning to anyway, but now I guess I really gotta see Venus, The Queen, and The Last King of Scotland. I should probably put Little Children and Blood Diamond on the list too, even though...meh. I generally like Iñárritu, but I think there must be a reason why I haven't made time to see Babel yet after lo these many weeks in wide release. A reason that likely bears more than a passing resemblance to Wesley Morris's pithy takedown of the flick in 2006's Slate Movie Club.
Addendum: Also, I will not be surprised if Streep wins it for Prada since, I have recently realized, that movie is basically just Training Day for girls. "Ooh, my boss is mean. The first day at work is confusing and scary. I'm in over my head. Now watch my descent into madness and complicity with the machine."
Monday, January 22, 2007
Go Bears
Go Bears
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.
I derived much amusement today from the fact that "Go Bears!" became an acceptable and appropriate response to any greeting or polite query, regardless of situation or medium. Run into a coworker in the elevator lobby first thing in the morning before the coffee has kicked in and can't think of anything to say? "Go Bears!" The checkout guy at the Au Bon Pain is being overly effusive and it's getting under your skin because you're sweating through about seventeen layers of winter clothing and are also stupid and lightheaded from hunger? "Go Bears!" The normal chit-chatty e-mails to and from vendors in other cities go flying through the series of tubes and common courtesy requires you to share a few words about your weekend? "Go Bears!" It's easy, efficient, all purpose. I wonder how long I can get away with using it.
"Indie rock book nerd tv junkie explosion!"
Colin Meloy gives it up for Tom Stoppard (via).
In the middle of a particularly hysterical recent bout of PMS, "I fell into a burning ring of ice cream" made me laugh so hard I started sobbing.
And, because I'm feeling multimedia, I give you the best scenes from The Wicker Man (thanks, Dono) and probably my favorite recurring characters on SNL in recent memory, Two A-Holes at an Adoption Agency.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Moving on in to the New Year
I've been out to see a shitload of stuff over the past week or more. Had a chance to catch up with:
Notes on a Scandal. I really wouldn't recommend seeing this alone if you occasionally feel vulnerable about ending up a crazy, embittered old maid. (**Cough, cough** I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying--I have several black spiral bound notebooks full of articulate yet deranged scribbling exactly like Judi Dench's character's.) The acting is stellar, and it needs to be in order to actually make the statements about loneliness and desperation and codependency and selfishness and vile behavior (of both the deeply motivated and animalistically unmotivated varieties) as it wants to make. There were a few points, especially toward the end as all the various intertwined subplots started coming to their inevitable climaxes, that I saw the bizarro-world version of what this movie could have been without Dench, Blanchett, Nighy, Marber's script, and Eyre's direction (though I could have done without Glass's score--OK, OK, I get it, the frenzied sense of entrapment, etc.): it could have been so strident, hysterical, and cliche that it would have made me scoff, legitimately offended, at the needlessness in perpetuating the evil old lady stereotype yet again. Yet, it's so perfectly pitched that it reveals a deep, core truth about people who kill any chance at happiness they might have because they can't stop themselves from bringing those they want so desperately to love down into their own misery, even if being miserable together is in itself a kind of love. Bonus points for a "Fit but You Know It" reference.
The Painted Veil. Unoffensive, slightly turgid, clearly Oscar bait. There's one howler of a scene plopped into the middle, though, that just begs to be read as a red state/blue state metaphor, and it made me want to shout at the screen. Gotta love any screen work Liev Schreiber is doing these days, though. We need more.
Dreamgirls. OMG, so bad. I dislike it more the more I think about it. I expect better acting out of community theater. I guess they got what they put into it, though: musicians trying to act instead of actors trying to sing. (Why didn't they just do a staged concert, release the soundtrack album, and be done with it?) The character development is appallingly thin, and even the talented actors look like they're drowning. J. Hudson, though--wow. It's like her voice was directly wired into my tear ducts. Unbelievably powerful. There were only about 20 people in the theater the day I saw it, and we all still ripped up in applause after "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." The camera does love Beyonce, though, and, in that, she was well cast. I think the best acting she did in the whole thing was that montage of her being photographed in all those exotic outfits.
Children of Men. A real stunner of a film. (And, another Danny Huston performance I can add to my films-of-'06 tally!) It's so scary and so powerful. If I look at it as a "film," I can see Rosenbaum's point about how the back end of the movie turns into "a rather banal suspense plot about whether she and her child and therefore humanity will survive," but, as LK and I discussed, that sequence is also one of the most powerful visual metaphors for parenting that we've seen in a good long while, a fact which I'm willing to cast aside my rampant filmie snobbery for.
Miss Potter. Well, at least I didn't pay to see it. (Free sneak preview passes; thanks, MJO.) I declared afterward that I felt I'd been whimsied to a pulp. The only true moment in the whole boring slog was at the end of the dinner party when Renee as Beatrix whispers her acceptance of Ewan as Norman's marriage proposal, and his face crumples into a deep frown that, in any other circumstance, would give way to a sob of thanksgiving, yet he must tuck the passion of that emotion back into a proper stiff upper lip, which, despite his best efforts, still blooms out into a giddy but cautious smile. Get that man a light saber, people! (Erm...) The Onion A.V. Club ably and concisely sums up pretty much anything else you might need to know in order to convince yourself to skeep eet.
Casino Royale. Wow, what a pleasant surprise! How thrilling was that opening foot chase through the construction site and on into the embassy? How nice was it to get even a little bit of Jeffrey Wright? I'd also just read the novel and was impressed by how closely they stuck to the basic plot outline while improving on some of the weak spots and making it utterly contemporary. And, not to be all I told you so, but Daniel Craig is perfection.
Elsewhere:
S/FJ writes the best review of Volver I've read yet. I doubt it will be topped.
Robot gives birth in South Korean hospital. Snip: "The newborn, also a robot, is equipped with lights on its hands and cheeks to indicate its health -- blue lights mean problems while pink lights signal all is ok." I love that "also a robot" parenthetical--as if there were some chance that the robot would be giving birth to an actual human. Or, perhaps, a puppy.
900 Hay Bales Dropped to Snowbound Cows. Someone please tell me there were gay cows out there! OMG, I so love the mental image. As Alex Ross wrote in the midst of all the Brokeback hysteria last year, "please rise for the singing of the gay national anthem: 'pling-pling-pling pling...pling...'" (moo moo-moo-moo).
Much like the album itself, an epic and stunning interview with Joanna Newsom about Ys (via). If this doesn't convince you, you will never be convinced.
Wait, wha--? Kele Okereke is gay? Or bi? Or whatever? (Link via.) I wonder how I never knew or figured that out before. Huh. Even though I've warmed up to the band considerably over time, it actually kind of makes me like them about 500 time more.
Happy birthday, David Bowie. I listened to "Queen Bitch" on the train this morning in observance of the day.
Notes on a Scandal. I really wouldn't recommend seeing this alone if you occasionally feel vulnerable about ending up a crazy, embittered old maid. (**Cough, cough** I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying--I have several black spiral bound notebooks full of articulate yet deranged scribbling exactly like Judi Dench's character's.) The acting is stellar, and it needs to be in order to actually make the statements about loneliness and desperation and codependency and selfishness and vile behavior (of both the deeply motivated and animalistically unmotivated varieties) as it wants to make. There were a few points, especially toward the end as all the various intertwined subplots started coming to their inevitable climaxes, that I saw the bizarro-world version of what this movie could have been without Dench, Blanchett, Nighy, Marber's script, and Eyre's direction (though I could have done without Glass's score--OK, OK, I get it, the frenzied sense of entrapment, etc.): it could have been so strident, hysterical, and cliche that it would have made me scoff, legitimately offended, at the needlessness in perpetuating the evil old lady stereotype yet again. Yet, it's so perfectly pitched that it reveals a deep, core truth about people who kill any chance at happiness they might have because they can't stop themselves from bringing those they want so desperately to love down into their own misery, even if being miserable together is in itself a kind of love. Bonus points for a "Fit but You Know It" reference.
The Painted Veil. Unoffensive, slightly turgid, clearly Oscar bait. There's one howler of a scene plopped into the middle, though, that just begs to be read as a red state/blue state metaphor, and it made me want to shout at the screen. Gotta love any screen work Liev Schreiber is doing these days, though. We need more.
Dreamgirls. OMG, so bad. I dislike it more the more I think about it. I expect better acting out of community theater. I guess they got what they put into it, though: musicians trying to act instead of actors trying to sing. (Why didn't they just do a staged concert, release the soundtrack album, and be done with it?) The character development is appallingly thin, and even the talented actors look like they're drowning. J. Hudson, though--wow. It's like her voice was directly wired into my tear ducts. Unbelievably powerful. There were only about 20 people in the theater the day I saw it, and we all still ripped up in applause after "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." The camera does love Beyonce, though, and, in that, she was well cast. I think the best acting she did in the whole thing was that montage of her being photographed in all those exotic outfits.
Children of Men. A real stunner of a film. (And, another Danny Huston performance I can add to my films-of-'06 tally!) It's so scary and so powerful. If I look at it as a "film," I can see Rosenbaum's point about how the back end of the movie turns into "a rather banal suspense plot about whether she and her child and therefore humanity will survive," but, as LK and I discussed, that sequence is also one of the most powerful visual metaphors for parenting that we've seen in a good long while, a fact which I'm willing to cast aside my rampant filmie snobbery for.
Miss Potter. Well, at least I didn't pay to see it. (Free sneak preview passes; thanks, MJO.) I declared afterward that I felt I'd been whimsied to a pulp. The only true moment in the whole boring slog was at the end of the dinner party when Renee as Beatrix whispers her acceptance of Ewan as Norman's marriage proposal, and his face crumples into a deep frown that, in any other circumstance, would give way to a sob of thanksgiving, yet he must tuck the passion of that emotion back into a proper stiff upper lip, which, despite his best efforts, still blooms out into a giddy but cautious smile. Get that man a light saber, people! (Erm...) The Onion A.V. Club ably and concisely sums up pretty much anything else you might need to know in order to convince yourself to skeep eet.
Casino Royale. Wow, what a pleasant surprise! How thrilling was that opening foot chase through the construction site and on into the embassy? How nice was it to get even a little bit of Jeffrey Wright? I'd also just read the novel and was impressed by how closely they stuck to the basic plot outline while improving on some of the weak spots and making it utterly contemporary. And, not to be all I told you so, but Daniel Craig is perfection.
Elsewhere:
S/FJ writes the best review of Volver I've read yet. I doubt it will be topped.
Robot gives birth in South Korean hospital. Snip: "The newborn, also a robot, is equipped with lights on its hands and cheeks to indicate its health -- blue lights mean problems while pink lights signal all is ok." I love that "also a robot" parenthetical--as if there were some chance that the robot would be giving birth to an actual human. Or, perhaps, a puppy.
900 Hay Bales Dropped to Snowbound Cows. Someone please tell me there were gay cows out there! OMG, I so love the mental image. As Alex Ross wrote in the midst of all the Brokeback hysteria last year, "please rise for the singing of the gay national anthem: 'pling-pling-pling pling...pling...'" (moo moo-moo-moo).
Much like the album itself, an epic and stunning interview with Joanna Newsom about Ys (via). If this doesn't convince you, you will never be convinced.
Wait, wha--? Kele Okereke is gay? Or bi? Or whatever? (Link via.) I wonder how I never knew or figured that out before. Huh. Even though I've warmed up to the band considerably over time, it actually kind of makes me like them about 500 time more.
Happy birthday, David Bowie. I listened to "Queen Bitch" on the train this morning in observance of the day.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Favorite Movie Moments of 2006
I don't feel like I saw enough first-run movies this year to be able to confidently make a top-anything list, so, instead, I'll just talk about my favorite moments in the movies this year.
Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine. We're talking the heart of the movie here. Perhaps the best (and unlikeliest?) comedy duo since Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock in Nurse Betty?
Penelope Cruz singing flamenco in Volver. I tend to be really lukewarm on Almodovar (despite which fact, I think I've seen everything he's done since Todo sobre mi madre mainly because Benji likes to bring me along so we can fight afterwards), and, sure enough, I thought Volver was really overrated. Esp. Cruz's pretty much universally lauded performance. But, the few moments when she sings at the restaurant with tears in her eyes is the real deal.
Anything and everything Sacha Baron Cohen touched this year. Yes, including his performance in the otherwise not-my-taste Talladega Nights.
Cameron Diaz's hair in The Holiday. I don't know what movie she was performing in because it certainly wasn't the one I was watching. No matter--her shiny, lustrous perfect shade of champagne blonde hair was so unspeakably beautiful to behold it more than made up for her general lack of character development and successfully held my interest in her plot line even when her acting, um, didn't.
Christian Bale's one-note symphony of a performance in The Prestige. The anonymous commenter to my original post about the flick says Hugh Jackman's performance is superior because he changes. In any other movie, opposite any other actor, I'd be willing to concede the point. But, Bale's sustained monomania is what this movie is about. His psychotic commitment to being right, to being the best, forces him to chisel away at anything that made him human until he's transformed himself into an avatar of his own ideas and theories of magic, until he's a beautiful, noxious flame burning with the fury of self-righteousness and vindication. And, it's even more thrilling because he knows what he's done. He knows that he's trapped himself in a cage of his own devising, and the variations in the "glowering" that he can't prevent from seeping out while he strains with frustration against the bonds of his own creation make him completely pathetic, and the performance absolutely riveting.
Being reminded of why Keanu Reeves belongs in movies in A Scanner Darkly. Somehow the feline elegance of his charisma is allowed to burn more purely when his physical self is abstracted through Linklater's animation technique. I'd never be tempted to defend him as an "actor," but I'm beginning to understand how he's built a career on being used as a vital element of the mise en scene, as the specialest special effect of them all.
Matt Damon in The Departed. Absolutely the best thing I've ever seen him do. There's much to love in this movie (Alec Baldwin commanding all and sundry to fuck themselves, being reminded of just how good DiCaprio--not to mention Scorsese--can be, Mark Wahlberg's hair), but this performance of Damon's has finally lived up to the promise and potential I'd seen in him at least since Good Will Hunting but never felt was completely actualized until now. I get chills thinking about the way he subverts, with such ease and economy, the usual function of that million dollar smile of his when he flashes it, charming as hell, in the first dinner date scene with the psychiatrist. That was the scene that really hooked me into the movie and announced that Damon has officially catapulted himself into the next level as an actor. (Anybody seen The Good Shepherd yet and care to weigh in on his progress?)
The music in Shortbus: the Animal Collective songs, Justin Bond, Scott Matthew, Jay Brannan, the Hungry March Band at the end--I'm getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about all of it. In anyone else's hands, a movie as charming but uneven as this one should have been memorable mostly for all the unsimulated sex and nudity, but JCM's finely honed musical sensibilities somehow create nearly miraculous poignancy out of the chaos without ever slipping into the maudlin. Much like Shortbus the club in the world of the movie, Shortbus the film, imperfect though it may be, manages to sanctify the longing for connection harbored by the misfits and fuckups who come to it with an open, honest heart, while, y'know, humping yr leg.
The actors who universally improve mediocre movies, temporatily redeem bad ones, and provide extra but unlooked for zest to good ones. This year I hail and salute Steve Coogan in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Marie Antoinette, Danny Huston in The Proposition and Marie Antoinette as well, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada. There's really not much that unites them as actors other than their exquisite ease in front of the camera, but that ease is an oasis of good taste for me in the midst of all the over-acting, under-writing, and general actorly attention-grabbing that so often goes on around them. It's not that each of them is not capable of a fair bit of scenery chewing on their own from time to time, but their subtly left-of-center choices, clear respect for the craft, and seeming immunity to hype keep even their boldest performances aligned with the frequency that tickles my brain and delights my imagination.
An early happy new year to you, my kittens! You guys are fucking peaches for sticking with my ramblings, and I look forward to the privilege of being allowed to metaphorically barf all over your computer screens in 2007.
Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine. We're talking the heart of the movie here. Perhaps the best (and unlikeliest?) comedy duo since Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock in Nurse Betty?
Penelope Cruz singing flamenco in Volver. I tend to be really lukewarm on Almodovar (despite which fact, I think I've seen everything he's done since Todo sobre mi madre mainly because Benji likes to bring me along so we can fight afterwards), and, sure enough, I thought Volver was really overrated. Esp. Cruz's pretty much universally lauded performance. But, the few moments when she sings at the restaurant with tears in her eyes is the real deal.
Anything and everything Sacha Baron Cohen touched this year. Yes, including his performance in the otherwise not-my-taste Talladega Nights.
Cameron Diaz's hair in The Holiday. I don't know what movie she was performing in because it certainly wasn't the one I was watching. No matter--her shiny, lustrous perfect shade of champagne blonde hair was so unspeakably beautiful to behold it more than made up for her general lack of character development and successfully held my interest in her plot line even when her acting, um, didn't.
Christian Bale's one-note symphony of a performance in The Prestige. The anonymous commenter to my original post about the flick says Hugh Jackman's performance is superior because he changes. In any other movie, opposite any other actor, I'd be willing to concede the point. But, Bale's sustained monomania is what this movie is about. His psychotic commitment to being right, to being the best, forces him to chisel away at anything that made him human until he's transformed himself into an avatar of his own ideas and theories of magic, until he's a beautiful, noxious flame burning with the fury of self-righteousness and vindication. And, it's even more thrilling because he knows what he's done. He knows that he's trapped himself in a cage of his own devising, and the variations in the "glowering" that he can't prevent from seeping out while he strains with frustration against the bonds of his own creation make him completely pathetic, and the performance absolutely riveting.
Being reminded of why Keanu Reeves belongs in movies in A Scanner Darkly. Somehow the feline elegance of his charisma is allowed to burn more purely when his physical self is abstracted through Linklater's animation technique. I'd never be tempted to defend him as an "actor," but I'm beginning to understand how he's built a career on being used as a vital element of the mise en scene, as the specialest special effect of them all.
Matt Damon in The Departed. Absolutely the best thing I've ever seen him do. There's much to love in this movie (Alec Baldwin commanding all and sundry to fuck themselves, being reminded of just how good DiCaprio--not to mention Scorsese--can be, Mark Wahlberg's hair), but this performance of Damon's has finally lived up to the promise and potential I'd seen in him at least since Good Will Hunting but never felt was completely actualized until now. I get chills thinking about the way he subverts, with such ease and economy, the usual function of that million dollar smile of his when he flashes it, charming as hell, in the first dinner date scene with the psychiatrist. That was the scene that really hooked me into the movie and announced that Damon has officially catapulted himself into the next level as an actor. (Anybody seen The Good Shepherd yet and care to weigh in on his progress?)
The music in Shortbus: the Animal Collective songs, Justin Bond, Scott Matthew, Jay Brannan, the Hungry March Band at the end--I'm getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about all of it. In anyone else's hands, a movie as charming but uneven as this one should have been memorable mostly for all the unsimulated sex and nudity, but JCM's finely honed musical sensibilities somehow create nearly miraculous poignancy out of the chaos without ever slipping into the maudlin. Much like Shortbus the club in the world of the movie, Shortbus the film, imperfect though it may be, manages to sanctify the longing for connection harbored by the misfits and fuckups who come to it with an open, honest heart, while, y'know, humping yr leg.
The actors who universally improve mediocre movies, temporatily redeem bad ones, and provide extra but unlooked for zest to good ones. This year I hail and salute Steve Coogan in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Marie Antoinette, Danny Huston in The Proposition and Marie Antoinette as well, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada. There's really not much that unites them as actors other than their exquisite ease in front of the camera, but that ease is an oasis of good taste for me in the midst of all the over-acting, under-writing, and general actorly attention-grabbing that so often goes on around them. It's not that each of them is not capable of a fair bit of scenery chewing on their own from time to time, but their subtly left-of-center choices, clear respect for the craft, and seeming immunity to hype keep even their boldest performances aligned with the frequency that tickles my brain and delights my imagination.
An early happy new year to you, my kittens! You guys are fucking peaches for sticking with my ramblings, and I look forward to the privilege of being allowed to metaphorically barf all over your computer screens in 2007.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Best Music of 2006
Well, my bebes, as 2006's year-end list-making extravaganza swells to positively orgiastic proportions, I simply cannot withhold the track listing of my third annual best-of mix CD any longer. The physical copies of the disks are slow in coming on account of my lamentable slothiness in getting the liner notes text to Mr. monkey.press for typesetting this month, but, rest assured, they are in the works and will be spectacular. Also, for those of you who have changed mailing addresses in '06, this gives you some extra time to pass the updated info along to me so as to ensure receipt of said disk.
All right. On with it then. Inspired by a conversation I had with CTLA earlier this week, I'll also include hyperlinks, where appropriate/available, to blog posts (and other assorted ephemera) wherein the song, the album, or the band in question is discussed.
I'm calling the comp O Unfathomable Firmament:
1. When You Wasn’t Famous--The Streets
(click for my report on seeing the Streets live at this summer's Intonation Music Festival)
2. We Used to Vacation--Cold War Kids
(click to revisit the play-by-play of my mind being blown after seeing them live for the first time, not to mention the second or third)
3. Province--TV on the Radio
(click for my regret over failing to procure a ticket for their sold-out show at the Metro)
4. Fire Island, AK--The Long Winters
(click for the afterglow of seeing the El-Dubs in concert for the first time in two years or click for the week this track first leaked to the interweb)
5. Déjà Vu--Beyonce, feat. Jay-Z
(it's not my link, but click for the write-up on Green Pea-ness that turned me on to the song in the first place; because I can't stump for him enough, I just have to state for the record that I never attempted to write anything about this song this year because James officially said pretty much everything there is to say about it back in June--please do click through and marvel at the way he matches the energy of B. and Jay's performances on the track with his own performance in pixels)
6. European Oils--Destroyer
(click for the moment I allowed myself to fall completely in love with Destroyer's Rubies)
7. Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont--The Divine Comedy
(click for my review of Victory for the Comic Muse and an early indication that this track would appear on my year-end mix)
8. Ta douleur--Camille
(again, not my links, but click for David Byrne's review of both the Cat Power and Camille shows in NYC this summer or click for the sheer comedy of watching S/FJ go from Camille to Lordi in three sentences)
9. Cowbell--Tapes ’n Tapes
(click for what basically amounts to the blog equivalent of a modest, flirtatious, behind-the-fan geisha-giggle of appreciation for T’nT on the day I first downloaded the album from iTunes)
10. White Collar Boy--Belle and Sebastian
(click for my post-concert reassessment of my entire relationship with Belle and Sebastian's music)
11. Laugh/Love/Fuck--The Coup
(rather than link to my post from earlier this month, click for Boots Riley's more in-depth explanation of what exactly happened during the Coup's nearly fatal bus crash on December 2)
12. Made-Up Lovesong #43--Guillemots
(click for my declaration that listening to this track feels like falling in love or click for a link to the video of the song being performed on Top of the Pops)
13. All the Wine--The National
(click for my post, from almost exactly a year ago, when I first started getting into Alligator or click for my big holy-fuck moment at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer)
14. Weekend--Aloha
(click to read me wank for a bit, after seeing them live one late-summer Sunday, about the "improbability" of Aloha)
15. Requiem--M. Ward
(not my link, but click for the best sentence I've read about M. Ward since Post-War's August release, the sentence that comes closest to articulating my own sentiments about this nearly perfect album: Sean Moeller's assertion that "Ward turns us all slutty, but slutty in love and that’s somehow something to be so happy about")
16. Party Pit--The Hold Steady
(click for a link to the Pitchfork interview that finds front man Craig Finn, presumably with a straight face, citing his desire for Boys and Girls in America to be "a little more Ang Lee" than Separation Sunday)
17. Kick Push--Lupe Fiasco
(click for the early days of my obsession with this track or click for my casual certainty that "this guy's gonna be huge" after catching a portion of his set at Intonation)
18. Wild Sage--The Mountain Goats
(click for the Mountain Goats post that was so cathartic to write that I pretty much haven't wanted to blog at all since then)
19. Bandits--Midlake
(it's not an internal Wrestling Entropy link, but click for my Audioscrobbler, which claims, credibly, that Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther is mysecond third-most-listened-to album of the year)
20. Sons and Daughters--The Decemberists
(click for the day I didn't receive The Crane Wife in the mail or--perhaps slightly more interestingly--click to read me wax rhapsodic about seeing Colin Meloy play solo again at the beginning of the year)
And there you have it, kittens! Standard hipster fare, to be sure (how many did you guess right, J.Ward?), but it's nonetheless a pretty accurate representation of the stuff that soundtracked my life (or, at very least, my commute) this year. I think a favorite-album top 10 list would probably be overkill at this point, but I will say that Destroyer's Rubies definitely would clock in at number one. It has several things going for it: it debuted early enough in the year to get its hooks in me when I still had a relatively clean mental/musical slate for '06, I didn't get burned out on it after a week of heavy rotation because it was rich enough to sustain repeated listens throughout the year, it had novelty in its favor (I didn't own any of Destroyer's previous albums at that point, and, no, the New Pornos don't count), and I was able to see a good handful of these songs performed live at the Pitchfork Festival. I realize that's all slightly precious, even overly deliberate, criteria, but the mathematics of it feel right. It's still a stunner of an album, one that's still doing a lyrical fan-dance for me, revealing a little bit more of itself to my ears every time I lean in to it with rapt attention.
We've got new Spoon, new Shins, and new National to look forward to in 2007, but it's the previously undiscovered goodies that I'll really be waiting for, without even knowing it.
Treat each other right this weekend, kittens. A happy merry all around.
All right. On with it then. Inspired by a conversation I had with CTLA earlier this week, I'll also include hyperlinks, where appropriate/available, to blog posts (and other assorted ephemera) wherein the song, the album, or the band in question is discussed.
I'm calling the comp O Unfathomable Firmament:
1. When You Wasn’t Famous--The Streets
(click for my report on seeing the Streets live at this summer's Intonation Music Festival)
2. We Used to Vacation--Cold War Kids
(click to revisit the play-by-play of my mind being blown after seeing them live for the first time, not to mention the second or third)
3. Province--TV on the Radio
(click for my regret over failing to procure a ticket for their sold-out show at the Metro)
4. Fire Island, AK--The Long Winters
(click for the afterglow of seeing the El-Dubs in concert for the first time in two years or click for the week this track first leaked to the interweb)
5. Déjà Vu--Beyonce, feat. Jay-Z
(it's not my link, but click for the write-up on Green Pea-ness that turned me on to the song in the first place; because I can't stump for him enough, I just have to state for the record that I never attempted to write anything about this song this year because James officially said pretty much everything there is to say about it back in June--please do click through and marvel at the way he matches the energy of B. and Jay's performances on the track with his own performance in pixels)
6. European Oils--Destroyer
(click for the moment I allowed myself to fall completely in love with Destroyer's Rubies)
7. Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont--The Divine Comedy
(click for my review of Victory for the Comic Muse and an early indication that this track would appear on my year-end mix)
8. Ta douleur--Camille
(again, not my links, but click for David Byrne's review of both the Cat Power and Camille shows in NYC this summer or click for the sheer comedy of watching S/FJ go from Camille to Lordi in three sentences)
9. Cowbell--Tapes ’n Tapes
(click for what basically amounts to the blog equivalent of a modest, flirtatious, behind-the-fan geisha-giggle of appreciation for T’nT on the day I first downloaded the album from iTunes)
10. White Collar Boy--Belle and Sebastian
(click for my post-concert reassessment of my entire relationship with Belle and Sebastian's music)
11. Laugh/Love/Fuck--The Coup
(rather than link to my post from earlier this month, click for Boots Riley's more in-depth explanation of what exactly happened during the Coup's nearly fatal bus crash on December 2)
12. Made-Up Lovesong #43--Guillemots
(click for my declaration that listening to this track feels like falling in love or click for a link to the video of the song being performed on Top of the Pops)
13. All the Wine--The National
(click for my post, from almost exactly a year ago, when I first started getting into Alligator or click for my big holy-fuck moment at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer)
14. Weekend--Aloha
(click to read me wank for a bit, after seeing them live one late-summer Sunday, about the "improbability" of Aloha)
15. Requiem--M. Ward
(not my link, but click for the best sentence I've read about M. Ward since Post-War's August release, the sentence that comes closest to articulating my own sentiments about this nearly perfect album: Sean Moeller's assertion that "Ward turns us all slutty, but slutty in love and that’s somehow something to be so happy about")
16. Party Pit--The Hold Steady
(click for a link to the Pitchfork interview that finds front man Craig Finn, presumably with a straight face, citing his desire for Boys and Girls in America to be "a little more Ang Lee" than Separation Sunday)
17. Kick Push--Lupe Fiasco
(click for the early days of my obsession with this track or click for my casual certainty that "this guy's gonna be huge" after catching a portion of his set at Intonation)
18. Wild Sage--The Mountain Goats
(click for the Mountain Goats post that was so cathartic to write that I pretty much haven't wanted to blog at all since then)
19. Bandits--Midlake
(it's not an internal Wrestling Entropy link, but click for my Audioscrobbler, which claims, credibly, that Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther is my
20. Sons and Daughters--The Decemberists
(click for the day I didn't receive The Crane Wife in the mail or--perhaps slightly more interestingly--click to read me wax rhapsodic about seeing Colin Meloy play solo again at the beginning of the year)
And there you have it, kittens! Standard hipster fare, to be sure (how many did you guess right, J.Ward?), but it's nonetheless a pretty accurate representation of the stuff that soundtracked my life (or, at very least, my commute) this year. I think a favorite-album top 10 list would probably be overkill at this point, but I will say that Destroyer's Rubies definitely would clock in at number one. It has several things going for it: it debuted early enough in the year to get its hooks in me when I still had a relatively clean mental/musical slate for '06, I didn't get burned out on it after a week of heavy rotation because it was rich enough to sustain repeated listens throughout the year, it had novelty in its favor (I didn't own any of Destroyer's previous albums at that point, and, no, the New Pornos don't count), and I was able to see a good handful of these songs performed live at the Pitchfork Festival. I realize that's all slightly precious, even overly deliberate, criteria, but the mathematics of it feel right. It's still a stunner of an album, one that's still doing a lyrical fan-dance for me, revealing a little bit more of itself to my ears every time I lean in to it with rapt attention.
We've got new Spoon, new Shins, and new National to look forward to in 2007, but it's the previously undiscovered goodies that I'll really be waiting for, without even knowing it.
Treat each other right this weekend, kittens. A happy merry all around.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Music Notes and a Dear, Departed Monster
Squee! There's a new Clientele album in the works! Even though most of their back catalog is available on eMusic, I haven't really explored any of it yet because I'm still pretty stuck on Strange Geometry. It's just such a beautiful collection of songs. I'm not alarmed about the prospect of their doing a "groovy, disco song" at all; it's probably just going to be, like, bouzouki with beats. Sign me up.
"Casino Noel"? Oh, Mikey Skinner. Why are you so effortlessly witty?
The Onion A.V. Club has released their best music of 2006 list, and . . . it locks up pretty neatly with mine. I didn't give Fishscale the fair shake it deserved this year, and Jenny Lewis doesn't really interest me at all, but Midlake, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists--it looks like a typical recently played smart playlist on my iPod!
RIP, Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond kind of bugs the crap out of me, but it's nearly impossible not to love the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein.
"Casino Noel"? Oh, Mikey Skinner. Why are you so effortlessly witty?
The Onion A.V. Club has released their best music of 2006 list, and . . . it locks up pretty neatly with mine. I didn't give Fishscale the fair shake it deserved this year, and Jenny Lewis doesn't really interest me at all, but Midlake, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists--it looks like a typical recently played smart playlist on my iPod!
RIP, Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond kind of bugs the crap out of me, but it's nearly impossible not to love the "Puttin' on the Ritz" sequence in Young Frankenstein.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Coup
Chris C. turned me on to the awesome sounds of The Coup earlier this year (their "Laugh/Love/Fuck" from Pick a Bigger Weapon will appear on my year-end best-of mix), and, as many of you may have read on the 'Fork last week, they got into a huge bus crash with touring partner Mr. Lif earlier this month and pretty much lost everything. The rest of their tour, which would have stopped through Chicago last night, has been canceled, and, as professional musicians, that means they will have no way of making a living for the time being. Via S/FJ, I discovered they have a PayPal account now set up to help them defray some of the costs of getting back on their feet. Check their MySpace page for the donation link and for a note from front man Boots Riley about the situation. The proprietress of the House That Entropy Built considers the amount of money she sent a mere pittance in comparison to the great quantity of joy they have brought her this year and wishes these revolutionaries all the best during this challenging time.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Hoboes, Rabbits, and Santa Claus
Get load of the hawt new design at Tiny Mix Tapes.
Are hoboes the new pirates?
The Rabbit is back and full of information about manufacturing humans.
It's been a while since anything has made me laugh as hard as these (via) pictures of kids screaming with fear in the face of Santa Claus. (The humor comes from the same place that got me absolutely hysterical about this last year.)
The P'Fork has hit us with some fantastically great interviews recently. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out what wonderful things Tom Waits and Craig Finn have to say.
Are hoboes the new pirates?
The Rabbit is back and full of information about manufacturing humans.
It's been a while since anything has made me laugh as hard as these (via) pictures of kids screaming with fear in the face of Santa Claus. (The humor comes from the same place that got me absolutely hysterical about this last year.)
The P'Fork has hit us with some fantastically great interviews recently. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out what wonderful things Tom Waits and Craig Finn have to say.
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