Don't sleep on this, kittens. This shit's gonna be hot.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
DFW
RIP times one million, David Foster Wallace. Not to compare them in the same breath or anything, but between him and Heath Ledger, the amount of potential talent we've lost this year is completely, astonishingly sad. I won't comment or speculate on the circumstances of his death, for mine is not to judge, but I'm super fucking broken up about it. Guess I finally have to get around to reading Infinite Jest now. I wish I could immediately put my hands on a favorite passage from one of his essays to quote here in memoriam, but the breadth of his brilliance makes it hard to come up with a quick few lines off the top of one's head. Please post in the comments if you can come up with anything.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Recent Concert Roundup
Kittens, I've been to a number of concerts in the past month that, for one reason or another, I haven't had a chance to tell you about yet. Let me do so now.
Early in August I made the last minute decision, prompted by an invite from work pal MS, to catch the She & Him show at the Park West. I hate to get all backlashy about it, esp. given how much I genuinely like that album, but . . . I'm gonna do it anyway. First off, the audience was ridiculous. It's the same problem I had the two times that I've seen Eddie Izzard perform live--everyone there is just a bit too amped to see the celebrity on stage, which skews the energy in the room all out of whack. The performer isn't required to win anyone in the crowd over, which, unless you're, I dunno, Nick Cave or somebody, means you're probably going to pander a bit. Zooey's got an undeniably fine voice (which comes off even better than expected live, despite the fact that she definitely oversings, a la Adele), but with the audience ready to go into ecstasies over every note out of her mouth, she was able to hide behind her charm a bit more than I would have liked. Give the people what they want, I guess.
That being said, I'm convinced that there is no more generous musician working in the loosely defined realm of indie rock right now than Matt Ward. Seriously, you guys, for as enormously talented as the dude is, there seems to be not a shred of ego in him. Even though he's at least 80 percent of the draw, for me, to this group, he was just hanging back at the side of the stage in a truly supporting, one might even say subordinate, role. It's really a beautiful thing to watch him make so much space for Zooey to shine. It's truly a testament to how much he clearly adores her and believes in her talent. And not just her talent, but the talent of all the musicians he's surrounded himself with. I can't remember what the last song before the encore was ("Sweet Darlin'" maybe?), but he pulled his by now familiar leaving-the-stage-before-the song-is-over move, which allowed the band to jam on the outro and receive all the audience's (well deserved) adulation at the end of the song. From anyone else (like, say, Beyonce), it would feel shrewd and bordline manipulative ("it's my spotlight to give and now I will give it to my underlings"), but it always comes off as completely classy with him.
Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond opened and sang backup for most of She & Him's set. Talk about a fucking dynamo! She was totally gorgeous and endearingly batty. With her old timey songs, upscale thrift shop fashion sense, and aw-shucks stage demeanor that was so painfully earnest it felt like there just had to be some wickedness underneath it all, she came across as nothing so much as a burlesque performer minus the striptease. I'm definitely planning on checking in with her Lavender Diamond material.
Later in the month came my favorite musical one-two punch in recent memory: Joanna Newsom performing Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, then Aesop Rock at the Abbey Pub on Saturday. At first blush, of course, they couldn't seem more opposed, but it didn't take long for me to realize how truly complementary they are--two supremely gifted wordsmiths exploding the boundaries of their chosen genres, making slobbering fanboys and -girls out of diehards and casual listeners alike.
As for Joanna at the Symphony Center--what a treat. I find myself returning to Ys in the oddest moments (such as the early morning prep time of my juice fast earlier this summer), and the brilliance of its through-line as a musical/thematic statement was utterly undeniable in a live setting. I just sobbed and sobbed during personal faves "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Cosmia." I paid a little bit of extra money for a better seat with some good sight lines, and, boy, was it ever worth it. I've steadily warmed to her unconventional voice over the past few years and will now officially no longer hold truck with anyone who talks smack about it. There's just everything a person could want in a vocalist there: warmth, character, spirit, sensitivity, not to mention killer intonation.
Aside from the overhwhelming brilliance and clarity of the CSO buoying her throughout the performance of Ys, she also brought along four other musicians who contributed to those songs, then accompanied her on a bunch of stuff from The Milk-Eyed Mender, as well as some more recent material, after a brief intermission. Drummer Neal Morgan particularly blew me away for his ability to get more music out of a kick drum, floor tom, and some cymbals than I've seen a lot of jackasses get out of a full guitar rig. Plus, he plays barefoot in a three-piece suit, which is, OMG, like totes adorable in its twee mash-up of high-brow earthiness. I also couldn't help but smile at the thought that this was probably the first time out at Symphony Center for a lot of the greasy haired indie rock kids in attendance, which has to count for something.
Aesop totally lit me on fire the next night. The fact that he performed "Fumes" would have been enough to make the show worthwhile in itself (remember those 27 perfect songs with a five-star rating? yeah, that's one of 'em), but dude is such an amazingly magnetic performer it would be hard to overstate just how enjoyable he is to watch. (Plus also, tall.) The genius of his lyrics, the sly, twisty sophistication of his character sketches and narratives, and the devastating sexiness of the soda-pop fizz in his voice all hardly need to be mentioned, but I just couldn't get over how much fire he puts into his physical performance on stage. (Check out my pictures from the night and hopefully you'll see a bit of what I mean.) On the basis of the crowd's reaction, I was definitely one of the few neophytes there. Everybody was loving the stuff off None Shall Pass, without question, but the place really went bonkers whenever he started spitting rhymes from the previous two albums, with call-and-response all over the place, no matter how intricate the syntax and meter. I've also acquired new artwork for the apartment, which always makes me happy.
Oh. I also went to a wedding. And it was fucking awesome.
Early in August I made the last minute decision, prompted by an invite from work pal MS, to catch the She & Him show at the Park West. I hate to get all backlashy about it, esp. given how much I genuinely like that album, but . . . I'm gonna do it anyway. First off, the audience was ridiculous. It's the same problem I had the two times that I've seen Eddie Izzard perform live--everyone there is just a bit too amped to see the celebrity on stage, which skews the energy in the room all out of whack. The performer isn't required to win anyone in the crowd over, which, unless you're, I dunno, Nick Cave or somebody, means you're probably going to pander a bit. Zooey's got an undeniably fine voice (which comes off even better than expected live, despite the fact that she definitely oversings, a la Adele), but with the audience ready to go into ecstasies over every note out of her mouth, she was able to hide behind her charm a bit more than I would have liked. Give the people what they want, I guess.
That being said, I'm convinced that there is no more generous musician working in the loosely defined realm of indie rock right now than Matt Ward. Seriously, you guys, for as enormously talented as the dude is, there seems to be not a shred of ego in him. Even though he's at least 80 percent of the draw, for me, to this group, he was just hanging back at the side of the stage in a truly supporting, one might even say subordinate, role. It's really a beautiful thing to watch him make so much space for Zooey to shine. It's truly a testament to how much he clearly adores her and believes in her talent. And not just her talent, but the talent of all the musicians he's surrounded himself with. I can't remember what the last song before the encore was ("Sweet Darlin'" maybe?), but he pulled his by now familiar leaving-the-stage-before-the song-is-over move, which allowed the band to jam on the outro and receive all the audience's (well deserved) adulation at the end of the song. From anyone else (like, say, Beyonce), it would feel shrewd and bordline manipulative ("it's my spotlight to give and now I will give it to my underlings"), but it always comes off as completely classy with him.
Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond opened and sang backup for most of She & Him's set. Talk about a fucking dynamo! She was totally gorgeous and endearingly batty. With her old timey songs, upscale thrift shop fashion sense, and aw-shucks stage demeanor that was so painfully earnest it felt like there just had to be some wickedness underneath it all, she came across as nothing so much as a burlesque performer minus the striptease. I'm definitely planning on checking in with her Lavender Diamond material.
Later in the month came my favorite musical one-two punch in recent memory: Joanna Newsom performing Ys with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, then Aesop Rock at the Abbey Pub on Saturday. At first blush, of course, they couldn't seem more opposed, but it didn't take long for me to realize how truly complementary they are--two supremely gifted wordsmiths exploding the boundaries of their chosen genres, making slobbering fanboys and -girls out of diehards and casual listeners alike.
As for Joanna at the Symphony Center--what a treat. I find myself returning to Ys in the oddest moments (such as the early morning prep time of my juice fast earlier this summer), and the brilliance of its through-line as a musical/thematic statement was utterly undeniable in a live setting. I just sobbed and sobbed during personal faves "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Cosmia." I paid a little bit of extra money for a better seat with some good sight lines, and, boy, was it ever worth it. I've steadily warmed to her unconventional voice over the past few years and will now officially no longer hold truck with anyone who talks smack about it. There's just everything a person could want in a vocalist there: warmth, character, spirit, sensitivity, not to mention killer intonation.
Aside from the overhwhelming brilliance and clarity of the CSO buoying her throughout the performance of Ys, she also brought along four other musicians who contributed to those songs, then accompanied her on a bunch of stuff from The Milk-Eyed Mender, as well as some more recent material, after a brief intermission. Drummer Neal Morgan particularly blew me away for his ability to get more music out of a kick drum, floor tom, and some cymbals than I've seen a lot of jackasses get out of a full guitar rig. Plus, he plays barefoot in a three-piece suit, which is, OMG, like totes adorable in its twee mash-up of high-brow earthiness. I also couldn't help but smile at the thought that this was probably the first time out at Symphony Center for a lot of the greasy haired indie rock kids in attendance, which has to count for something.
Aesop totally lit me on fire the next night. The fact that he performed "Fumes" would have been enough to make the show worthwhile in itself (remember those 27 perfect songs with a five-star rating? yeah, that's one of 'em), but dude is such an amazingly magnetic performer it would be hard to overstate just how enjoyable he is to watch. (Plus also, tall.) The genius of his lyrics, the sly, twisty sophistication of his character sketches and narratives, and the devastating sexiness of the soda-pop fizz in his voice all hardly need to be mentioned, but I just couldn't get over how much fire he puts into his physical performance on stage. (Check out my pictures from the night and hopefully you'll see a bit of what I mean.) On the basis of the crowd's reaction, I was definitely one of the few neophytes there. Everybody was loving the stuff off None Shall Pass, without question, but the place really went bonkers whenever he started spitting rhymes from the previous two albums, with call-and-response all over the place, no matter how intricate the syntax and meter. I've also acquired new artwork for the apartment, which always makes me happy.
Oh. I also went to a wedding. And it was fucking awesome.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
This Just In: I'm Full of Shit!
OK, I'm willing to eat my words here: Shearwater's Rook is an incredible album. I kind of hate the term 'grower', but that's clearly what it is. I just needed to learn the contours of the music better before I really could hear what it's doing. I've been listening to it a lot these past few days, and it's fucking epic. The piano lines sound, in places, like EST (RIP!), the guitar lines churn like Lake Michigan in a thunderstorm, and the little spikes of various reed instruments throughout give me tingles. All that being said, however, I still do think Meiburg over relies on his falsetto. I just have trouble with the preciousness of it. Trouble is, I get the sense that he thinks it's one of his selling points as a singer/musician, that he thinks he's really bowling us over when he pulls it out. But, I just don't hear it as an instrument in the same way, say, Justin Vernon's is. When Vernon uses his, I hear genuine pain. When Meiburg uses his, I hear an overeducated young man emoting with maximum self-consciousness. Meiburg's a very fine singer; his full-throated howls are resonant and exciting. But there's something slightly, unfortunately one-dimensional about his falsetto, kind of like getting out of the pool and wrapping yourself in a soggy towel. But anyway. I'm glad to have been proven wrong about the album; it's become a good companion for me (esp. with my previously mentioned fetish for listening to a full tracklisting in one sitting on the train in the morning).
Oh yes, and how about the Walkmen's new one? I didn't have my hate on for A Hundred Miles Off the way a lot of folks did, but I, weirdly, appreciate it even more now for the way it seems like such a clear dress rehearsal for the more mature, refined, almost elegant sound they've got going on with You & Me. Their talent for cracking open their albums with tightly coiled menace and desire continues unabated; "Donde Esta La Playa" instantly made me go "woah, hold on a second here..." when it first came rumbling into my headphones. That combination of the midnight bebop perambulations of Barrick's drums and the saline midrange of the beyond-mellow organ is the doorway to exactly the kind of sound and exactly the kind of songs the Walkmen have always meant to be playing and writing. This might prove to be a career-definer for 'em.
Other recent highlights from my personal Class of '03? Well, the fucking Stills, OK? They're such a superlative B+ band. It is an uncomplicated affection I have for them! I just like Tim Fletcher's voice and find their rhythm section consistently inventive.
Oh yes, and how about the Walkmen's new one? I didn't have my hate on for A Hundred Miles Off the way a lot of folks did, but I, weirdly, appreciate it even more now for the way it seems like such a clear dress rehearsal for the more mature, refined, almost elegant sound they've got going on with You & Me. Their talent for cracking open their albums with tightly coiled menace and desire continues unabated; "Donde Esta La Playa" instantly made me go "woah, hold on a second here..." when it first came rumbling into my headphones. That combination of the midnight bebop perambulations of Barrick's drums and the saline midrange of the beyond-mellow organ is the doorway to exactly the kind of sound and exactly the kind of songs the Walkmen have always meant to be playing and writing. This might prove to be a career-definer for 'em.
Other recent highlights from my personal Class of '03? Well, the fucking Stills, OK? They're such a superlative B+ band. It is an uncomplicated affection I have for them! I just like Tim Fletcher's voice and find their rhythm section consistently inventive.
Friday, August 22, 2008
The Nines
Remember the first couple times you saw Pulp Fiction in high school and you had a bunch of pseudo-philosophical conversations with your friends afterward discussing the possible theories of What Was in the Briefcase and Why Marcellus Wallace Wore the Bandage on His Neck? Well, imagine if someone took a composite of all those conversations and turned them into a feature-length movie, and you'd be pretty close to the experience of watching The Nines. Lowbrow, Hollywood-insidery, vaguely meta, self-consciously straining to be a Donnie Darko-esque mindfuck, and ridiculously yet sophomorically pretentious--this movie is a veritable Arthur Murray instruction manual of post-Tarantino cinematic missteps.
Kittens, this movie is a mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I found myself inexplicably delighted by it anyway. Maybe it was the sheer joy of having a free night at home alone to watch some piece of shit DVD on my couch in my jammies with a glass of booze in hand or maybe it's because it reminded me a bit of my old fave Dead Again (which I haven't seen in ages but am pretty sure I'd despise if I saw it for the first time now), but I just couldn't bring myself to get too riled up by it, despite the fact that it continued to go exactly in all the most obnoxious directions I was mentally begging it not to go. Even though it was missing the erotic Eurotrash patina that usually distinguishes these horrible train wrecks I find so fascinating, I think it also was reminding me of movies like The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Birthday Girl in the way that it was committing with poker-faced abandon to the insanity of its own attempt at a distinct internal logic.
It was also buoyed by a really remarkable, well-chosen cast and a superb series of performances from Ryan Reynolds. Is he the North American Jason Statham? Or is he the Ryan Gosling of B-movies? Either way, the smartest thing The Nines does is begin with Reynolds in character as a hot, cocky, drug-addled TV star on a bender--which is to say, a persona akin to how you probably think of the real-life Ryan Reynolds, if you think about him at all. Then the movie shifts into its second layer of narrative and he appears as a gay screenwriter trying to get a new TV pilot on the air, and damn if the genuine subtlety and range he shows all of a sudden doesn't completely upend how you'd just mentally oriented yourself to the world of this movie and your perceptions of his talent (or lack thereof). I'm absolutely sure this must have been an intentional choice, very much of a piece with the film's whole theme of questioning/destabilizing how well you truly know yourself and the people closest to you in your life. Like I say, it's probably the smartest thing the movie does over its 99-minute running time. The character is apparently based, loosely autobiographically, on writer/director John August, so who knows how much of the performance is just an impression, but I'm not sure how much that matters to me, especially given that Reynolds goes one further in the third and final vignette and shows a real, sweet gentleness as the bearded video game-designer dad.
The movie simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in its attempt to use Melissa McCarthy to make some sort of comment on perceptions of weight in Hollywood and society, but hey, a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role is still a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role, so I'm not inclined to complain too much. The perennially underused Hope Davis is also a welcome presence.
I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Go but had a lot of problems with the insipid daddy issues and faux-profundity about "storytelling" in Big Fish (two of the most prominent features previously written by August), and it's amazing how much The Nines feels like the exact intersection between the two (with a few heaping tablespoons of Soderbergh's incredibly irritating Full Frontal thrown in for good measure). So, little wonder, then, that I found myself drawn in and repulsed by it in equal measure. For better or worse, though, I kind of can't get it out of my head today, which I always, ultimately, take as a good sign.
Also, koalas are telepathic and control the weather. Best throwaway line this side of Spike's bitchy, sotto voce sneers in Buffy.
Kittens, this movie is a mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I found myself inexplicably delighted by it anyway. Maybe it was the sheer joy of having a free night at home alone to watch some piece of shit DVD on my couch in my jammies with a glass of booze in hand or maybe it's because it reminded me a bit of my old fave Dead Again (which I haven't seen in ages but am pretty sure I'd despise if I saw it for the first time now), but I just couldn't bring myself to get too riled up by it, despite the fact that it continued to go exactly in all the most obnoxious directions I was mentally begging it not to go. Even though it was missing the erotic Eurotrash patina that usually distinguishes these horrible train wrecks I find so fascinating, I think it also was reminding me of movies like The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Birthday Girl in the way that it was committing with poker-faced abandon to the insanity of its own attempt at a distinct internal logic.
It was also buoyed by a really remarkable, well-chosen cast and a superb series of performances from Ryan Reynolds. Is he the North American Jason Statham? Or is he the Ryan Gosling of B-movies? Either way, the smartest thing The Nines does is begin with Reynolds in character as a hot, cocky, drug-addled TV star on a bender--which is to say, a persona akin to how you probably think of the real-life Ryan Reynolds, if you think about him at all. Then the movie shifts into its second layer of narrative and he appears as a gay screenwriter trying to get a new TV pilot on the air, and damn if the genuine subtlety and range he shows all of a sudden doesn't completely upend how you'd just mentally oriented yourself to the world of this movie and your perceptions of his talent (or lack thereof). I'm absolutely sure this must have been an intentional choice, very much of a piece with the film's whole theme of questioning/destabilizing how well you truly know yourself and the people closest to you in your life. Like I say, it's probably the smartest thing the movie does over its 99-minute running time. The character is apparently based, loosely autobiographically, on writer/director John August, so who knows how much of the performance is just an impression, but I'm not sure how much that matters to me, especially given that Reynolds goes one further in the third and final vignette and shows a real, sweet gentleness as the bearded video game-designer dad.
The movie simultaneously goes too far and not far enough in its attempt to use Melissa McCarthy to make some sort of comment on perceptions of weight in Hollywood and society, but hey, a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role is still a chance to watch Melissa McCarthy carry a leading female role, so I'm not inclined to complain too much. The perennially underused Hope Davis is also a welcome presence.
I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Go but had a lot of problems with the insipid daddy issues and faux-profundity about "storytelling" in Big Fish (two of the most prominent features previously written by August), and it's amazing how much The Nines feels like the exact intersection between the two (with a few heaping tablespoons of Soderbergh's incredibly irritating Full Frontal thrown in for good measure). So, little wonder, then, that I found myself drawn in and repulsed by it in equal measure. For better or worse, though, I kind of can't get it out of my head today, which I always, ultimately, take as a good sign.
Also, koalas are telepathic and control the weather. Best throwaway line this side of Spike's bitchy, sotto voce sneers in Buffy.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
False Musical Memories
Obviously, I know that, to some extent, everybody associates certain music with certain specific times of their lives. But does anybody else have false musical memories? Everytime I listen to Death Cab's "We Laugh Indoors" (and, to a lesser degree, "A Movie Script Ending") I'm all, "oh yes, this takes me right back to that fall I spent with Holly in Seattle." Except I totally wasn't listening to that album at least until three years later. What the hell, Gibbard? Way to distill the exact emotional and experiential tenor of the Pacific Northwest and write it directly into the spaces in and around your songs. The same goes for pretty much the entirety of the Clientele's Strange Geometry, which feels so much like the summer I spent studying abroad in London during college that I can all but smell the pee and exhaust fumes from the Underground when I listen to it on my iPod. That album came to me in the dead-freezing cold of January 2006, so, again, I have no idea how the combination of Alasdair MacLean's songwriting and the muted haziness of the production in general can evoke my wistful, romanticized, undergraduate's sense of London so uncannily. I'm thankful for it, though. It's nice to be approached and kind of waved at by one's own past in these unexpected places.
Kids, I hope you're not sleeping on the Kills' Midnight Boom this year. It came out in March, and now that I've been living with it for a few weeks, I'm lamenting that I didn't pick it up sooner. It's so ballsy and smart and sexy. I want to get the lyrics to "Cheap and Cheerful" tattooed down the length of my torso: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring, baby, when you're straight / I want you to be crazy 'cause you're stupid, baby, when you're sane."
On the total other end of the spectrum, Adele's 19 (thanks again for the rec, Giddy) has an amusing way of turning my life into some kind of Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy every time I listen to it. Something about the sound of a British soul singer crooning over tastefully produced horns, I guess. She oversings like mad, but there's such a purity in it, like she's just discovered what she can do with her voice and is hollering at the top of her lungs to keep herself company. The fact, too, that pretty much all her songs are about being lonely but hopeful about love is hitting me in just the right places in the moments when I need that squishy kind of reassurance and commiseration. Plus, if one has to make a Britney-vs-Christina choice between her and Duffy, well, give me the cute chubby girl any day of the week.
Kids, I hope you're not sleeping on the Kills' Midnight Boom this year. It came out in March, and now that I've been living with it for a few weeks, I'm lamenting that I didn't pick it up sooner. It's so ballsy and smart and sexy. I want to get the lyrics to "Cheap and Cheerful" tattooed down the length of my torso: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring, baby, when you're straight / I want you to be crazy 'cause you're stupid, baby, when you're sane."
On the total other end of the spectrum, Adele's 19 (thanks again for the rec, Giddy) has an amusing way of turning my life into some kind of Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy every time I listen to it. Something about the sound of a British soul singer crooning over tastefully produced horns, I guess. She oversings like mad, but there's such a purity in it, like she's just discovered what she can do with her voice and is hollering at the top of her lungs to keep herself company. The fact, too, that pretty much all her songs are about being lonely but hopeful about love is hitting me in just the right places in the moments when I need that squishy kind of reassurance and commiseration. Plus, if one has to make a Britney-vs-Christina choice between her and Duffy, well, give me the cute chubby girl any day of the week.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Awesome Things About Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea...
...that have nothing to do with the music:
That Lalitree Darnielle photo of Dave Berman on the back of the CD case. I love concert photography, and I love photos of people looking happy. Double word score.
"Just put your fingertips on the polar bear noses + strum."
The fact that it's only 33 minutes long means that I can listen to the entire album during my commute in the morning. Music nerd OCD.
That Lalitree Darnielle photo of Dave Berman on the back of the CD case. I love concert photography, and I love photos of people looking happy. Double word score.
"Just put your fingertips on the polar bear noses + strum."
The fact that it's only 33 minutes long means that I can listen to the entire album during my commute in the morning. Music nerd OCD.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Radiohead, Live at Lollapalooza
No less than the best concert I've ever been to.
I know I tend to be the little boy who cried wolf of hyperbole, but you guys gotta take my word on this one. It was incredible. Magical. Transcendent. I almost can't talk about how good it was.
I was certainly digging it for the first four or five songs (S'gum's got the setlist) but wasn't feeling terribly transported and thought, since this was my first time ever seeing them in concert, maybe reports of their live chops were vastly overrated or that maybe I was simply expecting too much. But then they played "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," which started me on an emotional roller coaster similar to the one I experienced two weeks ago during Bon Iver's set at Pitchfork, where my personal emotional associations with the song melded with whatever groove the band was finally settling into, and then I just bubbled over into full-on fangirl freakout mode for the remaining hour and a half. The band achieved liftoff at that point as far as I'm concerned, kittens. How does one band manage to be so perfect? They're not doing anything, really, but, in that, they're doing everything. It's spectacle without hokum, virtuosity without undue pretension.
Of all the songs to bring me to tears, I started crying during "No Surprises." Not quite sure why, other than that it's so damn pretty, and, circumstantially, that I found it incredibly sweet that a bunch of people in the crowd were evidently also moved enough to start pulling out their lighters. Not really being a sports fan, and not being so politically active that I go to too many protests or rallies, it's easy for me to forget the power there is in being part of such an enormous group of people focusing all their attention and positive energy on one thing, at the same moment in time. The crowd was totally squirrelly before and after the set, but I gotta give credit, at least in my small little patch of the field, to everyone for honestly, enthusiastically, and basically politely engaging with the music and the performance while it was happening. And as that song was ending and I was wiping my eyes, I heard some dude near me exhale kind of dreamily, "the city looks really great tonight," which totally choked me up all over again.
I haven't even mentioned yet the most remarkable part of the night: the fireworks display that started up at the beginning of "Everything in Its Right Place" and then peaked during the big swell in the middle of "Fake Plastic Trees." Apparently the fireworks were connected to some other event going on over at Soldier Field, but the effect couldn't have been more magical if it had been intentional. The crowd flipped out. I started laughing, and then crying a little again, and then laughing some more, and just couldn't stop. Pure, pure joy and wonderment. I absolutely couldn't, and kind of still can't, believe that I was lucky enough to be there, to be a part of such an amazing moment.
And lucky is indeed the word for it--I didn't pay a cent for the pleasure of any of this. I hadn't bought tickets in advance, preferring instead to take my chances on the street and see what I could get from a scalper beforehand. As I was scoping out the territory, though, I totally coincidentally ran into my boy Tito and his brother as they were getting ready to enter the park with their wristbands. Once inside, Tito slipped his off and sent his brother back out to give it to me. We made it inside with no trouble at all. Those of you who know him (and to know him is to love him, as they say) will of course not be surprised that Tito insisted the only thing I owed him for it was a hug.
Before Radiohead went on, we caught Bloc Party's set. Which, yes, hilariously, makes this the third time I've, basically accidentally, seen them live. Other bands I've seen live three times? The Long Winters, the Divine Comedy, the Decemberists, the National, Andrew Bird, Laura Veirs...in other words, my favorite artists. Apparently Bloc Party is my indie rock equivalent of 10 Things I Hate About You, ie, something I now have a reluctant and slightly guilty fondness for because I get sucked into it anytime it's on/around. I mean, I'm not sure when "This Modern Love" became my jam, but fuck if my heart didn't start racing a bit when they kicked into that little rocking horse intro. What a gorgeous and affecting song. They were playing with a replacement bassist, which was slightly unfortunate since their rhythm section is so unbelievably tight, but I guess I can allow it since Gordon Moakes was back home in England with his parter, who was having a baby.
I wished I could have heard more of Grizzly Bear when we arrived at the park, esp. given that they debuted a bunch of new material, but what I could hear as we were headed across the grounds sounded fabulous. Likewise Malkmus/Jicks, who played between Bloc Party and Radiohead, on the most immediately adjacent stage, just barely within earshot. At least I got to hear a couple snippets of "Gardenia" on the wind.
I know I tend to be the little boy who cried wolf of hyperbole, but you guys gotta take my word on this one. It was incredible. Magical. Transcendent. I almost can't talk about how good it was.
I was certainly digging it for the first four or five songs (S'gum's got the setlist) but wasn't feeling terribly transported and thought, since this was my first time ever seeing them in concert, maybe reports of their live chops were vastly overrated or that maybe I was simply expecting too much. But then they played "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," which started me on an emotional roller coaster similar to the one I experienced two weeks ago during Bon Iver's set at Pitchfork, where my personal emotional associations with the song melded with whatever groove the band was finally settling into, and then I just bubbled over into full-on fangirl freakout mode for the remaining hour and a half. The band achieved liftoff at that point as far as I'm concerned, kittens. How does one band manage to be so perfect? They're not doing anything, really, but, in that, they're doing everything. It's spectacle without hokum, virtuosity without undue pretension.
Of all the songs to bring me to tears, I started crying during "No Surprises." Not quite sure why, other than that it's so damn pretty, and, circumstantially, that I found it incredibly sweet that a bunch of people in the crowd were evidently also moved enough to start pulling out their lighters. Not really being a sports fan, and not being so politically active that I go to too many protests or rallies, it's easy for me to forget the power there is in being part of such an enormous group of people focusing all their attention and positive energy on one thing, at the same moment in time. The crowd was totally squirrelly before and after the set, but I gotta give credit, at least in my small little patch of the field, to everyone for honestly, enthusiastically, and basically politely engaging with the music and the performance while it was happening. And as that song was ending and I was wiping my eyes, I heard some dude near me exhale kind of dreamily, "the city looks really great tonight," which totally choked me up all over again.
I haven't even mentioned yet the most remarkable part of the night: the fireworks display that started up at the beginning of "Everything in Its Right Place" and then peaked during the big swell in the middle of "Fake Plastic Trees." Apparently the fireworks were connected to some other event going on over at Soldier Field, but the effect couldn't have been more magical if it had been intentional. The crowd flipped out. I started laughing, and then crying a little again, and then laughing some more, and just couldn't stop. Pure, pure joy and wonderment. I absolutely couldn't, and kind of still can't, believe that I was lucky enough to be there, to be a part of such an amazing moment.
And lucky is indeed the word for it--I didn't pay a cent for the pleasure of any of this. I hadn't bought tickets in advance, preferring instead to take my chances on the street and see what I could get from a scalper beforehand. As I was scoping out the territory, though, I totally coincidentally ran into my boy Tito and his brother as they were getting ready to enter the park with their wristbands. Once inside, Tito slipped his off and sent his brother back out to give it to me. We made it inside with no trouble at all. Those of you who know him (and to know him is to love him, as they say) will of course not be surprised that Tito insisted the only thing I owed him for it was a hug.
Before Radiohead went on, we caught Bloc Party's set. Which, yes, hilariously, makes this the third time I've, basically accidentally, seen them live. Other bands I've seen live three times? The Long Winters, the Divine Comedy, the Decemberists, the National, Andrew Bird, Laura Veirs...in other words, my favorite artists. Apparently Bloc Party is my indie rock equivalent of 10 Things I Hate About You, ie, something I now have a reluctant and slightly guilty fondness for because I get sucked into it anytime it's on/around. I mean, I'm not sure when "This Modern Love" became my jam, but fuck if my heart didn't start racing a bit when they kicked into that little rocking horse intro. What a gorgeous and affecting song. They were playing with a replacement bassist, which was slightly unfortunate since their rhythm section is so unbelievably tight, but I guess I can allow it since Gordon Moakes was back home in England with his parter, who was having a baby.
I wished I could have heard more of Grizzly Bear when we arrived at the park, esp. given that they debuted a bunch of new material, but what I could hear as we were headed across the grounds sounded fabulous. Likewise Malkmus/Jicks, who played between Bloc Party and Radiohead, on the most immediately adjacent stage, just barely within earshot. At least I got to hear a couple snippets of "Gardenia" on the wind.
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Dark Knight and Bloggy Updates
And now for the least essential film review ever written: The Dark Knight was great. Heath Ledger was great, Aaron Eckhart was great, Christian Bale was great, Maggie Gyllenhaal was great, Gary Oldman was great, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine were great, Christopher Nolan's direction is great, Chicago-as-Gotham looks great (there's a bunch of stuff that was shot on Franklin just south of my office, which is great). I got a leeetle fatigued with all the high-stakes ultimatums and apocalypses toward the end (srsly, how many times can you ratchet up that tension before it starts feeling like crying wolf?), and I wasn't having seventeen orgasms by the time the credits rolled like I thought I might, but those are relatively minor complaints in the grand scheme of its overall greatness. The hugeness of Ledger's Joker could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but he was really swinging for the fences and somehow made it all work, spectacularly. The scene where he escapes from prison in the cop car and leans his head out the window into the night air has got to be one of the most strikingly beautiful moments I've seen in a movie in a long time. It's also amazing to me, as I said to moviegoing companions M&M afterward, how much acting Bale manages to do through that mask and suit; I'm thinking here particularly of the scene in the interrogation room, with all that coiled rage and intensity apparently being projected purely through his nose holes.
And hey, how 'bout that Quantum of Solace preview? Hot diggity damn. I laughed out loud at that series of shots with Daniel Craig walking up over the horizon line. So completely badass.
Inspired by a recent Rocket Report posting, I've made quite a few long-overdue additions to my blogroll at left that, as the sidebar header suggests, would be well worth your time. I draw your attention to
* 807nica, a journal from former work pal Erin, newly minted as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua
* the genius that is current work pal Pam's LJ creamsnake (her post from February about kittens in vases, drunk dials from first-ever boyfriends, and the fashion of Larry Sanders is still one of my favorite things on the internet ever)
* Shawn's forty-third, by my (exaggerated) count, blog, eat! drink! snack!, which I love unreservedly for the way this seemingly silly rubric of reporting on his snack food consumption allows him to muse pithily on all manner of tangentially related topics
* my girl Megs at Jonesalicious in Boston (and soon Germany)
* Bushman's Tumblr, Not from Texas, to tide you over until he gets back to posting at his redesigned main site
* the estimable photographer, rock enthusiast, and Chicago-based world traveler Sid at Too Much Rock (though not explicitly linked, be sure to also check out his Flickr page, too).
And hey, how 'bout that Quantum of Solace preview? Hot diggity damn. I laughed out loud at that series of shots with Daniel Craig walking up over the horizon line. So completely badass.
Inspired by a recent Rocket Report posting, I've made quite a few long-overdue additions to my blogroll at left that, as the sidebar header suggests, would be well worth your time. I draw your attention to
* 807nica, a journal from former work pal Erin, newly minted as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua
* the genius that is current work pal Pam's LJ creamsnake (her post from February about kittens in vases, drunk dials from first-ever boyfriends, and the fashion of Larry Sanders is still one of my favorite things on the internet ever)
* Shawn's forty-third, by my (exaggerated) count, blog, eat! drink! snack!, which I love unreservedly for the way this seemingly silly rubric of reporting on his snack food consumption allows him to muse pithily on all manner of tangentially related topics
* my girl Megs at Jonesalicious in Boston (and soon Germany)
* Bushman's Tumblr, Not from Texas, to tide you over until he gets back to posting at his redesigned main site
* the estimable photographer, rock enthusiast, and Chicago-based world traveler Sid at Too Much Rock (though not explicitly linked, be sure to also check out his Flickr page, too).
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Pitchfork Music Festival 2008
Is it fair to say that this was the most enjoyable Pitchfork Music Festival for me yet? Well, whether it's fair to say, or even true, I'm gonna say it. This was the most enjoyable Pitchfork for me yet. I gotta believe that not having super-high expectations for any acts that I was dying to see probably helped, as it allowed me to just kind of peacefully float through the park and catch what I fancied catching at any given moment over the course of the three days. Being in the moment tends to yield pretty high returns, y'know?
That being said, I feel like this was also the first year that there was too much good stuff going on--enough so that I had to make some hard choices about what to miss. And it's not like I wasn't pretty diligently on my feet for most of the weekend. Yet I didn't see any of Les Savy Fav, Spiritualized, Atlas Sound, or Chicago faves the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, I only caught the last few minutes of Dizzee Rascal's set (but managed to take some of my favorite photos of the fest while I was there), I was entirely too tired to fight my way into any position to catch Dinosaur Jr. on Sunday night, and I didn't really make any OMG new discoveries like I did last year with Jamie Lidell. Not to mention that I completely missed a bunch of impromptu shit like King Khan giving away ice cream and Tim Harrington giving $2 haircuts. But, I did Just Say No to the mud. (Well, as best I could.)
On to the music!
For the second year in a row, the Friday night ATP/Don't Look Back thing was the least essential portion of the festival for me, mainly because I didn't grow up listening to any of the three featured albums and hence have no real emotional attachment to them. Which is actually a pretty good test, I think, for how well they, or the groups in question, hold up. Does the music translate to someone not listening to it through a haze of nostalgia (or a haze of expectations, depending)? For the most part, yes. Mission of Burma killed it, just motherfucking nailed that shit to the wall, setting a weekend-long precedent for me of preferring the older, more established bands on the roster to the sexy young guns. Sebadoh utterly bored me to tears; it seems even they realized there was no reason for them to have been playing the gig. They just kind of shuffled and stammered through the tracklist, basically apologizing for taking up so much time. Public Enemy made me wanna fight the power, though, man. Plus, I always love watching dudes in the crowd flip out during hip-hop shows. There was a gaggle of guys of all different races around me shouting along to every lyric and affirming back everything Chuck D said. Flavor Flav was totally insane, but it's hard not to appreciate his sincerity when he cops to the fact that, even though he's all embroiled in the reality TV thing right now, Public Enemy will always be his first and only love.
One of the very few moments of legitimate panic I had all weekend was worrying if public transportation would get me to Union Park on Saturday afternoon in time for any part of Caribou's set. I know I'd just seen them a few months ago, but, based on how much I loved that show, and how much I've been obsessing over The Milk of Human Kindness since then, I needed to see them again. Fortunately, I got there for about half the set (after the rain ended), and boy was it worth it. I don't know what it is about this band, but they have something special going on. The melodies, the rhythms, the song structures, the trippy but also krautrocky vibe--they're just doing everything right, and right on the money, with humility, but workmanlike pride in a job well done, too. Dan Snaith is totes my new indie rock boyfriend.
It was something of a decisive moment for me after Caribou's set when I decided, fuck the Fleet Foxes. I think I'm a bit more susceptible to hype, in general, than I'd like to be, but I just decided I couldn't be arsed. Um, instead, I decided to succumb to hype on the other end of the spectrum and headed to the third stage for Fuck Buttons. Maybe I was just hoping to recapture the feeling of seeing them open for Caribou in April, or pay homage to how important that night was for me or whatever, but even if I was, they utterly surpassed my memory of that springtime show. How did they manage to do that in the middle of the day, in an open field, while I was totally sober? I don't know, but it was transcendent. The clouds even broke for a while in the middle of the set. The band is 100 percent cool, but somehow the experience of their music leaves no room for cool on the receiving end. You're either into that shit or you're not. It was delicious just to give in to it. That gauzy electronic thrum will totally envelop you if you let it, will dissolve you in the moment. It also helped that the audience was great--they cheered for every mood change, tempo shift, and distorto bass assault. It was totally inspiring.
Vampire Weekend was fine and all; it would be backlashy of me to kvetch too much about them. Esp. considering that, whether the humor is intentional or not, I don't think most people give them credit for being as funny as they are. There's a part of me that reads their whole snot-nosed, uber-privileged east coast shtick as total performance art. This Marathonpacks post on the band from last fall is about a million percent smarter and more on-point than anything I have to say here, but Eric's description in the first paragraph of how "Ezra Koenig fondly remembered the last time the band came to our fair college town" makes me giggle with glee when I think about the sniffly disdain (if not outright rage) that the band has inspired in various and sundry internet folks. Anyone who's going to get their classist panties in a twist about this freakin' band of all things probably deserves the high blood pressure. We're all indie as fuck now, and the decision to dress their career up in polos and wry collegiate charm is, depending on how you look at it, maybe one of the most punk rock moves they could have made. Which, even if most of the crowd wasn't as tickled by it as I am, is at least is registering at some level. Ezra was going into some spiel before playing "M79," inviting us to shout along with that "whoooah!" bit, and some kid standing near me kind of jokingly mused, "there's a lotta rules with these guys" and some other guy shot back, "that's because they went to school." That killed me. At any rate, they took the tempo on "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" down a few clicks, which served its lecherous preppy beach house vibe well, and I was entertained by how physically their bassist plays.
I thought maybe I was kind of over the Hold Steady, but...nope. Still fun to the max. I love that Craig Finn and Franz Nicolay seem to be actively competing for the honor of being the biggest fan of their own band, and I forgot how much the "how'm I s'posed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?" line in "Chips Ahoy!" always sucker punches me in the throat. In a weird way, their performance reminded me a lot of what I love most about seeing hip-hop sets at big festival shows like this--there's a million different, equally entertaining people running around on stage, they have the chops to fill the space to its utmost with physical grandstanding and noise, and there's a generous sense of inclusiveness looping like a Mobius strip between the band and the fans. I like this group an awful lot, but wouldn't call myself a superfan to any extent, yet when Finn ends the show by singing, "we're all the Hold Steady," I kinda feel like, "yeah! I am part of the life of this band and this experience right now; thanks for noticing and acknowledging it." It's such an easy trick, but it's a good one. And it works.
Ah, Jarvis. I don't know his--how you say--oeuvre well at all, but I was transfixed the entire time he was on stage. I had a really great sight line, thanks to a tallish Bettie Page look-alike photographer who insisted I stand in front of her (thanks, Bettie!), and used it to my advantage to take a slew of pictures. It's so nice to feel, as an audience member, that you're in the hands of a truly capable performer. Every move he made all night was fascinating, whether it was a knowingly lascivious hip swirl or simply telling a story about pre-concert anxiety dreams. There's a warmth and a professionalism in what he does that seems to stem from the perfect combination of experience and the fact that he's just a born performer. A rare treat indeed in the realm of (loosely defined) indie rock.
And then there was the sheer audacity of an Animal Collective headlining set. People, Animal Collective are not a headlining band. But...the fact that they were billed as such anyway completely delighted me with its perversity. The audience may have been actively digging it closer to the front, but back where I was standing, there was a palpable air of "huh?" in the crowd. "Do we dance to this? What's going on? How am I supposed to interact with this?" No matter--it was the perfect music at the perfect time as far I was concerned. Their songs felt like the night air, kind of drowsy and thick with a beguiling combination of leftover warmth and breezy, clammy cool. I involuntarily shouted "holy shit!" when that huge, massed chorus effect announced the beginnings of "Comfy in Nautica"; any other band, I probably would have been disappointed and merciless about the fact that Panda's vocals were more than a bit flat on the upper end, but I could not have given less of a fuck in that moment. Not to mention that I went utterly apeshit-level bonkers when they played "Peacebone." That song has got to rival "Hey Ya!" for being way less easy to dance to than you think it is, but I gave it my all anyway. (Um, there was much bouncing involved? I believe I waggled my arms above my head a few times?) Some angel somewhere near the park actually shot off a little spray of fireworks during "Fireworks," and I was deeply touched by the fact that Avey ended the song with two repetitions of the "you're only what I see sometimes" line instead of going back to "I'm only all I see sometimes" like he does in the album version of the track. Even if it was just a simple lyric bobble, I don't care. That's one of the key lyrical transformations in one of my favorite songs of the past five years (it's one of only 27 MP3s in my entire iTunes library currently designated with a five-star "perfect song" rating) and hearing it that way warmed me all over like a good shot of whiskey. To make the set even more special, who, of the hundreds of people crammed into the park at that point, should walk directly past me during one of the low-key droney moments but Dan Snaith. I kind of grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted that I really enjoyed his set from earlier in the day, and he thanked me and gave the most comically broad and good-naturedly dorked-out Canadian grin he could muster. A personal festival highlight, for sure.
"How was church? How many people here went to church this morning?" Times New Viking's drummer Adam Elliott asked us first thing Sunday afternoon. The fact that he plays sitting on a brown wooden folding chair, like the kind you might find in a church rec room somewhere, instead of on a regular old drum throne, gave the question a weird sincerity, in a way, before he careened into another Mark E. Smith-esque introduction to "pop song-ah numbah two!" Out from underneath the blanket of aggressively, intentionally disgusting sound quality that I've learned to love on their album, it was easier than ever to hear why they might very deliberately term their music "pop songs." And if my ears hadn't noticed it, I'd hope that the little bunch of daffodils sitting on the beat-up kick drum would have clued me into it eventually. What a perfect visual complement to the essence of this band's charm.
Dirty Projectors were all kinds of great, with a downright scary level of musical talent on stage. But, between the complexity of all the crazy-ass polyrhythms and finger-picking and hairsbreadth-tight harmonies, um, it's kind of no wonder that they're ever so slightly lacking in charisma. Maybe the indie rock master class vibe comes across better indoors, during a longer set? Regardless, Longstreth is like this beautiful Afrobeat-influenced ostrich and his bassist and other guitar player are totally foxy, so...there's that.
There's been a lot of hype surrounding King Khan online in the days since the fest, and he deserves every bit of it. All I can say is buh-nanas. He absolutely gave the performance that Jamie Lidell wanted to give at the Abbey Pub earlier this year. Khan isn't as gifted vocally (or perhaps even as musically) as Lidell, but the barn-burning stage show he cobbled together here was the spirit and genius of pure rock and roll stupidity. And, not to take away anything from his skill as a band leader and performer, but why aren't more people doing this? Even though it requires a largish band (horns + rhythm section + backup dancer and whatnot), the I-IV-V chord progressions are the kind of shit that these guys have been playing their entire lives, so the changes would be easy to pick up and easy to put 100% passion into at more or less a moment's notice. Like I said, Khan's great and all, but this kind of throwbacky, 1950s comic book version of rock and roll seems ripe for reviving on a larger scale. I mean, by the second song, he already had us picking trash up off the ground and flinging it all over the place. There's just nobody out there right now capitalizing on the essentially dirty, juvenile underpinnings of rock music like that. What's more, the audience totally knew how to handle it and took it in the spirit of joy and celebration, like throwing confetti. I was laughing so hard and loving it so much. And when he ended the show with a gospel-style rant, seemingly largely improvised, about crawling up inside of his woman while they were making love--"I pulled my leg in! And I pulled my other leg in! But I took mah shoes off because Indian people alllllways take their shoes off before they do somethin' holy!"--I was fairly convinced that I'd just seen something very, very special.
The Dodos were the weekend's big exception to my 'older is better' rule. Which I'm pretty sure is because they played with a mature kind of confidence and self-awareness (in the best possible sense of the word) that I just wasn't seeing in any of the other younger bands. Obviously, because they're a two-piece (with a Bob Mapplethorpe look-alike occasionally popping up as a third member to bang on a trash can), it's probably easier for them to adapt their set-up to different stage sizes and shapes, but they were really smart to push their gear all the way down front to minimize the dead air space as much as possible between them and the crowd. They also totally availed themselves of the volume levels at their disposal in a festival-grade sound system, which, again, is an important thing for a two-piece that's basically just guitar and drums to be aware of, but there was a vitality and urgency to it that seemed somehow really fresh and surprising. Being pummeled by the sound in that way got me moving and dancing way more than I thought I would during their set--after all, this is music that I've been emotionally associating with taking quiet, melancholy walks by myself around the neighborhood--which, y'know, is never exactly the worst way to heighten feelings of goodwill toward a band. Mostly I was just proud of them for bringing it. They got promoted to one of the main stages, and they definitely made sure they earned it with plenty of mojo to spare. Plus, they make ridiculous faces while they play, which makes them super-fun to photograph.
M. Ward. Le sigh. I love this man. What more can I say? He looked truly pleased to be playing throughout his entire, pitch-perfect set, his band was ace (was that the estimable Rachel Blumberg on drums? does anybody know?), and if the beefier, more rocked-up sound of all those wonderful songs from Post-War are any indication of what he's going to be doing with his next solo album, I'll be one very happy kitten indeed.
The side stage area was packed for Bon Iver, and I felt super-conflicted about actually remaining there in the throng. Honestly, I didn't really want to. When I managed to weasel my way down near the front but then got crammed in at a bad angle behind a bunch of tall people, that was pretty much the only other moment of panic I experienced after nearly missing Caribou. It was a delightful little stew of panic, too: of panic for my basic personal safety (I was feeling quite claustrophobic) and panic that I was going to miss 'seeing' the show that I was suffering for. Pretty much the only thing that kept me there was a sense of duty toward the album that's shaping up to be my favorite of '08. And it's not that I begrudge him his popularity at all; the album's a true stunner and worthy of the insane flights of adulation it inspires. It's just that weird, uncomfortable conflict of holding this bedroom-intimate music so close to your heart and then being forced to acknowledge in the harsh light of day, "oh wait, all these annoying people like this music too." My relative discontent with the experience wasn't helped by an overly muddy and bass-heavy sound mix that just didn't serve the spindly grace of these songs at all. And yet--I still wept during the sing-along part of "The Wolves (Act I and II)." Going into his customary request that we chime in for the "what might have been lost" swell, he said, "the song doesn't just feature you, it needs you. We need you" which pushed all my sensitive, communal inclusiveness buttons right off that bat, and then, once we all started to sing together, I took out my earplugs for the first time all weekend. I wanted my ears to be just totally blown out by the moment, I wanted to feel consumed and obliterated, shattered into little molecules by the song, by the voices around me, by the sound of my own voice lost in the middle of it all. I also felt it was a fitting offering to make in exchange for all the comfort this music has brought me this year. I'm not going to say that catharsis was worth the hassle of fighting the crowd, but it sure felt good and it sure proved Bon Iver's resilience and strength for the way they can reach up through such a quantity of bullshit to still genuinely touch people after many months of nearly continuous repetition of the same material.
The Spoonsters sounded great and gave a much more muscular and robust show than the one I saw, for all its setlist-associated merits, last year at the Riv. Even as a pretty huge fan, though, I have to admit that a Spoon show is probably never going to change anybody's life. Professionalism has its place, of course, it's wonderful to hear their songs played live, they've had beautiful lights the past couple times I've seen them, they know just when and how to pull out a crack horn section...I just wish that everything about them excited me as much as those albums do. Those albums make me want to run around flapping my arms like a chicken and depants perfect strangers on the street and stub my toe as hard as possible on a fire hydrant. Their shows make me want to shake somebody's hand and comment obsequiously about some random local microbrew and tie a double-knot in my tennis shoes. Ah well. That being said, though, if you're one of those fans of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga that still doesn't get what "The Ghost of You Lingers" is doing on there, I would strongly urge you to find a way to hear them play it live. (To tide you over for the time being, you can check out the track on their Daytrotter session.) That song absolutely soars in live performance, which, given everything I've just said, is pretty funny and ironic considering how relatively (stereotypically) un-Spoonlike it is. No wonder it's turning out to be one of my favorite new songs. Maybe they'll get my arms flapping like a chicken yet.
So there you have it, kittens! The rest of my photos are here (and, I have to say, my new camera was definitely MVP this weekend; I think that thing would make me toast in the morning if I asked it to). I hope you've been tending to your sunburns and rinsing all the mud out of your socks and getting yourself geared up for next year. It always comes around sooner than you think. Which, when it comes right down to it, is kind of never soon enough.
That being said, I feel like this was also the first year that there was too much good stuff going on--enough so that I had to make some hard choices about what to miss. And it's not like I wasn't pretty diligently on my feet for most of the weekend. Yet I didn't see any of Les Savy Fav, Spiritualized, Atlas Sound, or Chicago faves the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, I only caught the last few minutes of Dizzee Rascal's set (but managed to take some of my favorite photos of the fest while I was there), I was entirely too tired to fight my way into any position to catch Dinosaur Jr. on Sunday night, and I didn't really make any OMG new discoveries like I did last year with Jamie Lidell. Not to mention that I completely missed a bunch of impromptu shit like King Khan giving away ice cream and Tim Harrington giving $2 haircuts. But, I did Just Say No to the mud. (Well, as best I could.)
On to the music!
For the second year in a row, the Friday night ATP/Don't Look Back thing was the least essential portion of the festival for me, mainly because I didn't grow up listening to any of the three featured albums and hence have no real emotional attachment to them. Which is actually a pretty good test, I think, for how well they, or the groups in question, hold up. Does the music translate to someone not listening to it through a haze of nostalgia (or a haze of expectations, depending)? For the most part, yes. Mission of Burma killed it, just motherfucking nailed that shit to the wall, setting a weekend-long precedent for me of preferring the older, more established bands on the roster to the sexy young guns. Sebadoh utterly bored me to tears; it seems even they realized there was no reason for them to have been playing the gig. They just kind of shuffled and stammered through the tracklist, basically apologizing for taking up so much time. Public Enemy made me wanna fight the power, though, man. Plus, I always love watching dudes in the crowd flip out during hip-hop shows. There was a gaggle of guys of all different races around me shouting along to every lyric and affirming back everything Chuck D said. Flavor Flav was totally insane, but it's hard not to appreciate his sincerity when he cops to the fact that, even though he's all embroiled in the reality TV thing right now, Public Enemy will always be his first and only love.
One of the very few moments of legitimate panic I had all weekend was worrying if public transportation would get me to Union Park on Saturday afternoon in time for any part of Caribou's set. I know I'd just seen them a few months ago, but, based on how much I loved that show, and how much I've been obsessing over The Milk of Human Kindness since then, I needed to see them again. Fortunately, I got there for about half the set (after the rain ended), and boy was it worth it. I don't know what it is about this band, but they have something special going on. The melodies, the rhythms, the song structures, the trippy but also krautrocky vibe--they're just doing everything right, and right on the money, with humility, but workmanlike pride in a job well done, too. Dan Snaith is totes my new indie rock boyfriend.
It was something of a decisive moment for me after Caribou's set when I decided, fuck the Fleet Foxes. I think I'm a bit more susceptible to hype, in general, than I'd like to be, but I just decided I couldn't be arsed. Um, instead, I decided to succumb to hype on the other end of the spectrum and headed to the third stage for Fuck Buttons. Maybe I was just hoping to recapture the feeling of seeing them open for Caribou in April, or pay homage to how important that night was for me or whatever, but even if I was, they utterly surpassed my memory of that springtime show. How did they manage to do that in the middle of the day, in an open field, while I was totally sober? I don't know, but it was transcendent. The clouds even broke for a while in the middle of the set. The band is 100 percent cool, but somehow the experience of their music leaves no room for cool on the receiving end. You're either into that shit or you're not. It was delicious just to give in to it. That gauzy electronic thrum will totally envelop you if you let it, will dissolve you in the moment. It also helped that the audience was great--they cheered for every mood change, tempo shift, and distorto bass assault. It was totally inspiring.
Vampire Weekend was fine and all; it would be backlashy of me to kvetch too much about them. Esp. considering that, whether the humor is intentional or not, I don't think most people give them credit for being as funny as they are. There's a part of me that reads their whole snot-nosed, uber-privileged east coast shtick as total performance art. This Marathonpacks post on the band from last fall is about a million percent smarter and more on-point than anything I have to say here, but Eric's description in the first paragraph of how "Ezra Koenig fondly remembered the last time the band came to our fair college town" makes me giggle with glee when I think about the sniffly disdain (if not outright rage) that the band has inspired in various and sundry internet folks. Anyone who's going to get their classist panties in a twist about this freakin' band of all things probably deserves the high blood pressure. We're all indie as fuck now, and the decision to dress their career up in polos and wry collegiate charm is, depending on how you look at it, maybe one of the most punk rock moves they could have made. Which, even if most of the crowd wasn't as tickled by it as I am, is at least is registering at some level. Ezra was going into some spiel before playing "M79," inviting us to shout along with that "whoooah!" bit, and some kid standing near me kind of jokingly mused, "there's a lotta rules with these guys" and some other guy shot back, "that's because they went to school." That killed me. At any rate, they took the tempo on "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" down a few clicks, which served its lecherous preppy beach house vibe well, and I was entertained by how physically their bassist plays.
I thought maybe I was kind of over the Hold Steady, but...nope. Still fun to the max. I love that Craig Finn and Franz Nicolay seem to be actively competing for the honor of being the biggest fan of their own band, and I forgot how much the "how'm I s'posed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?" line in "Chips Ahoy!" always sucker punches me in the throat. In a weird way, their performance reminded me a lot of what I love most about seeing hip-hop sets at big festival shows like this--there's a million different, equally entertaining people running around on stage, they have the chops to fill the space to its utmost with physical grandstanding and noise, and there's a generous sense of inclusiveness looping like a Mobius strip between the band and the fans. I like this group an awful lot, but wouldn't call myself a superfan to any extent, yet when Finn ends the show by singing, "we're all the Hold Steady," I kinda feel like, "yeah! I am part of the life of this band and this experience right now; thanks for noticing and acknowledging it." It's such an easy trick, but it's a good one. And it works.
Ah, Jarvis. I don't know his--how you say--oeuvre well at all, but I was transfixed the entire time he was on stage. I had a really great sight line, thanks to a tallish Bettie Page look-alike photographer who insisted I stand in front of her (thanks, Bettie!), and used it to my advantage to take a slew of pictures. It's so nice to feel, as an audience member, that you're in the hands of a truly capable performer. Every move he made all night was fascinating, whether it was a knowingly lascivious hip swirl or simply telling a story about pre-concert anxiety dreams. There's a warmth and a professionalism in what he does that seems to stem from the perfect combination of experience and the fact that he's just a born performer. A rare treat indeed in the realm of (loosely defined) indie rock.
And then there was the sheer audacity of an Animal Collective headlining set. People, Animal Collective are not a headlining band. But...the fact that they were billed as such anyway completely delighted me with its perversity. The audience may have been actively digging it closer to the front, but back where I was standing, there was a palpable air of "huh?" in the crowd. "Do we dance to this? What's going on? How am I supposed to interact with this?" No matter--it was the perfect music at the perfect time as far I was concerned. Their songs felt like the night air, kind of drowsy and thick with a beguiling combination of leftover warmth and breezy, clammy cool. I involuntarily shouted "holy shit!" when that huge, massed chorus effect announced the beginnings of "Comfy in Nautica"; any other band, I probably would have been disappointed and merciless about the fact that Panda's vocals were more than a bit flat on the upper end, but I could not have given less of a fuck in that moment. Not to mention that I went utterly apeshit-level bonkers when they played "Peacebone." That song has got to rival "Hey Ya!" for being way less easy to dance to than you think it is, but I gave it my all anyway. (Um, there was much bouncing involved? I believe I waggled my arms above my head a few times?) Some angel somewhere near the park actually shot off a little spray of fireworks during "Fireworks," and I was deeply touched by the fact that Avey ended the song with two repetitions of the "you're only what I see sometimes" line instead of going back to "I'm only all I see sometimes" like he does in the album version of the track. Even if it was just a simple lyric bobble, I don't care. That's one of the key lyrical transformations in one of my favorite songs of the past five years (it's one of only 27 MP3s in my entire iTunes library currently designated with a five-star "perfect song" rating) and hearing it that way warmed me all over like a good shot of whiskey. To make the set even more special, who, of the hundreds of people crammed into the park at that point, should walk directly past me during one of the low-key droney moments but Dan Snaith. I kind of grabbed him by the shoulder and shouted that I really enjoyed his set from earlier in the day, and he thanked me and gave the most comically broad and good-naturedly dorked-out Canadian grin he could muster. A personal festival highlight, for sure.
"How was church? How many people here went to church this morning?" Times New Viking's drummer Adam Elliott asked us first thing Sunday afternoon. The fact that he plays sitting on a brown wooden folding chair, like the kind you might find in a church rec room somewhere, instead of on a regular old drum throne, gave the question a weird sincerity, in a way, before he careened into another Mark E. Smith-esque introduction to "pop song-ah numbah two!" Out from underneath the blanket of aggressively, intentionally disgusting sound quality that I've learned to love on their album, it was easier than ever to hear why they might very deliberately term their music "pop songs." And if my ears hadn't noticed it, I'd hope that the little bunch of daffodils sitting on the beat-up kick drum would have clued me into it eventually. What a perfect visual complement to the essence of this band's charm.
Dirty Projectors were all kinds of great, with a downright scary level of musical talent on stage. But, between the complexity of all the crazy-ass polyrhythms and finger-picking and hairsbreadth-tight harmonies, um, it's kind of no wonder that they're ever so slightly lacking in charisma. Maybe the indie rock master class vibe comes across better indoors, during a longer set? Regardless, Longstreth is like this beautiful Afrobeat-influenced ostrich and his bassist and other guitar player are totally foxy, so...there's that.
There's been a lot of hype surrounding King Khan online in the days since the fest, and he deserves every bit of it. All I can say is buh-nanas. He absolutely gave the performance that Jamie Lidell wanted to give at the Abbey Pub earlier this year. Khan isn't as gifted vocally (or perhaps even as musically) as Lidell, but the barn-burning stage show he cobbled together here was the spirit and genius of pure rock and roll stupidity. And, not to take away anything from his skill as a band leader and performer, but why aren't more people doing this? Even though it requires a largish band (horns + rhythm section + backup dancer and whatnot), the I-IV-V chord progressions are the kind of shit that these guys have been playing their entire lives, so the changes would be easy to pick up and easy to put 100% passion into at more or less a moment's notice. Like I said, Khan's great and all, but this kind of throwbacky, 1950s comic book version of rock and roll seems ripe for reviving on a larger scale. I mean, by the second song, he already had us picking trash up off the ground and flinging it all over the place. There's just nobody out there right now capitalizing on the essentially dirty, juvenile underpinnings of rock music like that. What's more, the audience totally knew how to handle it and took it in the spirit of joy and celebration, like throwing confetti. I was laughing so hard and loving it so much. And when he ended the show with a gospel-style rant, seemingly largely improvised, about crawling up inside of his woman while they were making love--"I pulled my leg in! And I pulled my other leg in! But I took mah shoes off because Indian people alllllways take their shoes off before they do somethin' holy!"--I was fairly convinced that I'd just seen something very, very special.
The Dodos were the weekend's big exception to my 'older is better' rule. Which I'm pretty sure is because they played with a mature kind of confidence and self-awareness (in the best possible sense of the word) that I just wasn't seeing in any of the other younger bands. Obviously, because they're a two-piece (with a Bob Mapplethorpe look-alike occasionally popping up as a third member to bang on a trash can), it's probably easier for them to adapt their set-up to different stage sizes and shapes, but they were really smart to push their gear all the way down front to minimize the dead air space as much as possible between them and the crowd. They also totally availed themselves of the volume levels at their disposal in a festival-grade sound system, which, again, is an important thing for a two-piece that's basically just guitar and drums to be aware of, but there was a vitality and urgency to it that seemed somehow really fresh and surprising. Being pummeled by the sound in that way got me moving and dancing way more than I thought I would during their set--after all, this is music that I've been emotionally associating with taking quiet, melancholy walks by myself around the neighborhood--which, y'know, is never exactly the worst way to heighten feelings of goodwill toward a band. Mostly I was just proud of them for bringing it. They got promoted to one of the main stages, and they definitely made sure they earned it with plenty of mojo to spare. Plus, they make ridiculous faces while they play, which makes them super-fun to photograph.
M. Ward. Le sigh. I love this man. What more can I say? He looked truly pleased to be playing throughout his entire, pitch-perfect set, his band was ace (was that the estimable Rachel Blumberg on drums? does anybody know?), and if the beefier, more rocked-up sound of all those wonderful songs from Post-War are any indication of what he's going to be doing with his next solo album, I'll be one very happy kitten indeed.
The side stage area was packed for Bon Iver, and I felt super-conflicted about actually remaining there in the throng. Honestly, I didn't really want to. When I managed to weasel my way down near the front but then got crammed in at a bad angle behind a bunch of tall people, that was pretty much the only other moment of panic I experienced after nearly missing Caribou. It was a delightful little stew of panic, too: of panic for my basic personal safety (I was feeling quite claustrophobic) and panic that I was going to miss 'seeing' the show that I was suffering for. Pretty much the only thing that kept me there was a sense of duty toward the album that's shaping up to be my favorite of '08. And it's not that I begrudge him his popularity at all; the album's a true stunner and worthy of the insane flights of adulation it inspires. It's just that weird, uncomfortable conflict of holding this bedroom-intimate music so close to your heart and then being forced to acknowledge in the harsh light of day, "oh wait, all these annoying people like this music too." My relative discontent with the experience wasn't helped by an overly muddy and bass-heavy sound mix that just didn't serve the spindly grace of these songs at all. And yet--I still wept during the sing-along part of "The Wolves (Act I and II)." Going into his customary request that we chime in for the "what might have been lost" swell, he said, "the song doesn't just feature you, it needs you. We need you" which pushed all my sensitive, communal inclusiveness buttons right off that bat, and then, once we all started to sing together, I took out my earplugs for the first time all weekend. I wanted my ears to be just totally blown out by the moment, I wanted to feel consumed and obliterated, shattered into little molecules by the song, by the voices around me, by the sound of my own voice lost in the middle of it all. I also felt it was a fitting offering to make in exchange for all the comfort this music has brought me this year. I'm not going to say that catharsis was worth the hassle of fighting the crowd, but it sure felt good and it sure proved Bon Iver's resilience and strength for the way they can reach up through such a quantity of bullshit to still genuinely touch people after many months of nearly continuous repetition of the same material.
The Spoonsters sounded great and gave a much more muscular and robust show than the one I saw, for all its setlist-associated merits, last year at the Riv. Even as a pretty huge fan, though, I have to admit that a Spoon show is probably never going to change anybody's life. Professionalism has its place, of course, it's wonderful to hear their songs played live, they've had beautiful lights the past couple times I've seen them, they know just when and how to pull out a crack horn section...I just wish that everything about them excited me as much as those albums do. Those albums make me want to run around flapping my arms like a chicken and depants perfect strangers on the street and stub my toe as hard as possible on a fire hydrant. Their shows make me want to shake somebody's hand and comment obsequiously about some random local microbrew and tie a double-knot in my tennis shoes. Ah well. That being said, though, if you're one of those fans of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga that still doesn't get what "The Ghost of You Lingers" is doing on there, I would strongly urge you to find a way to hear them play it live. (To tide you over for the time being, you can check out the track on their Daytrotter session.) That song absolutely soars in live performance, which, given everything I've just said, is pretty funny and ironic considering how relatively (stereotypically) un-Spoonlike it is. No wonder it's turning out to be one of my favorite new songs. Maybe they'll get my arms flapping like a chicken yet.
So there you have it, kittens! The rest of my photos are here (and, I have to say, my new camera was definitely MVP this weekend; I think that thing would make me toast in the morning if I asked it to). I hope you've been tending to your sunburns and rinsing all the mud out of your socks and getting yourself geared up for next year. It always comes around sooner than you think. Which, when it comes right down to it, is kind of never soon enough.
Monday, July 14, 2008
WALL-E, Pavement, Muxtape, & Whedon
Hey, WALL-E, way to be the best movie I've seen so far this year.
Wow, guys, I have nothing to say about the film that hasn't already been said better elsewhere, but, yeah. It's amazing. I kind of can't believe it actually got made. I was blown away by how deeply cynical it was (kittens, contra Kung Fu Panda, this is how you deal with obesity in a cartoon!) and thought the use of Hello, Dolly! throughout was inspired. There is no other praise but to urge everyone who hasn't seen it yet to do so posthaste.
OK, I give up, I guess I like Pavement now. I don't know if it's just a function of having been listening to (and loving) Real Emotional Trash all spring, but something clicked a couple weeks ago and I started to feel actively compelled to listen to Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Maybe I've been trying too hard to like them all along instead of, y'know, just liking them? First relenting with Wilco, now Pavement; can the Fiery Furnaces be far behind? (Erm, don't count on it.)
I realize I've been talking a lot about specific songs lately, so I took the opportunity to update my Muxtape with 11 songs I've mentioned directly or indirectly in the past two months and one song I haven't: King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner." The only reason it hasn't been mentioned yet is that I just downloaded it this weekend, and it's killing me right now. This song could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but his vocal performance sells the hell out of it. There's an itchy, exuberant franticness to it that doesn't make me doubt for an instant that he loves her! He loves her! He really, really loves her!
Also, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (via)?! Why am I just learning about this today? Think of all the idle moments I could have been wasting anticipating this if I'd known about it sooner!
Wow, guys, I have nothing to say about the film that hasn't already been said better elsewhere, but, yeah. It's amazing. I kind of can't believe it actually got made. I was blown away by how deeply cynical it was (kittens, contra Kung Fu Panda, this is how you deal with obesity in a cartoon!) and thought the use of Hello, Dolly! throughout was inspired. There is no other praise but to urge everyone who hasn't seen it yet to do so posthaste.
OK, I give up, I guess I like Pavement now. I don't know if it's just a function of having been listening to (and loving) Real Emotional Trash all spring, but something clicked a couple weeks ago and I started to feel actively compelled to listen to Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Maybe I've been trying too hard to like them all along instead of, y'know, just liking them? First relenting with Wilco, now Pavement; can the Fiery Furnaces be far behind? (Erm, don't count on it.)
I realize I've been talking a lot about specific songs lately, so I took the opportunity to update my Muxtape with 11 songs I've mentioned directly or indirectly in the past two months and one song I haven't: King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner." The only reason it hasn't been mentioned yet is that I just downloaded it this weekend, and it's killing me right now. This song could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but his vocal performance sells the hell out of it. There's an itchy, exuberant franticness to it that doesn't make me doubt for an instant that he loves her! He loves her! He really, really loves her!
Also, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (via)?! Why am I just learning about this today? Think of all the idle moments I could have been wasting anticipating this if I'd known about it sooner!
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Things That Make Me Happy
The line in "My Favorite Year" on Trouble in Dreams when Dan Bejar sings "in some small way we're all traitors to our own cause." ::shivers:: I love this line. Both because it's, um, true, and also because it's such an honest and meta-fantastic description of Bejar's own working methods, especially on this album--he's so pessimistic about rock music and yet can craft a rock song that, while not completely undermining that pessimism, still has the kind of really good, gushy feeling you get from a classic, sturdy, solid song you've been listening to all your life. I look forward to hearing him spit that line the way I always look forward to hearing Ben Gibbard sing "I wish the world was flat like the old days / then I could travel just by holding a map / no more airplanes or speed-trains or freeway / there'd be no distance that could hold us back" at the beginning of Transatlanticism.
And speaking of Death Cab--I love that little tic in Gibbard's songwriting technique where his melody lines and lyrics run so long that they almost tip off the end of the bar. I'm thinking specifically here of "I Will Possess Your Heart" and its opening lines "How I wish you could see the potential / the potential of you and me / it's like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can't read just yet." It's that little "just yet" spillover that kills me, the same way his "it varies from season to season, kid" in "Why You'd Want to Live Here" does. I dunno what it is. It's kind of like, in the same way that CTLA and I have theorized that the reason why Colin Meloy's diction is so chewed is because he loves language so much that he's trying to sing all vowels simultaneously at all times, Gibbard's so enamored of his own talent for effortlessly elegant melody that he can't help trying to cram as much into every song as he possibly can.
Deadwood fans, sometimes I'll just quietly think to myself "Hang dai, fuckin' Wu--hang dai" and grin like a complete idiot for the next hour and a half.
And speaking of Death Cab--I love that little tic in Gibbard's songwriting technique where his melody lines and lyrics run so long that they almost tip off the end of the bar. I'm thinking specifically here of "I Will Possess Your Heart" and its opening lines "How I wish you could see the potential / the potential of you and me / it's like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can't read just yet." It's that little "just yet" spillover that kills me, the same way his "it varies from season to season, kid" in "Why You'd Want to Live Here" does. I dunno what it is. It's kind of like, in the same way that CTLA and I have theorized that the reason why Colin Meloy's diction is so chewed is because he loves language so much that he's trying to sing all vowels simultaneously at all times, Gibbard's so enamored of his own talent for effortlessly elegant melody that he can't help trying to cram as much into every song as he possibly can.
Deadwood fans, sometimes I'll just quietly think to myself "Hang dai, fuckin' Wu--hang dai" and grin like a complete idiot for the next hour and a half.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Important Things I Learned Today
In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream (But That's Only Because the Earth Itself Is Screaming Louder than You Could Possibly Ever Scream, Like That One Baby in the Grocery Store, OMG, It's Burning My Ears).
Montgomery, Alabama's, minor league baseball team is called the Montgomery Biscuits.
The Long Winters are going to appear on that Huey Lewis comp Are You Still with Me?! when/if it ever sees the light of day. (In the meantime, check out Throw Me the Statue's superb take on "If This Is It.") This whole ball of wax makes me happy x one million.
Montgomery, Alabama's, minor league baseball team is called the Montgomery Biscuits.
The Long Winters are going to appear on that Huey Lewis comp Are You Still with Me?! when/if it ever sees the light of day. (In the meantime, check out Throw Me the Statue's superb take on "If This Is It.") This whole ball of wax makes me happy x one million.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Musical Thoughts
I've been listening to a shitload of new music lately, kittens. So much so I can barely keep it all straight in my head.
I only brought one mix CD along with me to my long weekend in Santa Fe for use in the rental car, so, wary of growing bored with it too quickly, I picked up a copy of Death Cab's new one, Narrow Stairs. Honestly, I can't even tell if they're a good band anymore--I'm going to tend to like what they do because I tend to like the sonic palette they use and they tend to keep using it. Simple as that. It's definitely more of a piece with Plans than it is any of their pre-major label stuff in that the production's exceedingly glossy (without being soulless) and any angst it contains isn't congealing so obviously on the surface anymore. There are no real clunkers--except maybe "Talking Bird"--the band is tight as ever (Jason McGerr: MVP), and Gibbard's tenor is starting to acquire some butteriness where it used to be all citrus. Whatever the album's charms may be, though, they were magnified exponentially for me through the concentrated repetition, nearly subliminal absorption, and heightened emotional receptivity peculiar to being in a car for several hours at a stretch, listening to the same thing on repeat--a pleasure I haven't enjoyed for a very long time. I really don't think I would have given the album that much of a chance to grow on me if it hadn't been for those circumstances. At least two of my all-time top-five favorite albums ascended to that ranking the same way, so...draw what conclusions from that you will.
Apropos of bands whose sonic palettes I tend to like, I'm slightly shocked by how much I'm actually not liking Shearwater's Rook. Maybe I just need to live with it some more, but, based on the way everybody talks and blogs about this band, I thought it would be an instant love affair--the sweeping emotion, the big dramatic swells, all the bird imagery. And yet...not so much. I'm tremendously bugged by Meiburg's falsetto, which he uses to signify importance way too often, when it's his full-on chest voice I find most affecting.
The new Raconteurs album has been a pleasant surprise after just a few spins. (Thanks, Chanesaw.) These guys could've just crapped out another album on par with Broken Boy Soldiers (which is to say, pleasant enough but ultimately unremarkable and unmemorable), but you can hear the sound of honest-to-God ambition on Consolers of the Lonely. The song forms and instrumentation are adventurous (horns!!) and the album qua album hangs together better than it would've needed to. Plus, I always forget how much I like Brendon Benson. (Though, he or whoever else had a hand in writing the otherwise stunning "The Switch and the Spur" owe former collaborator Jason Falkner some cash for lifting that opening chord progression from "The Plan" on Can You Still Feel.)
Because the CTA likes to fuck with me personally, I missed the starting times for two different movies I was trying to see on Saturday, so by the time I finally got to the theater, the only thing starting that I was even halfway interested in was, yes, Kung Fu Panda. I love a good animated romp, and this was generally amusing, lovely to look at, well voiced, etc. But, in my post-Buffy brain, I have a really hard time swallowing "chosen one" story lines that aren't exceptionally well done, not to mention that, ultimately, this film is a valorization of incompetence and gluttony so long as they're accompanied by ebullience and joie de vivre. Um, no. Obviously, I'm all for spreading the message that bodies of all shapes and sizes are acceptable, etc., but a kids' movie promoting itself with McDonald's happy meals featuring a character who both overeats when he's nervous and uses food as the only tool that will get him motivated while not being particularly skilled in anything other than enthusiasm and non sequiturs is, um, pretty frustratingly early-twenty-first-century American. Not cool.
Also, of course, RIP to the good Mr. Carlin.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Musical Musings
Sometimes, for me, listening to a Wilco song with, like, half an ear open is akin to catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and being surprised by how good you look. I put "Hate It Here" on a mix I made this weekend and have been totally blown away by its, and the band's, greatness. I don't know if Tweedy's voice has ever sounded as cool to my ears as it does here. Remind me again why I don't listen to this band (or at least Sky Blue Sky) all the time?
Americans, why do we generally refuse to have anything to do with the Arctic Monkeys? I was listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare yesterday and was bowled over anew with how good they are. I kind of can't believe some of those melodies were written by a contemporary kid in his early 20s; they're so sweetly twisty, they sound like they could've come straight out of the early days of rock 'n' roll. Not to mention Turner's facility with both writing lyrics and delivering them. Even when he's spitting sarcasm and bile, there's such ease there.
Grizzly Bear's "While You Wait for the Others" is really, really fucking good. I know the song and the video have been floating around out there for a few months already, but it always takes me a while to warm up to Grizzly Bear's stuff in general, so the full weight of its greatness is finally just hitting me now. But srsly, it's like this wonderful, warm, lavender-scented bath for your ears.
Americans, why do we generally refuse to have anything to do with the Arctic Monkeys? I was listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare yesterday and was bowled over anew with how good they are. I kind of can't believe some of those melodies were written by a contemporary kid in his early 20s; they're so sweetly twisty, they sound like they could've come straight out of the early days of rock 'n' roll. Not to mention Turner's facility with both writing lyrics and delivering them. Even when he's spitting sarcasm and bile, there's such ease there.
Grizzly Bear's "While You Wait for the Others" is really, really fucking good. I know the song and the video have been floating around out there for a few months already, but it always takes me a while to warm up to Grizzly Bear's stuff in general, so the full weight of its greatness is finally just hitting me now. But srsly, it's like this wonderful, warm, lavender-scented bath for your ears.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Jamie Lidell, Live at the Abbey Pub
It was a good show. Not a great show--but a good show that I'm happy I attended. Lidell and his band have only been on the road touring behind Jim for just over a week now, so I think there's hope that by the time they swing back around ("when I! come back around!") for Lollapalooza in August their set will have some more cohesion. But last night felt a little all over the place. I think part of the problem is that his band is...well, not much of a band yet. You could tell that Jamie wanted to blast out on stage and light the place on fire like old school James Brown, but the four guys behind him were nowhere near musically robust enough to support that attempt. They were clearly having fun, and their oddball stage antics and costumes were certainly of a piece with Lidell's sensibility, but until these guys can actually match his chops as well as his silliness--or, y'know, until he can afford to bring the Dap-Kings out on the road--I'd much rather see him just do the solo knob-twiddling freak-out thing. Which he did for a nice extended segment in the middle of the set. (A girl in my peripheral vision kept turning her back to the stage so she could flirt possessively with the guy she'd come to the show with, and I just wanted to shake her by the shoulders and say, "do you realize what you're missing every time you do that?!") He was also, thankfully, in fine vocal form throughout the night; his croon on the first verse of "Green Light"--easily one of my favorite songs on the new album--was just ridiculously pristine. I also have to give credit to the extremely amped audience. Even if the show wasn't quite as mind-bendingly in-the-pocket as I would have liked, the crowd was having a blast. Lots of dancing, clapping, and call and response--in fact, during the obligatory break between the fake end of the show and the encore, we all politely clapped and hollered for a few seconds until some brilliant person got the entire crowd singing the "I been waitin' / I been waitin' / I been waitin' / yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" bit from Jim's "Wait for Me" until the band started trickling back out on stage. It was an incredibly sweet and heartfelt gesture.
Right, so...Sex and the City. I don't even know what I can say about the movie, much less the entire juggernaut, at this point. I've been tying myself in knots all week trying to come up with something interesting to say about it here, but I don't know if any attempt to untangle would do much of a service to my thoughts or to the film. Was I offended by the prerelease backlash? Yeah. My standard line has been, "it's The Baby-Sitters Club for sexually active adult women. No more, no less. Get over it." But do I understand the fatigue and annoyance that comes of all that hysterical media saturation, especially if you're not a fan? Of course. Harry Potter's similar omnipresence last summer drove me batty. Did the backlash start to get to me a little bit, in spite of myself? It did, during the few days when I was meekly referring to my plans to see "that movie with the ladies." I pretty quickly realized, though, that that shit ain't right and just started outright discussing the fact that I was going to see it during opening weekend with, yes, three of my good city girlfriends. Was there a certain thrill in being in a theater full of women who were reminding the muckety mucks in Hollywood WITH THE VERY LOUD NOISE OF OUR DOLLARS that we're still a demographic to be reckoned with? Sure, while at the same time wanting to scold everyone for gasping with delight at that hideous walk-in closet reveal and for laughing at all the lamest jokes.
I think the only aspect of the movie I haven't seen widely addressed yet is Samantha's incredibly offensive food-instead-of-sex subplot. Far from being a genuinely affecting corollary to Carrie and Miranda's story lines wherein they're also separated from the things that matter most to them, hers is played slapstick. I guess Samantha's inherent wink-wink, nudge-nudginess kind of resists overwrought emotional histrionics in general, but her loss was really not treated with much respect at all. I think it's sort of barely coincidental that she's the oldest actress of the bunch, and thus beginning to slip into the realm of "it's so funny when grandma says 'penis'!" I mean, for a character who's known for her notoriously prurient appetites, her "sex scenes" actually become scenes of creepy-old-lady voyeurism as a bunch of plastic-looking porno people bounce and gyrate in front of the open windows next door to her. Oh, and of course she also buys a dog (retail therapy + being associated with the animalistic impulses of fucking and feeding--ugh), which then allows for the convenient "pooch" pun when she arrives back in New York and everyone's horrified by how much weight she's gained. About halfway through the scene, Carrie tosses off some line like "it's not about the pounds, you'd look beautiful at any weight"--and you can practically smell the graphite, the line feels so penciled in during eleventh hour script revisions. Obviously, I'm pretty angry about all that. But, I liked the rest of it enough on the whole, I guess. Best line? When they first get to the hotel in Mexico and Miranda barks, "you got wireless here? Thanks."
I also saw a bit of French piffle, Roman de gare, last weekend. It kind of pointlessly folds back on itself in that "you've just been watching the story that the character is writing!" way, but the performances are very warm and the preposterousness of many of the plot twists yields its own pleasure. Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know of my love for Dominique Pinon, so it was definitely a treat for me to get to see him carry a film like this. Extra bonus points for all the wonderful French crooner stuff on the soundtrack.
Hey, how much fun is that Spoon Don't You Evah EP? I finally got around to putting it on my iPod and couldn't believe how easy it was to listen, not counting the one from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, to six different versions of the song in a row. A lot of it is certainly just the endless amount of richness in Britt's voice, but if the tracks had just been standard issue variations on the boring thumpa-thumpa remixes I always find myself regretting having downloaded, even the samples of him wouldn't have floated the middle five all on their own. I'm glad, though, that Spoon's tastefulness extends even to DJs and other remix artists on their interstitial releases.
Local friends, if you find yourself venturing out for the Printers Row Book Fair this weekend, be sure to stop by booths 331 and 333 to say hi to the CRP worker bees. A few local authors will be signing their recently released books and we'll be featuring plenty of other local interest titles. Should be fun!
Right, so...Sex and the City. I don't even know what I can say about the movie, much less the entire juggernaut, at this point. I've been tying myself in knots all week trying to come up with something interesting to say about it here, but I don't know if any attempt to untangle would do much of a service to my thoughts or to the film. Was I offended by the prerelease backlash? Yeah. My standard line has been, "it's The Baby-Sitters Club for sexually active adult women. No more, no less. Get over it." But do I understand the fatigue and annoyance that comes of all that hysterical media saturation, especially if you're not a fan? Of course. Harry Potter's similar omnipresence last summer drove me batty. Did the backlash start to get to me a little bit, in spite of myself? It did, during the few days when I was meekly referring to my plans to see "that movie with the ladies." I pretty quickly realized, though, that that shit ain't right and just started outright discussing the fact that I was going to see it during opening weekend with, yes, three of my good city girlfriends. Was there a certain thrill in being in a theater full of women who were reminding the muckety mucks in Hollywood WITH THE VERY LOUD NOISE OF OUR DOLLARS that we're still a demographic to be reckoned with? Sure, while at the same time wanting to scold everyone for gasping with delight at that hideous walk-in closet reveal and for laughing at all the lamest jokes.
I think the only aspect of the movie I haven't seen widely addressed yet is Samantha's incredibly offensive food-instead-of-sex subplot. Far from being a genuinely affecting corollary to Carrie and Miranda's story lines wherein they're also separated from the things that matter most to them, hers is played slapstick. I guess Samantha's inherent wink-wink, nudge-nudginess kind of resists overwrought emotional histrionics in general, but her loss was really not treated with much respect at all. I think it's sort of barely coincidental that she's the oldest actress of the bunch, and thus beginning to slip into the realm of "it's so funny when grandma says 'penis'!" I mean, for a character who's known for her notoriously prurient appetites, her "sex scenes" actually become scenes of creepy-old-lady voyeurism as a bunch of plastic-looking porno people bounce and gyrate in front of the open windows next door to her. Oh, and of course she also buys a dog (retail therapy + being associated with the animalistic impulses of fucking and feeding--ugh), which then allows for the convenient "pooch" pun when she arrives back in New York and everyone's horrified by how much weight she's gained. About halfway through the scene, Carrie tosses off some line like "it's not about the pounds, you'd look beautiful at any weight"--and you can practically smell the graphite, the line feels so penciled in during eleventh hour script revisions. Obviously, I'm pretty angry about all that. But, I liked the rest of it enough on the whole, I guess. Best line? When they first get to the hotel in Mexico and Miranda barks, "you got wireless here? Thanks."
I also saw a bit of French piffle, Roman de gare, last weekend. It kind of pointlessly folds back on itself in that "you've just been watching the story that the character is writing!" way, but the performances are very warm and the preposterousness of many of the plot twists yields its own pleasure. Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know of my love for Dominique Pinon, so it was definitely a treat for me to get to see him carry a film like this. Extra bonus points for all the wonderful French crooner stuff on the soundtrack.
Hey, how much fun is that Spoon Don't You Evah EP? I finally got around to putting it on my iPod and couldn't believe how easy it was to listen, not counting the one from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, to six different versions of the song in a row. A lot of it is certainly just the endless amount of richness in Britt's voice, but if the tracks had just been standard issue variations on the boring thumpa-thumpa remixes I always find myself regretting having downloaded, even the samples of him wouldn't have floated the middle five all on their own. I'm glad, though, that Spoon's tastefulness extends even to DJs and other remix artists on their interstitial releases.
Local friends, if you find yourself venturing out for the Printers Row Book Fair this weekend, be sure to stop by booths 331 and 333 to say hi to the CRP worker bees. A few local authors will be signing their recently released books and we'll be featuring plenty of other local interest titles. Should be fun!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Iron Man, Redbelt, Sarah Marshall, Dirty Projectors, Scott Pilgrim
Iron Man was entertaining enough, I guess, and the principal actors were all certainly very fine, but it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. Trying to make a rock-em, sock-em comic book movie relevant or timely or whatever by setting a major portion of the plot in Afghanistan seems, rather than allowing the one to enrich the other, kind of an insult to both. In his Chicago Reader review, J.R. Jones bemoans the fact that Favreau as director makes no direct commentary on the fact that the Tony Stark character acts as a metaphor for the U.S., but I think Jones is slightly off the mark. I think using Stark's single-minded mission to destroy the weapons he's sold to the 'bad guys' as such a driving force of the plot and such a hinge for his character arc implicitly acknowledges that everybody knows this is how arms get distributed to questionable people with questionable motives, and everybody knows this is the same charade of self-righteousness we've been watching on TV every day since 9/11. It's so obvious that it needn't be remarked on. But, the fact that it needn't be remarked on doesn't take away from the reality that it's a pretty despicable thing to build a supposedly escapist summer blockbuster around, a blockbuster where we're supposed to cheer for these virtuosic displays of ballistic might.
Redbelt was likewise a bit of a snooze-fest and letdown. Over the course of his career, Mamet has perhaps done his job too well--by continually railing against seedy, amoral Hollywood wheeling and dealing, he's made it impossible to believe that anyone would be as starry-eyed and gullible when confronted with the kind of too-good-to-be-true offer from a solicitous actor/producer team that Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mike Terry character is handed. (Esp. a character with the avowed integrity and honor issues that he has.) Though the plot strained credibility in many places, I'm always happy to watch Ejiofor do anything, and I thought the casting of Tim Allen was inspired.
I suppose I should have had problems with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but it won me over in spite of myself. Sure, the female characters were fairly one-dimensional and disproportionately hot in comparison to their more schlubby male counterparts, but I felt like, on the whole, it had a pretty good sense for all the different kinds of stuff that hangs in the air, unspoken, between people--between old lovers, new lovers, friends that aren't really friends, and people you feel threatened by. Plus, when is Paul Rudd going to step away from these disposable comedic walk-on roles and start carrying movies on his own again? He's a demonstrably better actor than most of the guys in Apatow's stable and shines with a ridiculous amount of on-screen charisma. When he breaks into a smile in that scene when he's trying to figure out how old he actually is, I felt like my retinas were being seared. Damn.
I've been listening to Dirty Projectors' Rise Above a lot lately and liking it a ton. Since I have absolutely no familiarity with the Black Flag album it's re-creating/reenvisioning, though, I find myself listening to Rise Above in much the same way that I used to listen to original cast recordings for musicals I'd never actually seen performed. There's something enjoyably elliptical about just jumping in blind and assembling the plot, such as it is, to the best of my abilities with the clues left behind by the music and lyrics. This way of listening has also helped smooth over some of the songs' sudden crazy tempo shifts and jarring vocal affectations--they're easier for my ears to acclimate to if I hear them as out-of-context scene changes and moments of character development.
Speaking of character development, I've spent the last three evenings immersed in the Scott Pilgrim books (and plan to finish the fourth today)--holy crap, I'm just completely in love with this series now. It's so smart and funny and delightful. And Canadian. I don't think I've grown so attached, so quickly, to a group of characters like this since I first started getting into Deadwood. I just want to give them space to continue to rattle around in my brain like a catchy power pop melody. So good!
Redbelt was likewise a bit of a snooze-fest and letdown. Over the course of his career, Mamet has perhaps done his job too well--by continually railing against seedy, amoral Hollywood wheeling and dealing, he's made it impossible to believe that anyone would be as starry-eyed and gullible when confronted with the kind of too-good-to-be-true offer from a solicitous actor/producer team that Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mike Terry character is handed. (Esp. a character with the avowed integrity and honor issues that he has.) Though the plot strained credibility in many places, I'm always happy to watch Ejiofor do anything, and I thought the casting of Tim Allen was inspired.
I suppose I should have had problems with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but it won me over in spite of myself. Sure, the female characters were fairly one-dimensional and disproportionately hot in comparison to their more schlubby male counterparts, but I felt like, on the whole, it had a pretty good sense for all the different kinds of stuff that hangs in the air, unspoken, between people--between old lovers, new lovers, friends that aren't really friends, and people you feel threatened by. Plus, when is Paul Rudd going to step away from these disposable comedic walk-on roles and start carrying movies on his own again? He's a demonstrably better actor than most of the guys in Apatow's stable and shines with a ridiculous amount of on-screen charisma. When he breaks into a smile in that scene when he's trying to figure out how old he actually is, I felt like my retinas were being seared. Damn.
I've been listening to Dirty Projectors' Rise Above a lot lately and liking it a ton. Since I have absolutely no familiarity with the Black Flag album it's re-creating/reenvisioning, though, I find myself listening to Rise Above in much the same way that I used to listen to original cast recordings for musicals I'd never actually seen performed. There's something enjoyably elliptical about just jumping in blind and assembling the plot, such as it is, to the best of my abilities with the clues left behind by the music and lyrics. This way of listening has also helped smooth over some of the songs' sudden crazy tempo shifts and jarring vocal affectations--they're easier for my ears to acclimate to if I hear them as out-of-context scene changes and moments of character development.
Speaking of character development, I've spent the last three evenings immersed in the Scott Pilgrim books (and plan to finish the fourth today)--holy crap, I'm just completely in love with this series now. It's so smart and funny and delightful. And Canadian. I don't think I've grown so attached, so quickly, to a group of characters like this since I first started getting into Deadwood. I just want to give them space to continue to rattle around in my brain like a catchy power pop melody. So good!
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Concerts and Camera
Kittens! How've you been? I've missed you.
First and foremost, I have to let you know that I got a new camera. So far, I'm extremely pleased with it and its flexibility. Many thanks to JH, who recently bought the same one and let me fondle it for a while, which helped me make the decision to purchase one of my very own.
Had the pleasure of seeing Jim White live for the first time last Friday at the Old Town School of Folk Music. (Jim White the Southern Gothic troubadour who records for Luaka Bop, not Jim White the drummer for the Dirty Three.) Setting aside for a moment the fact that the well-to-do yuppies in the crowd probably bugged me more than the garden variety rude, unkempt hipsters I usually encounter when I'm out at a show, it was an enjoyable night. He talks incessantly between songs, unspooling these long, insane monologues about these insane (and often quite poignant) experiences he's been through (watching with panic, fear, and fascination as waterspouts writhed and twisted on the beach in Florida, talking heretical smack to Jesus-lovin' Sleepy LaBeef at a Canadian bluegrass festival) and though there's obviously a bit of polish and raconteurishness to these stories, I get the sense that if you just ran into him in a coffee shop somewhere, he'd probably talk your ear off in a similar way. I bet it's somewhat exhausting, but ultimately quite rewarding, to know him personally. It's the same sense I get about Quentin Tarantino whenever I see or read interviews with him. In fact, White's music and persona exist for me at this funny intersection of a whole collection of other artists, in addition to Tarantino, I have particular fondness for, which, even though I'm not an avid fan of his, really just makes me inherently sympathetic to and curious about what he's doing. There's the Tarantino talkiness, but also the dark, lyrical Americana of Denis Johnson, the joie de vivre informed but unbowed by life's more unforgiving realities of John Darnielle, the childlike silliness and deceptive simplicity of Jonathan Richman, the quirky country parables of Lyle Lovett. (I'm sure there's probably some others in there that I'm forgetting at the moment.) I wasn't familiar with the majority of the material he played, much of which comes from his most recent album Transnormal Skiperoo, but that's OK because he started the show with "A Perfect Day to Chase Tornados," as heartbreaking, tender, and transfixing a song as I know.
Oh my god, Son of Rambow is absolutely the movie that Be Kind Rewind wanted to be. I don't know what I could possibly say that would convince you that you need to see this film at your earliest convenience, but please pretend that I've just said it. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. The British whimsy, the ways that little boys can be such beautiful idiots, the emotional intelligence about the trickle-down economics of bullying--Garth Jennings is just firing on all cylinders here. I was in a total state of suspended delight through the whole thing. Highly recommended.
Also caught the Laura Veirs solo show at Schubas this week. I try to catch her whenever she's in town just because...well, just because. It's like, what else am I supposed to do when it comes to someone who's written and recorded so much music that's insinuated itself into my life so thoroughly in such a relatively short period of time? I show the fuck up at the shows and clap like my life depended on it and buy the merch, that's what. Though I missed Tucker Martine and Karl Blau's contributions, when she plays without her backing band, the songs can reveal their impressively sturdy roots in old-timey country, folk, and bluegrass idioms (an impression which was definitely helped by her playing "Freight Train," which appears on the Two Beers Veirs tour EP, and by then pulling out her banjo to play "Cluck Old Hen," complete with audience participation) and her skill as a guitar player really shines. Liam Finn--New Zealander, son of Crowded House's Neil Finn, with a likeness of Johnny Burns from Deadwood--opened, with a little vocal help from the sumptuously lovely EJ Barnes, and fucking owned the room. Pics here.
Even though it's ostensibly just two guys playing music on a mostly dark stage, I'm tempted to tag this video (via) of the Dodos playing "Fools" as NSFW because, um, holy crap, it's kinda sexy. (Also, WTF, is Casey Affleck playing drums for them now?) Yes, darlings, I'm just using my twenty-ninth year to get some good cougaring practice in before I hit 30...
Jamie Lidell fans, please be sure not to miss this shit-hot remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good." Not only does the track itself knock me out, I was fucking pleased as all hell to discover that remixer Son Lux is actually an old pal from college whom I've obviously lost touch with in the intervening years. Looks like he's making quite a name for himself among the tastiest of the tastemakers in New York. An awesome discovery for the week.
Monday, May 05, 2008
In Which AMF Once Again Must Contend with the Disillusionment Wrought by Becoming Overly Enthusiastic About Certain Movie Previews
Gak. So, The Forbidden Kingdom was awful, awful, awful. So disappointing. It totally felt like it was made by committee, which is to say it felt utterly bland and almost messianically bent on being as inoffensive as possible. The preview fails to intimate that the whole reason white boy Michael Angarano is in the movie in the first place is because of a ridiculous Wizard of Oz-esque framing device wherein he's transported from his seemingly sad life in present-day Boston (why Boston?) to the vaguely mythical China that finds him teamed up with the Jackie Chan and Jet Li characters so he can return some mystical staff to its rightful owner and, in so doing, restore peace to the kingdom, etc., etc. Ugh. It started out promisingly enough, with a kicky, self-aware, pseudo-70s credit sequence inspired by the vintage Hong Kong action movie posters that decorated the Angarano character's bedroom walls, and I hoped that maybe the movie was going to do some interesting stuff with the way that young white dudes so fetishize HK action movies, but...no dice. You know me, I like to try to come out of a movie with at least one nice moment that I can remember about it, but I'm hard pressed to be able to point at anything here. Jet Li when he's in character as the Monkey King, perhaps? At least there's some life on screen then. Aside from that, not much else. I never felt emotionally involved with any of the characters, and even the fight sequences weren't that interesting. A shame.
The Music Box hit us this weekend with the first of a series of Jimmy Stewart flicks, beginning with Call Northside 777. What a treat--set in Chicago (where the skyline shots were all just, like, the Tribune Tower, the Merchandise Mart, and the river), revolving around a whole bunch of Polish characters and their attendant crazy last names and cozy Polish neighborhoods, featuring a textbook (which is to say charming, engaging, and sharp) performance from Stewart as a hard-nosed newspaper journalist. I loved that, even though the movie has the happy/expected ending, the narrative never explains why the crime went down the way it did or why Wanda Skutnik altered her testimony to indict the wrong guy. I also loved Stewart's few all-too-brief scenes with Helen Walker as his wife; they had great chemistry and she was feisty as all get-out. I'd need a grad student to do the research for me, but I'd love to know where this film falls in the continuum of "cutting edge technology saves the day" movies. I'm bad with remembering plot in much detail, but somehow the climax revolves around Stewart's character needing to prove that Wanda Skutnik saw the fall guy a day before she claims she did, and they do this by enlarging a photograph 200x or more in order to read the date on a newspaper being held by a paper boy hovering somewhere in the background. So, not only are they zooming in on the photo, but then they have to transmit these enlargements over the wire from Chicago to a newspaper office in the state capital. It's tempting to chuckle at how wowed the characters are by this great new technology, but shit--I'm just impressed that they were doing this kind of stuff in the late '40s at all. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
John Darnielle at LPTJ on Jamie Lidell's new album: "…one thing pop music is good for is remembering that somewhere inside us is the potential for unvanquishable joy: clearing a space for that remembering, broadening that space. Jamie Lidell’s present project seems to be focused on illuminating that joy-containing space, hanging signs that point toward it." OMG, bring it. After his set at the Pitchfork fest last summer, I've decided that, if I can possibly help it, I just can't miss his live show whenever he tours through Chicago. I'm counting the days until June 4. Abbey Pub. See you there, bitches.
Also, a great big happy birthday to my boy Michael, captain of the Geeks, today. Be sure to celebrate your Cinco de Mikow in style!
The Music Box hit us this weekend with the first of a series of Jimmy Stewart flicks, beginning with Call Northside 777. What a treat--set in Chicago (where the skyline shots were all just, like, the Tribune Tower, the Merchandise Mart, and the river), revolving around a whole bunch of Polish characters and their attendant crazy last names and cozy Polish neighborhoods, featuring a textbook (which is to say charming, engaging, and sharp) performance from Stewart as a hard-nosed newspaper journalist. I loved that, even though the movie has the happy/expected ending, the narrative never explains why the crime went down the way it did or why Wanda Skutnik altered her testimony to indict the wrong guy. I also loved Stewart's few all-too-brief scenes with Helen Walker as his wife; they had great chemistry and she was feisty as all get-out. I'd need a grad student to do the research for me, but I'd love to know where this film falls in the continuum of "cutting edge technology saves the day" movies. I'm bad with remembering plot in much detail, but somehow the climax revolves around Stewart's character needing to prove that Wanda Skutnik saw the fall guy a day before she claims she did, and they do this by enlarging a photograph 200x or more in order to read the date on a newspaper being held by a paper boy hovering somewhere in the background. So, not only are they zooming in on the photo, but then they have to transmit these enlargements over the wire from Chicago to a newspaper office in the state capital. It's tempting to chuckle at how wowed the characters are by this great new technology, but shit--I'm just impressed that they were doing this kind of stuff in the late '40s at all. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.
John Darnielle at LPTJ on Jamie Lidell's new album: "…one thing pop music is good for is remembering that somewhere inside us is the potential for unvanquishable joy: clearing a space for that remembering, broadening that space. Jamie Lidell’s present project seems to be focused on illuminating that joy-containing space, hanging signs that point toward it." OMG, bring it. After his set at the Pitchfork fest last summer, I've decided that, if I can possibly help it, I just can't miss his live show whenever he tours through Chicago. I'm counting the days until June 4. Abbey Pub. See you there, bitches.
Also, a great big happy birthday to my boy Michael, captain of the Geeks, today. Be sure to celebrate your Cinco de Mikow in style!
Sunday, April 27, 2008
My Blueberry Nights and Beyond
Movies? I like movies.
Dude, I thought I heard/read that My Blueberry Nights was supposed to be not very good? Well, I'm happy to report that it's actually a great little flick. Sure, it's not as emotionally gutting as In the Mood for Love or as intricate and perplexing as 2046, but as a reminder of the whimsical, romantic melancholy of the rightly beloved-by-all Chungking Express, it's totally satisfying. Norah Jones is an utter blank, but that's clearly part of the point. The three vignettes that she travels through center around a series of losses that escalate in intensity as they simultaneously diminish in personal importance to her character, a tantalizing conceptual framework that helps make up for the way iffy beginning when Jude Law's cafe-owner character explains how he doesn't remember people by their names as much as he remembers them by the food they eat (eye roll) and Ms. Jones does the most 'acting' she's required to do in the whole piece after she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her and she smashes a glass bottle on the sidewalk (big eye roll). As the movie travels across the country from New York to Memphis to Reno and opens up geographically, it also starts to shimmer a little bit, in that lovely Wong Kar-wai way, where the edges of the characters bleed and drip into each other (much like the sexy macro photography of the blueberry pie a la mode behind the opening credit sequence), as odd traits and circumstances and even physical resemblances echo and rhyme from one storyline to the next, and the next. (The bleed even goes meta when Chan Marshall, another husky voiced singer-turned-actress with a great head of hair, shows up as Jude Law's pined-for ex. They've got such great chemistry in their brief scene together, I would without a doubt pay cash money to see the prequel version of that love affair.) David Strathairn gives a typically incredible performance, and Natalie Portman proves once again that she can pretty much do anything as she nails her blowsy Western cardsharp character, complete with a ton of bad turquoise jewelry and even worse frosted hair. The movie's not going to change your life or anything, but it feels really good.
Caught up with The Long Goodbye for the first time in about nine years (thank you, Music Box weekend matinee series!), and while the anti-Altman bias I subconsciously inherited from my favorite college film professor way back when has mostly waned by now, I still do have to take issue with the final "Hooray for Hollywood" musical tag here. The film's formal snarkiness about the noir genre makes its point well, especially given where it falls in the context of both the American New Wave and Altman's emergence as one of the defining directors of that era, but that little twist of the knife at the end strikes me as just a bit too too. That being said, though, I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of the movie this time around. Elliott Gould could not have been more wonderful as the anti-Philip Marlowe, and the casting of Sterling Hayden just gives me chills it's so perfect.
The Visitor was definitely enjoyable, if a bit maudlin. I suppose I'm being kind of harsh, and I suppose, politically, I'm not exactly part of the demographic that needs to have the U.S.'s insane and draconian immigration laws dramatized for me. But I also feel like, anytime you're going to make a movie that revolves around some gorgeous Syrian man who just wants to play his djembe, his gorgeous girlfriend who just wants to sell her hand-beaded jewelry, and his gorgeous mother who just wants to know her gorgeous son is safe and happy in his adopted homeland, there's going to necessarily be a bit of deck-stacking involved in making sure that we, the audience, feel rilly bad about the unpleasant stuff that happens to these attractive and artsy people who are filled to the brim with a lusty embrace of life and all its sensual pleasures that the uptight white people are too square or too repressed to experience. Seriously, I grant that I'm being too harsh here. The movie is filled with a lot of fine and subtle acting and doesn't at all scream this subtext like the sort of issue-of-the-week TV movie that I'm making it out to be, and the story doesn't necessarily need, or could even have sustained, a more complex version of the Tarek character. But...I just get the nagging feeling that there's a way of reading the message here, however well intentioned, that the only "foreigners" worth caring about are the ones who are attractive and emotionally useful in some way to the lives of the white Americans they encounter, while eliding the more complex and perhaps boring truth that the system is deeply fucked, regardless of the personal charisma of the people it has imprisoned and deported. I dunno; how would one make an emotionally affecting film about deportation without (unintentionally?) sainting its racially profiled characters? I think it's also illustrative of how incredibly broken, and wide-ranging in its brokenness, the system is that I can't even get behind a film as generally well-made and enjoyable as this without twisting myself into knots over it.
I also weirdly, and almost accidentally, saw Enchanted this weekend. I laughed out loud a bunch of times--both at stuff like the intentionally funny "Happy Working Song" and the unintentionally funny nuevo-Disney ethos that all happily-ever-afters must now also come certified with a successful transition into entrepreneurship for at least one of the main characters. I'm not a Grey's Anatomy watcher, so I don't really get the whole Patrick Dempsey thing, but he does a completely serviceable job here, no real complaints. But, there's the part of me that thinks that, until further notice, in these kinds of romantic comedies that are primarily vehicles for their lead actresses, these otherwise bland leading men roles should perpetually be played by Mark Ruffalo, just to see how much seething rage and illicit, up-against-the-wall sex appeal he can sneak into the mainstream.
Do yourself a favor and be sure to check out the recent White Denim Daytrotter session. I'm just totally enamored of this young band and have been consistently thrilled by everything I've heard from them so far.
There's a fantastic Q&A with Dan Bejar up on eMusic right now. I pity any of these poor bastards who were honestly expecting straightforwards As to their Qs. The "'Summer Babe.' Just kidding. No, 'Summer Babe'" one liner got one of those rolling thunderclap laughs out of me, where the humor didn't hit me for a few seconds, then I sort of chuckled curtly, then really started cackling out loud, sitting alone at my desk. Big love.
Dude, I thought I heard/read that My Blueberry Nights was supposed to be not very good? Well, I'm happy to report that it's actually a great little flick. Sure, it's not as emotionally gutting as In the Mood for Love or as intricate and perplexing as 2046, but as a reminder of the whimsical, romantic melancholy of the rightly beloved-by-all Chungking Express, it's totally satisfying. Norah Jones is an utter blank, but that's clearly part of the point. The three vignettes that she travels through center around a series of losses that escalate in intensity as they simultaneously diminish in personal importance to her character, a tantalizing conceptual framework that helps make up for the way iffy beginning when Jude Law's cafe-owner character explains how he doesn't remember people by their names as much as he remembers them by the food they eat (eye roll) and Ms. Jones does the most 'acting' she's required to do in the whole piece after she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her and she smashes a glass bottle on the sidewalk (big eye roll). As the movie travels across the country from New York to Memphis to Reno and opens up geographically, it also starts to shimmer a little bit, in that lovely Wong Kar-wai way, where the edges of the characters bleed and drip into each other (much like the sexy macro photography of the blueberry pie a la mode behind the opening credit sequence), as odd traits and circumstances and even physical resemblances echo and rhyme from one storyline to the next, and the next. (The bleed even goes meta when Chan Marshall, another husky voiced singer-turned-actress with a great head of hair, shows up as Jude Law's pined-for ex. They've got such great chemistry in their brief scene together, I would without a doubt pay cash money to see the prequel version of that love affair.) David Strathairn gives a typically incredible performance, and Natalie Portman proves once again that she can pretty much do anything as she nails her blowsy Western cardsharp character, complete with a ton of bad turquoise jewelry and even worse frosted hair. The movie's not going to change your life or anything, but it feels really good.
Caught up with The Long Goodbye for the first time in about nine years (thank you, Music Box weekend matinee series!), and while the anti-Altman bias I subconsciously inherited from my favorite college film professor way back when has mostly waned by now, I still do have to take issue with the final "Hooray for Hollywood" musical tag here. The film's formal snarkiness about the noir genre makes its point well, especially given where it falls in the context of both the American New Wave and Altman's emergence as one of the defining directors of that era, but that little twist of the knife at the end strikes me as just a bit too too. That being said, though, I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of the movie this time around. Elliott Gould could not have been more wonderful as the anti-Philip Marlowe, and the casting of Sterling Hayden just gives me chills it's so perfect.
The Visitor was definitely enjoyable, if a bit maudlin. I suppose I'm being kind of harsh, and I suppose, politically, I'm not exactly part of the demographic that needs to have the U.S.'s insane and draconian immigration laws dramatized for me. But I also feel like, anytime you're going to make a movie that revolves around some gorgeous Syrian man who just wants to play his djembe, his gorgeous girlfriend who just wants to sell her hand-beaded jewelry, and his gorgeous mother who just wants to know her gorgeous son is safe and happy in his adopted homeland, there's going to necessarily be a bit of deck-stacking involved in making sure that we, the audience, feel rilly bad about the unpleasant stuff that happens to these attractive and artsy people who are filled to the brim with a lusty embrace of life and all its sensual pleasures that the uptight white people are too square or too repressed to experience. Seriously, I grant that I'm being too harsh here. The movie is filled with a lot of fine and subtle acting and doesn't at all scream this subtext like the sort of issue-of-the-week TV movie that I'm making it out to be, and the story doesn't necessarily need, or could even have sustained, a more complex version of the Tarek character. But...I just get the nagging feeling that there's a way of reading the message here, however well intentioned, that the only "foreigners" worth caring about are the ones who are attractive and emotionally useful in some way to the lives of the white Americans they encounter, while eliding the more complex and perhaps boring truth that the system is deeply fucked, regardless of the personal charisma of the people it has imprisoned and deported. I dunno; how would one make an emotionally affecting film about deportation without (unintentionally?) sainting its racially profiled characters? I think it's also illustrative of how incredibly broken, and wide-ranging in its brokenness, the system is that I can't even get behind a film as generally well-made and enjoyable as this without twisting myself into knots over it.
I also weirdly, and almost accidentally, saw Enchanted this weekend. I laughed out loud a bunch of times--both at stuff like the intentionally funny "Happy Working Song" and the unintentionally funny nuevo-Disney ethos that all happily-ever-afters must now also come certified with a successful transition into entrepreneurship for at least one of the main characters. I'm not a Grey's Anatomy watcher, so I don't really get the whole Patrick Dempsey thing, but he does a completely serviceable job here, no real complaints. But, there's the part of me that thinks that, until further notice, in these kinds of romantic comedies that are primarily vehicles for their lead actresses, these otherwise bland leading men roles should perpetually be played by Mark Ruffalo, just to see how much seething rage and illicit, up-against-the-wall sex appeal he can sneak into the mainstream.
Do yourself a favor and be sure to check out the recent White Denim Daytrotter session. I'm just totally enamored of this young band and have been consistently thrilled by everything I've heard from them so far.
There's a fantastic Q&A with Dan Bejar up on eMusic right now. I pity any of these poor bastards who were honestly expecting straightforwards As to their Qs. The "'Summer Babe.' Just kidding. No, 'Summer Babe'" one liner got one of those rolling thunderclap laughs out of me, where the humor didn't hit me for a few seconds, then I sort of chuckled curtly, then really started cackling out loud, sitting alone at my desk. Big love.
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