Handlebar, Handlebar, You Are My Handlebar!

I just got the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in the mail the other day and haven't really had a chance to read anything yet (except the piece on Matt Dillon, which seems oddly spiteful, though perhaps it's just not as gushingly reverent as most glossy magazine profiles I'm used to these days), but this exchange from the Q&A with Andre Benjamin that Stereogum excerpted yesterday cracked me the hell up:

RS: Are you with me on this: "Hey Ya!" is the best song of the twenty-first century? ANDRE BENJAMIN: Jesus. I don't know, man. That could be argued by a lot of people. RS: Can you think of anything better? ANDRE BENJAMIN: No.

Love it. Bitches, seriously, if you are not reading Green Pea-ness on some kind of regular basis, you are missing out on the best kind of celebratory exasperation the MP3 blogs have to offer. He talks a lot of shit about a lot of stuff, but always in service of wildly flipping out about something he loves. He reminds me of the Doc from Deadwood in that way; sphincter perpetually clenched and just barely resisting the everpresent urge to grab some motherfuckers by the throat who don't SEE! DON'T YOU SEE! the beauty and decency that's so readily apparent to his own eyes and ears. James celebrated the blog's first birthday last week with a five-day reappraisal of ten songs that have continued to stand the test of time for him, and, this week, gave us an inspired vision of how our musically inclined grandparents might have reacted to the shit-hot new singles of their era. Go visit now. "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" is all that's been in my head for the past three or four days. Sing it with me! "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" I can watch segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website or YouTube, I can rent TV on DVD from Netflix, and I can read wonderfully funny blow-by-blow wrap-ups of the VMAs from S/FJ and Fluxblog. Why would I ever pay good money for cable? It is revealed that Chicagoist loves Great Expectations every bit as much as I do. Yay! We've all seen Sufjan's facial hair by now, yes? I love how something as completely insignificant as a newly grown handlebar mustache has become this major issue being discussed all around the series of tubes. On quite the other hand, here's something actually worthy of being discussed all around the series of tubes: Robert Christgau got fired from the Village Voice. And now for our weekly requirement of cute-but-also-funny animal related items: bunnies yawning (via the Birdchick Blog) and Chicago's own cat circus (thanks, LK).

Or Is It, "These Other Cats Is Just Pluto"?

I've been obsessed for a little while now with the Kut Masta Kurt remix of Diverse and Mos Def's "Wylin Out" available on the free, downloadable Chocolate Swim EP here. I love, love, love that line in the chorus that goes, "I'm Diverse / these other cats is just Whole Foods." I feel like it's the perfect way to kind of affectionately poke fun at the Adult Swim demographic of now-responsible early-thirtysomethings who own condos and hold down steady, interesting jobs and are politically liberal and like to buy organic food whenever possible but still jones for some funny, subversive cartoons at night. And, that would all be true except for the fact that, you guessed it, they're not actually rapping about Whole Foods. The line, rather, is "these other cats is just hopefuls." I only just realized this a few days ago and was so disappointed, and a little bit embarrassed, when it finally clicked, but, holy shit, what a fucking funny way to mishear the line, huh? Seriously, John Darnielle, will you just HAVE MY BABIES ALREADY??? This week on Salon he discusses (brilliantly, strangely, hilariously) television and boxing and how bright Sebastian Bach would be "if he could just stay focused." (OMG, does this betray a Gilmore Girls habit as well?) I couldn't even bring myself to read the rest of the contributions because I knew I'd just be disappointed that he didn't write them. There's also, of course, the new album, which, yes, is very, very sad, but, at first blush, nowhere near as emotionally impenetrable as all the "I'm still processing [it]" comments might lead one to believe. It's beautiful and cold and feels kind of perfectly breathless, like all the air has been crushed out of it, with a few trinkets and other bits of discarded, gilded dross left rattling around inside. I feared that his falsetto work would tip the whole boat into dirge overload, but it doesn't at all. I can't remember which blog I found it on originally, but here's a link to the music video for "Woke Up New," directed by Rian Johnson, the guy who did Brick. (Seriously, if his spine-tinglingly perfect choice to run "Sister Ray" over the closing credits is any indication, this guy knows good music.) Gorilla vs. Bear points us in the direction of the Cold War Kids' free Daytrotter session MP3s and the wonderfully juicy corresponding interview. The band sounds just as exhausted as the write-up claims they were after the drive back out to Iowa, but that battle fatigue brings something really beautiful out of "Hospital Beds" that I'd never quite heard in the song before. I don't know if I'm posting this for anyone other than myself at this point, but, if you have any interest in these cats at all, don't miss these links. Good Hodgkins links to a great interview with Chicago oddball Devin Davis. I laughed out loud at his perfect encapsulation of what it means for him to have reached a certain level of success as an indie musician: "People now introduce me to friends as 'Devin Davis' instead of 'Devin' which is kind of funny, but flattering." The best thing, in my mind, about the whole Pluto demotion thing is that people are talking about and thinking about space, about our solar system. As funny as I find stuff like Kottke's mnemonic contest and Colbert talking planetary smack, I'm firmly in support of the scientists trying to figure out just what the fuck a planet is. It seems to me the height of respectable, forward-thinking science that they aren't afraid to make these intense pronouncements that are forcing us to redefine what we had previously held as "true" about our little corner of the cosmos. I'm not discounting the fact that this decision was probably fraught with dissention and contention and debate and that the new "dwarf planet" classification might not satisfy all the voters from the International Astronomical Union, but still, if we can no longer expect our politicians to have the courage to say, "you know what, upon further evidence, I need to reconsider my position," we need to support and encourage astronomers, biologists, mathematicians, and the like when they're doing their damnedest to help us understand the amazing, confounding, continually unfolding nuances of our known universe.

Pitchfork Music Festival 2006

It came and it went, kittens, and now we're left to contend with the sunburn, dehydration, and exhaustion that the Pitchfork Music Festival has left us with--not to mention the digital pictures, posters from Flatstock, calluses on our thumbs from refreshing our favorite music blogs this morning to see when and how they'll weigh in on the weekend, and a hankering to dust off our copies of Alligator, Destroyer's Rubies, and The Tyranny of Distance. Sure, this fest was more hot, more crowded, and had more stuff to be taken in than Intonation last month, but the sheer scale of it all pretty much forced me to focus my attention on the acts that I was really and truly psyched in advance to see. You just can't fake that shit in 90+ degree heat. We arrived on Saturday to the stompy, circusy sounds of Man Man. I had hoped to catch some of their set based on Pitchfork's insanely glowing concert review from last week, but from many accounts, their live show is better served by a more intimate club setting than an outdoor fest anyway. Band of Horses was up next, and after three different people have made a specific point to tell me that I'd really dig them, I had no choice but to catch up with the end portion of their set, after bearings (and snackables and beer) were gotten. Bed Bridwell's vocals made more sense to me live than they ever have on the few MP3s (incl. "The Funeral") I've downloaded, and the band's stonerish good nature was just as appealing as their meaty guitar sound. I'm looking forward to checking out the album. I've been surprised by the handful of negative remarks about the Mountain Goats' set that I've read on the interweb, as I've recently landed like an anorexic Ukrainian gymnast firmly and triumphantly on the John-Darnielle-can-do-no-wrong side of the mat. I can understand how some might have thought his banter went on a little long for an outdoor show, but dude is so witty, what with his self-flagellation about the stupidity of writing up a set list that included a brand new song in the second slot and rants about enduring a '70s Californian upbringing that brought endless rounds of singalongs with fuckin' guys in the fuckin' park with fuckin' acoustic guitars and his jokey fake-out that we were all going to join together to sing "Imagine" (we sang "No Children" and "Terror Song" instead), I don't know how anyone could not have been won over, even if his music wasn't someone's usual cup of tea. Destroyer was the band I was most excited to see on day one. (Also, Dan Bejar is the indie rock musician I would most like to hug. I'm pretty sure this is not the normal reaction elicited by such an intensely cerebral songwriter, but, gah, brutha just seems to me like he could use a friendly squeeze around the ol' midsection.) A propos of Zoilus's quoted observation that Bejar is the "hardest working music critic today," even the bloody stage banter during his set was meta. I was warning my companions not to expect pretty much any talking at all, based on his comment in this June interview in Pitchfork that "I don't banter with the audience, cause I don't have anything to say to them," but when he eventually approached the microphone, with air-quotes nearly visible around his head, and asked "is this thing on?" I felt like I was watching some Andy Kaufman-level performance art. He later went on to introduce a new song by proclaiming, then trailing off, "this song is about...ahhhh...", summarized another with "one quarter of that song was a protest song" (one of his band members--I couldn't see which--waited a beat before sallying, "protesting what? The other three-quarters of the song?"), and he bid farewell to the crowd before finishing up with "Looters' Follies" by mock-apologizing, "I know we've taken up a shitload of time with witty stage banter." But because he wasn't sneering behind any of those bons mots, the intellectual pleasures yielded by this acknowledgment that he was self-consciously Performing the Act of Playing an Outdoor Summer Concert merged with and buoyed the sumptuousness of his melodies and arrangements. (Though, I do have to wonder how it feels to be a grown man in his band belting out an alternating series of "la-di-das" and falsetto "wah-wah-wahs." That shit is funny, and intentionally so.) They went heavy on material from Destroyer's Rubies, which suited me just fine, but the few he played from earlier albums (the set list on Fluxblog cites "Crystal Country," "Modern Painters," and "It's Gonna Take an Airplane") only served to confirm that I need to start delving into his back catalog. Because Ted Leo is so consistently solid, and because I'd already seen him play live twice before, I made the foolish, foolish mistake of stepping away from the stage about halfway through his set. Yes, which means I heard "Biomusicology" from inside a porta-potty and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" with a palmful of the interesting paste created when baseball diamond dust and hand sanitizer meet. Damn, damn, damn. There has been so much hating on the Walkmen recently that seems so excessive and so, well, wrong, that I thought surely their tight set here would serve to bring some back into the fold. Nope. I honestly don't get it. They seem a little less manic than they used to, but isn't that a good thing? A sign of becoming more assured, more mature musicians? Which is not to say that their songs lacked immediacy or energy or whatever. Matt Barrick was missing in action due to the impending arrival of his firstborn child (congrats!), but the secret of their success certainly can't be tied that directly to his propulsive drumming. I was nothing but impressed with what I heard on Saturday. Paul Maroon's confident guitar work especially stood out for me. I'm a newcomer to the Silver Jews' output and only know Tanglewood Numbers, but I was certainly excited to see the notoriously reclusive David Berman live. He was marvelously smart and droll, bidding us to mind our manners as the crowd started getting squirrely during emcee Tim Tuten's overly long intro, and confessing that he doesn't really like Brian Wilson at all. But, he also ended up, probably unintentionally, depressing the hell out of us with some of the song selections (closing with "There Is a Place"? Yowch), with his story about playing a gig in Tel Aviv a few days before things got really scary there, and, well, just with the weight of what it means for him to be here playing for us at all. I was especially taken with Cassie's presence on stage there with him. She was an amazing sight to behold with her short dress, wild hair, and enormous bass guitar, and her musicianship certainly was not to be denied, but I can't imagine the emotional gymnastics she must have to go through to be able to make it through all those songs, standing right there next to him every night. A formidable woman, indeed. The rest of the band was ace; I couldn't help commenting later in the car on the way home that it's so great to see slightly older musicians playing so well, with such ease in their stage presence. I had every intention of making it back down to the park to see, if not Tapes 'n Tapes, then at least Danielson to kick off day two, but I was so unexpectedly wrecked the next morning that it was all I could do to arrive about halfway through Jens Lekman's set. We heard him playing "Black Cab" as we walked over from the El, which felt like such a good omen for the rest of the day. The crowd was loving him (and, assuredly, his foxy all-girl horn section) and you could hear him sending the love right back out with his strong, smooth vocals. I'll be interested to see what he ends up doing with his next full-length. The National. Holy fuck. That is what I came to this festival for. Without a doubt my favorite act of the whole weekend. I was distraught over missing them at the Double Door earlier this year but consoled myself with knowing I'd see them this weekend. But, as my summertime music selections have taken a turn for the breezy and sun-soaked, I'd forgotten how much the brooding, wintry songs from Alligator mean to me until I started hearing them pour out of the speakers: "Abel," "Lit Up," "Looking for Astronauts," "Mr. November," and, holy Christ, "All the Wine." This was the only band that brought me near to tears all weekend. And not just misty eyelash blinky tears either; I had to choke back a few full-throated sobs heating up the inside of my face. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Matt Berninger looks variously like a Southern Californian movie star, an Austrian Olympic athlete, and a French thug, and sings like he's dealing with some genuine mental illness (in, y'know, the best and sexiest way possible). I saw him later walking around the Flatstock tent but was way, way, way too nervous to even risk talking to him. I cannot overstate how much I loved their set and can't wait to see them live again. I don't know how I scraped myself together afterward, but LK and I headed over to the Biz 3 tent, with a few hundred of our closest friends, to catch the waning minutes of CSS's set. It's worth exploring the cansei de ser sexy tag at Flickr or heading over to Gorilla vs. Bear to see some pictures because they were every bit as wild and fun as they're supposed to be. We were standing outside the tent, behind the stage, on the righthand side, so our view wasn't the greatest (and, personally, I had to rely on LK to narrate most of what was happening for me anyway, as I really couldn't see much over the heads of the assembled crowd), but we could definitely feel the love. It was also nice to hear the songs fleshed out with the full band and a little less in-your-face with the slickly produced bleepy-bloopiness. My curiosity about Devendra Banhart has only increased since last fall, especially after downloading "Hey Mama Wolf" and "Quedate Luna" from Cripple Crow. I can hardly believe it myself, but I think after taking in his set this weekend, I've pretty much been won over. He does what he does with such sincerity, and he and his band carry it off with some impressive musicianship that I wouldn't have expected from my impression of the lo-fi, we're-recording-inside-a-rusted-meat-locker wankiness of his earlier albums. As is his custom of late, he brought a kid up on stage to play a song near the end of the set, and I was just so touched by the selflessness of it all. He (Devendra) described being able to do that as an honor and one of the best things that comes out of his life as a touring musician, and I didn't doubt it for a moment. There was such an incredible beauty in the way he embraced the kid after he was done playing and held on to him like they were brothers reuniting after a long separation. Save yr e-mails, I know, I know: I'm such a hippie. I listened to Yo La Tengo from across the lawn, as I wanted to stay put to be sure to get a good spot along the barricade for Spoon. From what little I know of YLT's stuff, they sounded pretty solid. Spoon's roadies started trickling out onto the stage while YLT was wailing away, tuning and plugging stuff in, and eventually were joined by Jim Eno and the boys and later Britt himself. We cheered when Britt walked out, and he held a finger to his lips, politely shushing us so we wouldn't disturb the other show in progress. He assessed the crowd with a pleased look on his face, and I'm about 85% sure that he smiled at me. I was standing against the railing, facing the stage and beaming, not like a freak, but just like a perfectly content person who was looking forward to seeing one of her favorite bands for the first time. I'd like to think that that was his small way of greeting and acknowledging my happiness. There was, perhaps predictably, a lot of material from Gimme Fiction, which, hey, I'm not going to complain about, and they also got some great stuff from Kill the Moonlight in there, including "Someone Something," "Stay Don't Go" (no beatboxing, unforch), and--wowza!--"Paper Tiger." (I love it when musicians subtly make fun of their own songs by slipping funny different lyrics in there, and Britt got away with a good one here by singing "I will no longer do the devil's dishes.") They closed with "My Mathematical Mind," and Britt absolutely played the fucking shit out of his guitar. Down on the knees, feedback shrieking into the night air, the whole bit. It was a rousing end to a set that, while solid and satisfying, didn't exactly reach transcendent heights for me. And, music aside, I salute Britt's decision to go with green pants. Come on, guys: green pants!! I don't know why I was so taken with them, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "holy shit, he's wearing green pants." And, even better, he managed to pull them off without seeming self-consciously hip or even, horror of horrors, overtly metrosexual. I mean, I suppose this shouldn't be surprising coming from a guy who wrote a song called "The Fitted Shirt," but I gotta give credit where credit is due. Green pants, man. Green pants. I didn't have the energy left in me to push toward the front of the crowd to get a good position (or, ahem, good pictures) for Os Mutantes, so I took advantage of the pleasures that can be had from standing in the middle of a field, listening to some supremely groovy music, not elbow-to-elbow (or, in my case, elbow-to-hipbone) with a bunch of other sweaty, exhausted concertgoers: exchanged my last beer ticket for a heavenly cup of 312, chatted with my pals, danced all my kinks out, and watched people unself-consciously dancing their own kinks out as well. The bears, the seemingly out of place shirtless frat boys, the lovey-dovey couple out with their awkward single friend, the college-age kid who looked like he's probably a computer science major doing a modified poopy-pants dance--it was a joy to see them all feeling the music and having fun. The band was bright, happy, and overflowing with goodwill. They sent us out into the night in style. Big love to LK for tolerating and even indulging my fanaticism, KP for the ride, and DS, JZ, and Nora Rocket for the laughs and the good company.

Kottke, Gondry, Grizzly, Comedy

Jason Kottke helps spread the word that the trailer for the new Michel Gondry film The Science of Sleep is bopping around online now. Too much hype, too much anticipation, and too much familiarity with a director's previous work can be a dangerous thing (and I am nothing if not if not overly familiar with Eternal Sunshine), but damn if I'm not already guessing that it's going to end up on my top ten movie list at the end of the year. According to the IMDB, we're looking at a late September release date. Get excited. Via Stereogum, check out La Blogotheque's videos of the Grizzly Bear boys singing two of their songs in Paris on the street and in the bathroom. The band is new to me, but I really like the sound of what they've got going on here. Bonus points for their apparently close musical friendship with Owen Pallett, who remixed their song "Don't Ask" for last year's rerelease of debut full-length Horn of Plenty and arranged some strings for their upcoming album Yellow House. Pitchfork gives an almost-perfect 4.5 star score to The Divine Comedy's "A Lady of a Certain Age" (off recently released ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse) in one of the worst descriptive write-ups of a song I've ever read on the site. The Scott Walker comparisions are apt (even though, ahem, "Mathilde" is technically a Jacques Brel composition), but the writer ends up with a mouthful of mush as he (perhaps?) tries to reflect the richness of Hannon's best work by turning his prose-hose on full gush and then manages to flatten the poignancy of the thrice repeated "no, you couldn't be" line by overexplaining it. I know I probably sound like a jet black pot criticizing the Fork's kettle over here, as my own piled on superlatives have occasionally been known to crumble under the weight of their own floridity when I get excited about something, but I just want the music bloggers to do right by Neil, especially now that he seems to be getting more attention than ever on this side of the pond. Whatevs. At least it was the last track they reviewed at the end of the day on Friday, so Neil's pensive, black and white visage has been left up on the front page of the site all weekend (right underneath Sufjan!), which hopefully has led the indie kids over to The Hype Machine or elbo.ws looking for some downloady goodness. I hope they like what they find. Apropos of the new DC album, I finally had a chance to listen to it in its entirety a few times over the course of this past week, and I'm absolutely tickled with it so far. It feels the closest of any of his recent work to merging the epic sweep of the big orchestra albums like Fin de Siecle and A Short Album About Love with the fanciful eccentricity of early classics Liberation and Promenade. "The Light of Day" is a sappy, adult-contemporary snoozer and album-closer "Snowball in Negative" succumbs to the dreaded musician-singing-about-the-process-of- recording-the-song-you're-listening-to faux pas with the line "smoking my six-hundredth last cigarette out of the studio skylight," but those are relatively minor quibbles. Neil's growing into the lusciousness of his voice with sure, steady grace, the wit is as sharp and subtle as ever (the "oh, did I tell you I love you?" in "To Die a Virgin" never fails to kill me), and he's grown bolder with the funkiness of his grooves (again, "To Die a Virgin" stands out with that leisure-suit lecherous bass, and the oh-oh-oh bongo/bell interludes in "Diva Lady" just make me grin). Old fans will also love the reemergence of familiar DC tropes like the horse's gallop rhythm in his cover of the Associates' "Party Fears Two" (on the special edition DVD that came with the version of the album I purchased, Neil sheepishly suggests that that rhythmic pattern should be carved on his gravestone) and the overlapping voices playing cat and mouse as they narrate and sing the same lines in personal favorite "Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont." I love that Neil still has the ability to make records under the Divine Comedy moniker and that they're still artistically sophisticated endeavors. I could get quite sappy now about how much this band and its body of work means to me, but if that's not already abundantly clear, anything else I might attempt to say at this point would probably sound disingenous.

You Left Me Behind to Remind Me of You

Michelle Collins has been on fizz-ire this week. LK and I accidentally caught a portion of Deal or No Deal the other night, and, as we'd never seen it before, we were alternately stunned and baffled by its insipidity. The You Can't Make It Up episode summary posted the next day, complete with Celine Dion screen-captures, was like so much manna from the comedy heavens, reconfirming my perception of the show as being a vile waste of time and money. But, for all that post's hilarity, her riff on Cute Overload's alpaca footballing star was just crazy-brilliant. Didn't know it was possible to improve on something that was already wiping-away-tears funny. The Guillemots cover the Streets' "Never Went to Church." I've been digging on the Guillemots for a little while, and I'm big-time into The Streets right now, so what could go wrong, right? But, arrrrrrg, I just can't go 100 percent of the way with this cover. As far as the music itself goes, the Guillemots' take is more interesting than it could have been, but I have a real problem with the fade-out repetition of that line at the end. Mike Skinner's slightly treacly version is definitely not one of the sonic stand-outs on his latest album, but it's nevertheless become one of my favorites simply because of that line. The reason it works so well is that it's kind of tossed off in the middle of the song. It totally caught me off guard the first time I heard it, and my heart would have 'sploded right out of my chest from the truth and brilliance of it, that is, if my heart hadn't stopped beating entirely for a few moments. But, Skinner doesn't give you any time to dwell on it. The song just matter of factly chugs along back into the sub-Kanye's "Roses" chorus (which Pitchfork brilliantly referred to at the end of last year as his "please-don't-die-grandma" song), and then on through to the end. And, well, isn't that what it's like to have an epiphany about some irreducible aspect of the human condition? Those realizations come out of nowhere, hit you hard, then drift on by, their force a mere echo, leaving it incumbent upon you to hold the memory of them and adjust your perspective accordingly or just let them disappear into the rushing, receding current of your life. I mean, this is really emotionally sophisticated stuff. But Fyfe Dangerfield totally dilutes it both through repetition and by saving it until the end of the song, like it's some kind of summary or punchline or something. No one's ever had an epiphany gift-wrapped for them at an opportune moment and then gently repeated until they catch it and really have time to process it. Here, it just plays like the most banal pop music or processed romantic comedy cheese. Unforch.

I've Got Music to Keep Me Warm

Hilarious: "Now That's What I Call Blogging!" (via Stereogum). Downloadable Christmas mixes at The Test Pilot (also via Stereogum) as well as Gorilla vs. Bear and Good Weather for Air Strikes (the latter two via the Test Pilot post). If you're looking to snag the lot, be forewarned that they do overlap on a number of tunes. Matthew Perpetua outdoes himself on Fluxblog today, writing about the GENIUS that is Mike Jones. (Mike Jones's "Tippin' Toxic" will appear on my year-end best-of mix and I can thank Fluxblog for introducing me to it.) Giddy sent me a link to this Pandora web site yesterday, and though I haven't had a chance to play with it as extensively as I'd like, it looks like it might be useful for learning about new music in the future. Dig the weird, overly specific yet somehow still vague descriptions of the musical style you choose to explore.

Aaaand SCENE

Hello, my darlings.

You've noticed; I've noticed; we've all noticed. My heart's just not in this anymore.

I'm enormously proud of the writing I've done here and feel nothing but gratitude for the opportunities and connections this blog has afforded me over the past six years. But the energy has been on the wane for a while now, and I think it's best to take a final bow and draw the curtain on Wrestling Entropy at this point, formally, rather than just letting it linger untended into an indefinite future. There are few things worse than lack of closure.

While I take some time away to rest and rejuvenate my writing muscles and attend to other projects, the archives will stay up until our robot overlords cut Blogger off at the knees, and if and when I have something exciting to share, I may throw a new posting up here, just in case you keep this RSS feed active in your various online readers. Until such point as I do, though, you're welcome to visit me in my slightly less serious guises on Tumblr and Twitter; I also expect to keep posting on a highly erratic schedule over at my Divine Comedy oeuvreblog, Songs of Love, as I poke my way through Neil Hannon's gorgeous back catalog, and my Flickr photostream usually stays pretty fresh, too. IRL Allison can be found, among other times and places, on the third Thursday of every month at Lizard's Liquid Lounge with my band, Tiny Magnets. (For future reference, most of these same links are available in one bundle over at Flavors.me for one-stop shopping.)

Exuberant and heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been part of the extended family of commenters and lurkers here at Wrestling Entropy. Special thanks goes to giant-among-bloggers Matthew Perpetua for linking me in his esteemed FluxBlogroll; his seal of approval brought me much more attention among a much larger readership than I would have been capable of generating on my own.

Take care of yourselves, and each other, kittens. I'll be around.

King Sparrow, Live at the Empty Bottle

Whoa, somebody let the big dogs out of the gate. Wow. I hadn't seen King Sparrow live for longer than I'd realized, and watching them grow as a band in real time has been thrilling. Where, as a young band, their show started out tight and precise then relaxed into a sense of casual mastery, now they've turned yet another corner into an explosive, physical ferocity. I don't know if it's just that they've been cooped up in the studio for the past little while and were ready to reconnect with the energy of a club crowd again or what, but last night at the Empty Bottle they seemed hungrier, and thus more energetic, than I've maybe ever seen them. Old faves from the Derailer EP were present and accounted for ("Forest" just keeps opening up with secret byways and melodic turns every time I hear it), but goosed by the addition of the new tunes they've been working up for their debut long-player, even these familiar songs seemed to vibrate with new intensity.

Eric is steadily pushing his own boundaries as a vocalist, much to the songs' benefit. A few perfectly calibrated, well-placed howls here and there provided a nice little pinch of danger to offset their immaculate chops as musicians. He and Sean (the band's secret weapon) also seemed to be interacting more on stage than I've ever seen them. Watching the way musicians watch each other while they're playing is always one of my favorite things about seeing a band in concert. Then, of course, John's drumming always seems somewhere on the verge of full-scale detonation, in the best way possible. Even though he's one of my favorite local drummers, I always forget how ferocious he can be, the way I forget what the exciting warm springtime feels like after a winter full of ice and snow.

I know I'm not going to convince anyone that already hasn't been convinced at this point that they need to pay attention to these guys. It just makes me stupidly happy to live in a city where I can take the bus a few miles south on a random Thursday night and hear some soul-explodingly good music for less than I would pay for a sushi dinner. Go find 'em on MySpace or Twitter or Facebook (or in my frustratingly blurry pics), and revel in the joy of good, local, live music.

W. E. Street Team Update

Kittens! Spring is springing here in Chicago and there's so much fun to be had in the next few weeks. Get out yr calendars:

King Sparrow will be playing this Thursday, April 1, at the Empty Bottle. Eric tells me there will be new songs + old faves, so basically, what more could you ask for? I'm forgoing the Spoon show at the Aragon that night to support my hometown boys, so you know that means it's gonna be epic. (No pressure, guys.) Also, if you haven't watched the video tour of the studio where they've been recording their new album yet, check it out here and get ready for LOLs.

JT and the Clouds will be celebrating the release of their new album Caledonia on Friday, April 16, also at the Bottle. I'm so excited for this I could just burst. I've basically been looking forward to this show since early December. They've been touring the East Coast and Canada the past few weeks and will soon be heading out for a lengthy jaunt through Europe, so it'll be nice to remind them how much they're loved here at home while we have the chance.

Tiny Magnets will be back at Lizard's Liquid Lounge later this month, on Thursday, April 22. Seriously, if you haven't been out to the bar yet, you must. It's the perfect combination of cozy and cool. In other Tiny Magnets news, we've been busily recording and have some nicer sounding tracks up on our MySpace page. We also have a new presence on Facebook; we'd invite you to become a fan of ours there if you're so inclined!

Fat February

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, kittens: this is the best time of year. Oh sure, the weather is bullshit and the winter weight gain is in full effect, but: the early darkness! the implicit permission to avoid social engagements in favor of reading books on your couch and going out to movies alone! It's easy to bitch about the craptacular nature of February--and I do, often--but really, I'm having a blast. A quiet, sleepy, fat blast.

FILM

Again, it'd be all too easy to complain about how many shitty movies I've seen recently (my brain tends to hold on to the details and negative emotions elicited by the bad ones in far greater proportion than the good ones, skewing my internal control group), but, as I've often said, the simple act of watching a movie is just inherently pleasurable to me, so even a bad movie is preferable to no movie at all. A quick rundown of what I've caught recently.

Pineapple Express. It's obviously Franco's movie, of course, but when David Gordon Green recontextualizes the whole thing as a metaphor for Vietnam, I was like, ohhhh, well played, sir, well played. Kevin Corrigan was also extremely well used here.

In the Valley of Elah. Given Paul Haggis's involvement, I was a little dubious about the film, but it's way more artfully done than I thought it would be. We recently published a nonfiction book, Murder in Baker Company, about the true story that inspired the movie, and I had the opportunity to talk to Lanny Davis, the inspiration for the Tommy Lee Jones character, on the phone last year not long before he died. Unfailingly polite and eager to see us do his son's story justice, he called me ma'am once or twice during our short conversation. There's a scene in the movie when Jones's character does the same for a waitress in a bar, and I nearly crumpled. This isn't a feel-good movie by any stretch, but I'm surprised by how heartily I'd recommend it.

The Dreamers. Wait, wha--? I thought this movie was supposed to be sexy. Gawd, it was just pretentious and confusing and the worst example of a self-conscious, self-serious art film. Clearly a metaphor for American/European politics in the late '60s moreso than any kind of interesting or coherent story, this totally failed for me both as erotica and as the proverbial love letter to cinema.

The White Ribbon. Haneke, that magnificent bastard, nails it yet again. Tonally, it reminded me, in a weird way, of Cronenberg's Spider, in the way that Haneke, as a director, knows by now what his audiences are expecting out of a Haneke movie, so he deliberately rides that tension for all it's worth, until the audience is squirming for release, forcing us to acknowledge that seeing something really fucked up happen onscreen would actually make us more comfortable than being patient with all the ambiguity. Sure, there are some zingers that get revealed, but mostly what has stuck with me is the velvety black and white cinematography, the scene where the farmer sits with his wife's recently bathed corpse just out of frame for that nice long take, and the way that the voice-over provides a meta-commentary on the act of discussing the narrative slipperiness of a Haneke plotline when it describes the way the townsfolk attempted to impose some kind of logic on the disappearance of two of the main characters.

The Young Victoria. Total candy. Excellent scenery chewing from Mark Strong as Sir John Conroy (he's also the baddie in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes). I always forget, too, how much I like Paul Bettany.

Crazy Heart. There is no way that Jeff Bridges, talented and likable as he demonstrably is, gives anything other than a competent performance here. Also, I'm so mad at Maggie Gyllenhaal for perpetuating the older man/younger woman thing here, especially given that her performance is also fairly by-the-numbers. You know the movie is really all over the place when Colin Farrell gives the most interesting and memorable performance. (Jesus fuck, can we talk about that hair?)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In many ways, I sincerely hope somebody takes this movie to their bosom and reclaims its bat-shit-craziness, turning it into a so-bad-it's-good cult classic because there's something weirdly appealing about it. Tom Tykwer's direction maybe? Maybe something in the source material? Anyway, I basically rented it because of Ben Whishaw, and, while he's clearly throwing everything he's got as an actor at the wall, it was the wrong kind of effort and didn't really do anything to help the film. An exceedingly miscast Dustin Hoffman mercifully dies early on, and Alan Rickman does his Alan Rickman thing somewhere in the back half of the movie (not complaining about this in the least).

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. OK, unlike Perfume, this movie isn't even charmingly bad enough to be campy. Actually, I think it would love to consider itself campy, but it fails painfully, on just about every level. I really always try to find something redeeming about a movie, but this one made me so actively angry with its crappiness, I really can't think of a damn thing. (The scene when they go to the dominatrix's apartment, maybe? Robert Downey Jr.'s shoulders?) It's just a complete train wreck from the first frame--which explains, via painfully literal intertitle, what it means when it calls itself "an imaginary portrait"--to the last.

Fish Tank. Bleak as all hell, but really, really great. The creepy interplay of absent-daddy issues and a young girl's burgeoning sexuality is handled really nicely, helped of course by Michael Fassbender's exceedingly charming and manipulative (in a good way) performance.

The Piano Teacher. Obviously, The White Ribbon got me on a Haneke kick. This is basically a perfect encapsulation of everything I want out of a film: French and German subtitles, gorgeous music, a steely, inscrutable female protagonist, and horribly twisted sex. The Walter Klemmer character is a bit too unrealistically convenient/contrived to be believable, but I didn't mind too much because of where he allows the story to go and for what he allows Isabelle Huppert to reveal about her own character. Uncomfortable and mesmerizing.

MUSIC

I've basically had Spoon's Transference on constant repeat since its release in January. "The Mystery Zone" is instantly one of Britt Daniel's best-ever songs, but I find new things to love on the album every time I listen to it. This week I've got major love for "Trouble Comes Running."

When I feel the need to give Transference a break for a while, I've been having my mind unexpectedly blown by Chris Whitley's Dirt Floor. I'd never even heard of this dude before one of my Tiny Magnets bandmates mentioned that I'd probably like his stuff, and now I'm obsessed. Though a lot of his other songs get loud and rocked-out, Dirt Floor is firmly in the realm of one-man-with-an-acoustic-guitar gorgeousness, reminiscent of Pink Moon on one end of the spectrum and For Emma, Forever Ago on the other, though he's way more blues-influenced than either of those guys. Highly, highly recommended.

I anticipate that Jason Falkner's I'm OK, You're OK--now finally released in the US after several years of only being available as an import from Japan--will probably be giving both those albums a run for their money in coming weeks, though. It's vintage Falknery goodness--his voice is as strong as ever, and the hooks will insinuate themselves into your very soul. "Anondah" is utterly gorgeous, and "This Time" is basically a perfect album opener.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Tiny Magnets (oh, hey, look: a MySpace page!) have a show coming up this Friday, 2-26, at the Horseshoe on Lincoln. (Guys, this is not to be confused with the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted.) We're set to go on around 9:30. Bring yr friends!

Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Tiny Magnets will go on around 9:20. See you there, Chicago!

Tiny Magnets

Tiny Magnets
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Friends: it's my rock 'n' roll debut tonight. Come check us out! Featuring me on vocals, Brian Cremins (singer/songwriter/guitar player extraordinaire and impresario of Short Punks in Love), Kevin Henretta (of Plastics Hi-Fi and Ten Hundred on lead guitar filtered through enough pedals to rock your face directly off), and Michael Main (of St. Aviator on drums and bass).

Inglourious Basterds and the Year in Film

It probably goes without saying that Inglourious Basterds was one of my favorite movies this year. I'm not sure that it beats out Kill Bill for my fave Tarantino of the '00s (I was just bowled over by what he accomplished with that film, esp. after revisiting it this summer), but it was unquestionably a highlight in the rather dull year that '09 was, for me, for movies.

It should also go without saying that this isn't QT's WWII movie--it's his WWII-movie movie. Huge difference. For all the intertextual trainspotting that the most obnoxious filmies were falling all over themselves to point out (Aldo Raine is a wink to Aldo Ray! etc.), I don't think this point was given enough attention. Dono very rightly and thoughtfully pointed out over on his blog that, among other things, reimagining Hitler's demise doesn't actually change the historical record, doesn't actually change the fact that all those people died in concentration camps, doesn't actually erase any of the atrocities that occurred and linger in our memories. Of course it doesn't. But after decades' worth of WWII movies that have more subtly attempted to redraw the shape of history in ways that are often way more odious in their piousness and self-righteousness (as Eddie Argos put it, Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now), QT's genius here is to be as fucking in-your-face about his historical revisionism as possible. If we're going to necessarily fictionalize WWII by making a movie about it, why not, at this point, just use every ounce of juice available in the medium and get our rocks off? As Mike Barthel put it, "No one, at this point, needs to be educated about the Nazis or the Holocaust; anyone who wouldn’t have sympathy for the Jews or antipathy for National Socialism is pretty much a lost cause, and it’s hard to imagine any piece of torture-porn or rigorous factual evidence convincing someone who’s not already in that camp. So why not, you know, have some fun with it?" To reiterate: this isn't a movie about WWII--it's a movie about WWII movies. Nobody is desecrating anything here, at least nothing that doesn't deserve to be desecrated a little bit. Don't all the Saving Private Ryans and Life Is Beautifuls need to have the piss taken out of them a little bit with pure punk rock cinema?

Because, as Sean T. Collins so brilliantly pointed out, that's exactly what this is: punk rock cinema. It's snotty and sneering and unapologetically going to leave anyone in the dust who doesn't get the joke. How the fuck else did you think QT would deal with the subject matter? As Archie Hicox, the English film critic-turned-solider-turned-spy, says right before the massacre in the basement tavern, "I hope you don't mind if I go down speaking the King's." In other words: when shit looks grim, you use the language available to you, and then you enjoy your Scotch.

And the language available to QT is movies, the intoxicatingly beautiful and ridiculous grammar of which underpins stuff like the Hugo Stiglitz intertitle and its accompanying power metal guitar riff before Aldo Raine busts into prison to tell him "we're big fans of your work"; Shosanna's face, enjoying the literal last laugh, projected onto the smoke rising from the movie theater-turned-gas-chamber that has been set ablaze using actual film stock; Frederick Zoller turning from a soldier into an actor; Goering fancying himself the Third Reich's David O. Selznick; Bridget von Hammersmark conflating spying with acting; Donny Donowitz and Private Ulmer's breathless action-movie-cliche exchange before busting into Hitler's opera box ("After I kill that guy, you have 30 feet to get to that guy. Can you do it?" "I have to!"); and, of course, the final, cheekily self-referential shot of Aldo Raine drawling "I think this just may be my masterpiece." Even the WWII-movie convention of everyone going around speaking accented English gets a nod during the impeccable opening sequence when Hans Landa shifts from French to English and back again.

Which reminds me--holy shit, this movie was subtitled in at least three different languages and one of the major plot points turns on being able to discern inconsistencies in another character's accent and use of idiomatic gestures. This, rather than the male-dominated cast of soldiers and its attendant tough-guy posturing, is the true hearkening back to the era of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: language, my people, language. All the sitting around and talking to kill time, all the ways that secrets are traded as precious commodities. Language divides just as sure as it brings pleasure; it's a weapon every bit as dangerous, in its own way, as Aldo Raine's knife. Nicknames and rumor (the trash genres of verbal communication, as it were) serve, elegantly, a kind of double function here, as destabilizing tactics among the governments and their martial emissaries (eg, Hitler's futile insistence that no one ever refer to Donowitz as "the Bear Jew" again) and as sly commentary on the world of film fandom (eg, the repeated question "have you heard of me?", Landa's pointed insult to Utivich about his height).

All of which, of course, would be bullshit if the movie wasn't so much fun and also so lovely. Much has been made of the final showdown at the premier of Nation's Pride, and for good reason. It has to be one of the most taut, thrilling sequences since...well, maybe since the House of Blue Leaves vignette in Kill Bill. The use of Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was a brilliant, achronological touch that just catapults you into the excitement and anticipation of the moment. Sublime.

There's much, much more to be said about the film, and I'll probably get around to saying more eventually. I just felt like I needed to get some of my most salient impressions up here (four months after the fact, ahem; thanks for your patience, friends) before the end of the year. Viva QT!

*

The few things I've seen since our last movie update right after Thanksgiving have been mostly lackluster. I fell asleep during the final climactic battle sequence of Avatar, and A Single Man is as dumb, shallow, and pretty a film as you'd expect a douchebag like Tom Ford to make. Up in the Air didn't do much for me other than prove, more than ten years after the release of Out of Sight, that America clings tightly to its favorite enduring fantasy of having nearly anonymous sex with George Clooney after getting picked up by him in a hotel bar. (JR Jones made me cackle when he referred to Clooney in his review in the Reader as "the most adored man in America after Barack Obama.") Also, Vera Farmiga is super pretty (though I still always momentarily think she's Claire Forlani). Sherlock Holmes is fluffy and fun, almost distractingly so--Robert Downey Jr., talented as he demonstrably is, pretty much doesn't even act anymore as much as he personifies a series of exclamation points bouncing around at 24 frames a second. In the plus column, I liked Broken Embraces quite a bit more than any Almodovar film in the past few years, especially when you realize it's not actually about the Penelope Cruz-centered love story, but actually about the improvised family structure created by and around Judit and her son. And though I missed it during the approximately five minutes it was out in theaters this summer, I finally just caught Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience on DVD and really loved it. I love that he's one of the few filmmakers willing to engage in any sort of conversation (reductionist as it necessarily must be) about the ways that people make and use money. The personal trainer character made me want to gag on my own tongue a couple times for the ways that he reminded me exactly of the trainer I was working with for six weeks this fall.

Otherwise...yeah. It's been a pretty boring year for movies. Whither the explosion of creativity and innovation we saw ten years ago in '99? Was it just a fin de siecle thing? Not much has really stuck with me this year. It's all the single word movies: Up, Moon, Taken, Humpday, Adventureland. More importantly, there was also Bright Star, Bad Lieutenant, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, as elaborated upon above, Inglourious Basterds. And, in their own weird ways, also The Soloist and Two Lovers. That's not even a movie per month! Hopefully you've had a luckier year than me, my darlings. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the new year and the new decade, shall we?

Bonus track: in chronological order, here are my top 20 favorite films of the '00s.

Almost Famous--2000 (I'm pretty sure I saw this movie the same day I had Ethiopean food for the first time--CTLA, be a good Boswell and correct my memory if I'm wrong about this)
The Anniversary Party--2001 (this is really of a piece with Rachel Getting Married, as far as their being real-time depictions of talented friends gifting each other with the extravagance of their talent; I have a real soft spot for that sort of thing)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch--2001
Moulin Rouge!--2001
The Royal Tenenbaums--2001 (although I seriously did debate citing The Life Aquatic; I've really come around on that film since I originally saw it in the theater, now that I think I better understand what it's doing)
Insomnia--2002 (Christopher Nolan's most underrated film)
The Pianist--2002 (Polanski, you fucker, I wish I knew how to quit you)
Signs--2002 (shut up, I don't even care--this is my favorite film about the experience of the day of 9/11)
All the Real Girls--2003
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead--2003 (it's Clive Owen in a neo-noir; why didn't more people see this?)
Lost in Translation--2003
Kill Bill, Vol. 1--2003--and Vol. 2--2004 (it's really unfair to think of them as separate movies)
Before Sunset--2004
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--2004
Cache--2005 (along with seeing Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, this is one of my favorite filmgoing experiences ever)
A History of Violence--2005
There Will Be Blood--2007
Man on Wire--2008
Rachel Getting Married--2008
Bright Star--2009

Best Music of 2009

Previously: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

*

Though I'm going to go on and on in the following paragraphs about the minutiae of what I loved most in these individual songs and how they colored specific moments in my life this year, I'm struck oddly mute now that it's time to make a statement about the whole enchilada. At the root of it all, to be honest, after the overwhelming angst of '08, I basically just wanted to make you guys a kickass mix this time around. What else could I possibly say to top the simple truth of that aspiration?

Well, of course, in my attempt to eschew narrative as I was assembling this comp, I've only ended up more emphatically tracing the outline of the journey I've been on in the past 12 months: sugar-rush highs crash down into contemplative lows, everything swirling together into a general impression of '09 that I hope holds up beat by beat but will also end up being greater than the sum of its parts.

But, now that I've been doing this for a while, I feel like I"m finally getting the hang of how to make it work most effectively. Am I talking about the mix or the year? Take your pick. The whole point of these things has always been to blur that line a little bit, hopefully for the benefit of us both. Truthfully, there's almost nothing I look forward to more than the chance to design this little musical and emotional excursion for you at the end of each year.

But, enough with the boo-hooing! Screw the self-conscious navel gazing! Let's party like it's 1999, a decade after the fact.

*

1. Quiet Dog--Mos Def
Mighty Mos returns! This simple, stunning track reminds us, in the era of auto-tune and overcooked soul samples, of hip-hop's barest essentials: voice and beat. It, of course, helps that both of the elements here are killer: handclaps that crunch like celery, drums that rumble like they're perched on a polar ice cap so that they can use the length of the planet to resonate, and Mos's endlessly appealing mischievous playfulness. Dude whispers his way out of this track--what a testament to his bottomless well of charisma!

2. Dull to Pause--Junior Boys
Any album that sets itself up to be an exploration of the place where the act of cinematic creation and the act of seduction share language and become momentarily synonymous was bound to interest me at least in passing, but I never expected to fall quite as hard as I did for Begone Dull Care. It's immaculately wrought from front to back, its cool cynicism coming on like our era's answer to Steely Dan in their heyday. The amoral licentiousness of Jeremy Greenspan's whispery croon is mottled with just enough pillowy charm that it fools me into believing that the creepy, Hitchcockian possessiveness of the lyric "I don't want to share you / so don't say good night" is actually kinda sexy.

3. Which Song--Max Tundra
I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release at the end of '08, which was probably for the best since it afforded me plenty of time in the usually musically barren beginning of the year to really drown myself in its pleasures. Even though it's arguably of a piece with the rest of the spazzypants stuff I got heavily addicted to this spring (which you'll read more about soon in re: Micachu), I hesitate to diminish the brilliance of what Max Tundra's done here by reducing its appeal to "hey, that shit's crazy!" I mean, it is crazy, but it's also funny and cutting and thoughtful and positively overflowing with hooks and deeply satisfying melodic invention. The always casually brilliant Mike Barthel compared this album to a Magic Eye image, noting that you have to wait for your brain to relax into it and assemble the different sonic chunks before you can hear the shape behind all the squiggles. But unlike a Magic Eye picture whose scribbles can be ignored or cast off as mere obfuscation of the thing you're really looking at, there's no there here--the scribbles turn out to be the essence of everything that's enjoyable about this music in the first place.

4. Not a Robot, but a Ghost--Andrew Bird
For as much as I love Andrew Bird, he's kind of like the musical equivalent of Michel Gondry--so intimidatingly brilliant and creative that his output can get a bit samey if he's not challenged by an equally brilliant collaborator. For my money, any time he lets Martin Dosh really pull out all the stops, the results always soar. (I'm sure this is why I prefer Armchair Apocrypha, which Dosh's fingerprints are all over, to Bird's other solo albums thus far.) The keening in his voice here is all the more potent with the beats bolstering the angst in such an sharply visceral way.

5. Temecula Sunrise--Dirty Projectors
My computer died for about a month right in the middle of this summer, and one of the last new releases I'd synched onto my iPod before it happened was Bitte Orca. Much like the experience of being isolated with DCFC's Narrow Stairs in the deserts of New Mexico last year, being forced to focus my attention on this album for an extended period of time was, in a sense, an amazing relief. Without the option of swapping in and out a bunch of other music, I enjoyed the luxury of really getting to know this one deeply. Sure didn't hurt that it's eminently deserving of sustained attention, full of all the intense drama and philosophy and catharsis I'm always looking for in an album. The angular and inventive guitar solo here floors me every time. Unlike most guitar solos plopped into your average indie rock song, it's not just a bracketed section of sound called [guitar solo]; it's something curious and rich and inviting and every bit as compelling as the vocals surrounding it. (Also, music theory nerds, please e-mail me if you can figure out the time signature this song is written in. It's had me stumped for months.)

6. Eat Your Heart--Micachu & the Shapes
For at least the first half of the year, I just surrendered to the fact that something in me wanted to listen to the spazziest music possible all the time. Call it the yang to last year's Bon Iver-dominated yin or whatever, but I wanted to feel assaulted by noise so abrasive it constantly courted pure annoyance. Dan Deacon's Bromst did a respectable job, but no album sugared me up as immediately or intensely as Micachu's Jewellry. The herky-jerky time signatures, broken toy instruments (and vacuum cleaners!), and her guttural drawl all hit this weird pleasure center somewhere in my occipital lobe and just blissed me out with totally overwhelming insanity.

7. Rudie Fails--White Rabbits
Considering how wholly uninterested I am in White Rabbits as a band, they sure have a way of writing songs that capture my imagination to the point of obsession. (I'll spare you the Alice in Wonderland free association here.) Of course, getting Britt Daniel to produce this recent batch of songs was a pretty surefire way of grabbing my attention and guaranteeing at least a modicum of affection. "Percussion Gun" was an early favorite from It's Frightening (o ye of the awesome front cover), but something about the balance of looseness and ferocity here gave "Rudie Fails" legs I wouldn't have necessarily expected. But dude--That piano! All that empty space! The vocal howl! Even if it's just Spoon Jr., I'm OK with that.

8. Middle Cyclone--Neko Case
Guys, this is the song she named her entire album after. Who else would have the balls to write something this emotionally naked and then so confidently direct everyone's attention to it? This song made me sad before I even got sad again this year. Neko sings truth.

9. The Sleeping Beauty--American Music Club
Consider this the equivalent of me waving my arms in the air, jumping up and down, and shooting off air horns to draw everyone's attention to the wonderful and unjustly slept-on American Music Club album The Golden Age. Though it was released early in '08, it came to my attention this summer and sank its hooks into me immediately with its West Coast-gothic vibe. There were long stretches of time when it was really the only album I could stand to listen to. I could extol the virtues of pretty much any of its songs--though my special faves would include "All My Love," "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco," and "The Dance"--but the autumnal regret and muted fatalism of "The Sleeping Beauty" just fit like a glass slipper (to mix my fairy tale metaphors) here. If there's any album cited on this mix that I would go out of my way to advise you to check out in full, it's this one.

10. While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear, feat. Michael McDonald
Did you not believe me last year? Do you remain unconvinced of the stratospheric excellence of this song? I believe Mr. Michael McDonald might have a thing or two to say about the matter. Guys, I'm sorry, I know it's kind of obnoxious to run the same song two years in a row, but when Grizzly Bear released this B-side, it was like they were daring me to do it. I couldn't not take the bait. This song's still fresher than fresh a year and a half after I first heard the live recording of it. I would wear the essence of those cymbal crashes as a perfume if I could find a way to bottle it.

11. Hard to Find a Friend--Baby Teeth
There are plenty of great bands working in Chicago right now, but Abraham Levitan is in an altogether more rarified group--dude is a straight-up great songwriter. He's got a seemingly effortless way with with melodies that are easy-on-the-ears yet deceptively complex and with vivid lyrics that trip pleasantly off the tongue while telling poignantly humorous (and humorously poignant) Everyman stories. Add to that potent mix the band's utterly winning on-stage charisma and stealth chops (Peter Andreadis--subtlest drummer I've heard in ages and the band's secret weapon), and they're like a time bomb of rock just waiting to explode out of the Midwest. Don't say you weren't warned.

12. The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)--The Decemberists
It's Tuesday, so that must mean it's time to hate on the Decemberists. Or, wait--is it backlash-to-the-backlash day? I can't keep that shit straight anymore. Lucky for everyone who's turned a blind eye to the hype cycle, Colin Meloy just keeps on writing impeccable songs like this one. Though I initially dismissed it as a mere pretender to "Wicked Little Town"'s throne, I eventually opened my ears enough to hear the actual song I was listening to, instead of just my perception of it. And when I finally heard it, it became one of those tracks I almost couldn't listen to on the train for fear of bursting into tears any time it so much as came up on shuffle. The romantic complexity laced with foreboding in the lyrics coupled with the featherweight bombast of the arrangement makes this one of the roundest songs I've heard all year.

13. Save Me from What I Want--St. Vincent
Though I ultimately found Actor too wearying an album to garner much repeat play, this track immediately jumped out at me. It keeps Annie Clark's more outre instrumental affectations in check while letting her extremely nuanced vocals shine with subtle shades of humor, exasperation, and ennui. Plus, the transition from the Decemberists to this is secretly my favorite segue on the comp, both sonically and thematically.

14. Crazy/Forever--Japandroids
Japandroids' Post-Nothing was definitely, surprisingly, one of my favorite albums this year, thanks to its perfect combination of heart-on-sleeviness and go-for-broke sonic force. I love any band that can make me feel like I'm 16 again (except with actual good taste in cool music this time). They get extra bonus points for being stereotypically dorkily polite Canadians live in concert.

15. 1901--Phoenix
Though I loved Alphabetical when it came out in '04, I kind of lost track of Phoenix for a while there. In my brain, I tend to file them in the same drawer as Sloan: un-show-offy professionals who have a way with a killer hook, whose recorded output is so consistent that their albums sometimes, weirdly, seem redundant. Put it another way--they're like a well-made TV show like House or 30 Rock that you can just pop into and out of, episode by episode, without getting lost in the season's major narrative arc. A piece of easily accessible art that didn't make me work to crack it open, "1901" goes down smooth every time, like a bourbon vanilla milkshake.

16. Brother Sport--Animal Collective
Perhaps the apotheosis of this year's obsession with all things annoying-but-catchy. There were a few weeks during that hideous late February/early March time of year when I would blast this song straight into my ears first thing in the morning as I let my light therapy box sear my retinas from its perch next to the bed. (What, do you have a better suggestion for not turning homicidal at the end of a grueling Chicago winter?) The counterpoint between the Saturday morning cartoon sonics and Panda Bear's harmonies stacked as wide as the Lake Michigan shoreline is somehow so stupid, so fucking funny, that it's perfect--transcendent even. Likewise his spur to "OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your throat a luttul" shifts from being phonemic soup at first to then resonating as a spiritually valid mantra for creative self-agency. I loved "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" as much as anyone, but the pinata-like explosion of Muppetty affability and wisdom here at the end of the album will always mark "Brother Sport" as the defining track of Merriweather Post Pavilion for me.

*

Honorable mentions this year go to Short Punks in Love's "Olivia," Metric's "Help I'm Alive," A.C. Newman's "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer," the xx's "Basic Space," the Clientele's "Harvest Time," Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Franz Ferdinand's "No You Girls," Anni Rossi's "Machine," Passion Pit's "The Reeling," Arctic Monkeys' "Cornerstone," and the Duckworth Lewis Method's "Jiggery Pokery."

Thanks as always to anyone who recommended anything to me this year, indulged my enthusiasms, came out to a concert or festival with me, or made any kind of joyful noise that touched my life. Special thanks to JH for working with me again on the beautiful packaging that will come with the actual burned copies of the CDs.

November Update

Hello, my kittens. Are you ready for your now-regular monthly dispatch from the land of Wrestling Entropy? In all honesty, I'm not even sure I am. I started an insane workout regimen about six weeks ago, and just about the only thing I've gotten out of it is a deeper understanding of the fact that meatheads and gym rats aren't necessarily dumb as a matter of course--they're just fucking exhausted all the time. All the blood that would normally be helping their brains compose lovely and thoughtful sentiments has been rerouted to their muscles, leaving them dim and ineloquent masses of crabbiness and fatigue. OK, well, maybe that really is just me, but man--this shit's been brutal. Anyway. To the extent that I've been able to scrape myself together enough to do anything remotely of interest this month, here's what I've been up to:

Max Tundra, Live at Schubas. I was just talking to Eric and Annie about how it's become impossible to tell what shows are going to sell out immediately and what shows you're going to be able to waltz right into at the last minute. I found out about the November 5th Max Tundra show a day or two ahead of time and utterly panicked. I figured there'd be no way I would be able to get a ticket. Well, not only was I able to buy one, I could have brought along about 50 of my closest friends. I was soooo bummed at what a small turnout there was for the show. Granted, he didn't go on until about 11 pm on a Thursday night, the Mountain Goats/Final Fantasy (bandonyms ahoy!) double-header was scheduled the same night just up the street at the Metro, and Schubas is a terrible venue for dancypants genres--but still. It's Max Tundra! I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release in late '08, but after finally grabbing it earlier this year, it's absolutely been my personal #1 album of '09. I tried to tell him as much while folks were congregating around the merch table at the end of the night, and it was a supremely, comically awkward interaction. I just kept gushing and he just kept running out of ways to say "thanks, I appreciate it," and the whole thing escalated with an embarrassing-for-us-both high five. (Initiated by him--allow me to spare myself a little dignity by making that fact perfectly clear.) Anyway, the album is still unimpeachable and you should check it out if you haven't had the pleasure yet.

After nearly a year of fits and starts, I finally finished reading American Prometheus a few weeks ago. It was astonishingly good. I have no idea how a book of this scope gets researched and written (not to mention edited), but it's seriously gorgeous. I lived with the book for so many months, and it contained so much heartwrenching emotion, I was literally in tears as I finished the last page. Highly, but not lightly, recommended.

As something of a palate cleanser (ahem), I also read Toni Bentley's butt sex book The Surrender pretty much immediately thereafter. It was really quite great. It's less prurient than it could have been and she's a surprisingly lovely writer. It was also interesting to see how structurally similar it was to Eat, Pray, Love. Is there some sort of "contemporary woman's memoir" script that necessitates a tripartite structure, a post-divorce journey of soul-searching, feats of physical endurance invented to mirror and in many ways overcome emotional blockages, culminating in greater self-awareness and inner peace? Will someone who's not been working out six days a week please write this essay for me? KTHX.

I saw more movies this month than I realized I did, mostly thanks to the time afforded me over four-day holiday weekend. In brief:

The Men Who Stare at Goats. Completely ridiculous and demonstrably not very well written, but somehow amusing in spite of itself. I'm sure this is mostly thanks to the effortless charisma of most of its cast. I just wish they weren't working so hard to save a movie that didn't necessarily deserve to be saved.

Tropic Thunder. Obvy, I'm way behind the times here, and, even after seeing the whole thing, I felt like I didn't really need to thanks to the best jokes being given away in last year's omnipresent trailer. But it was still pretty enjoyable anyway. The fake gay priest movie preview at the beginning probably got the biggest laugh out of me, but Jay Baruchel's film nerd monologue about Renny Harlin was a pretty close second. That kid prob should also have been in The Men Who Stare at Goats in re: effortless charisma.

Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, I am 100% the target demographic here, but there's no sense in tip-toeing around the fact that I loved every fucking minute of it. Seriously, it's just delight upon delight, while also remaining deeply, deeply weird. The bit with the wolf near the end? No exaggeration: I was weeping with laughter. I saw it on Thanksgiving night and the audience fucking applauded when the credits began to roll. I always love the extravagance of the gesture when that happens at the end of a movie. No one involved with its creation or performance is going to hear it; it's just a pure, spontaneous expression of happiness and fellow-feeling and aesthetic satisfaction.

Coco Before Chanel. This was a bit more of a snooze than I was hoping/expecting, but it was ultimately redeemed for me by how much of an unconventional hero Coco is presented as here. She's not particularly charming or likable, but she's still this gutsy dame who gets shit done and befriends all kinds of powerful and influential people and builds her own empire from scratch. I was glad to see a small group of young-looking girls in the theater on the afternoon I caught this; what an awesomely feminist message for them to be exposed to: it's OK to be bitchy and difficult! The world won't fall apart and you'll have more self-respect and you'll probably get a lot more things of genuine value accomplished that way!

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Holy shit. So awesome. Ridiculous and dark and hilarious and foul. I know this is a totally obnoxious thing to say, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I would have absolutely gone apeshit-level bonkers for when I was about 19. Not that I enjoyed it any less at 30, but I could just imagine adopting this as a kind of secret-handshake movie back then, my love for it becoming a place that would feel like an exclusive club inside my own brain, a place to meet up with other like-minded friends to discuss its many hideous pleasures. There's no way to overstate how fucking fantastic Nicolas Cage is here--because he's already gone ahead and embedded the overstatement in his own performance. There's also, of course, the subtextual level where the character's story becomes the story of the post-Katrina plight of the city, which realization had me racing to my bookshelf to start reading my gratis copy of Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood immediately after the movie to help understand contemporary New Orleans a bit better. Do not sleep on this one, fellow lovers of neo-noir and all things bat-shit insane.

I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, be sure to pop over to Pitchfork News and check out Elvis Costello playing "High Fidelity" with the Roots. I just...there are no words. Does shit get any cooler than this? It's inspired me to rock out to Get Happy!! the past few days. Every time I let my love for Elvis slip a little bit from my immediate consciousness, something like this comes along to remind me why dude will forever be one of my faves.

Also, hey, Animal Collective, where do you find the time/energy/creativity to fart out another superlative set of songs in the same calendar year as Merriweather Post Pavilion? The new Fall Be Kind EP is a stunner, totally worth it for the first two tracks alone, though the entire moody journey is incredibly rewarding. Embarrassing admission: when I first heard Avey Tare sing that line in "On a Highway" about "Noah's dreaming," I was totally trying to figure out the Biblical allusion until I read the Pitchfork review, which reminded me that that's Panda Bear's real name. Oh. Right. Duh.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend, my darlings!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, my kittens! What kind of treats do I have to share with you today?

Bright Star. It's probably already come and gone from your local theater, so a fat lot of good this recommendation will do you until the DVD comes out, but I have to go on record as saying this film was wonderful. I was absolutely rapt the entire running time. When the lights came up, the first thing I said to Benji (who gave it a lovely review here in his awesomely fun new weekly column over at The New Gay) was: "all those little Twilight girls should be forced to watch this as a corrective." This is how to deal elegantly and passionately with young love and unrequited physical longing. Campion and her lead actress Abbie Cornish did an extraordinary job of respecting the intensity of the emotions while still allowing them to be completely youthful and wild. Cornish's breakdown when Fanny finds out Keats has died is totally earned and totally heartbreaking. It's not just the love story that's compelling here, though--the quiet way that her family embroiders the edges of the scenes gave the whole thing a warmth and intimacy that occasionally bordered on claustrophobia (as real families often do), and Paul Schneider (yes, that Paul Schneider) continues to be one of those MVP, will-watch-in-anything-he-does kind of actors. Also inspired: hearing Ben Whishaw as Keats reading one of his poems over the closing credits instead of going straight to music.

An Education. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I think Nick Hornby's one-dimensional script just kind of hamstrung it before the movie even had a chance. It reminded me of the problems I had with State of Play--all these awesome actors borderline wasting their talents working extra hard to redeem the shitty dialogue and flat character types. Rosamund Pike especially (known to the romantics among us as Jane Bennet from the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice) did a heroic job overcoming the on-page limitations of her "I'm dumb and pretty" broken record, giving her some real sadness and charm where none were naturally occurring. Dominic Cooper, too, as her boyfriend Danny showed enough spark and charm and glamor to make his scenes memorable, and I nearly cheered when Sally Hawkins showed up for a brief, heartbreaking moment near the end. The usually unimpeachable Alfred Molina and Peter Sarsgaard weren't served nearly as well, unfortunately--though Molina's monologue to his daughter, apologizing to her through her closed bedroom door, was tragically tender and regretful in all the right ways. But, to the film's credit, as with Bright Star, there was an enormous amount of sensitivity in portraying the lead character Jenny as quite bright while also allowing her to also be petty and vain and rash, which kept her well outside the bounds of annoying movie precociousness. You can check out the meat of Lynn Barber's true story and a little bit about the making of the film here at The Guardian.

I don't know who Daisy Chapman is, but her cover of "Our Mutual Friend" was linked recently at the Divine Comedy's Twitter page. I wanted to love it, both because that's one of the best songs Neil has written in the '00s and because DC songs should always be covered more often than they currently are, but unfortunately she sucks all the life and nuance out of it by singing the surface of the song instead of the subtext. The original version that appears on Absent Friends (and, ahem, my best of 2004 mix) is nearly inexhaustible, thanks to the way that Neil's interp reveals, in a paradoxically complex way, the essential shallowness of these characters--all the vapid conversation about how it's hard to hear your own voice at the nightclub or how the old 45s "are like the soundtrack to our lives." He also leaves enough ambiguity in the storyline to doubt whether the girl was intentionally leading the narrator on or if he just drunkenly misconstrued her level of interest in him. No such nuance in Daisy's version! Though, yes, she has a lovely voice and comes up with an inventive solo piano arrangement to reconfigure the chamber music affectations of the DC original, she goes straight for the jugular in the most uninteresting way possible. She oversings and oversells the first person narrator's heartbreak, leaving no possible interpretation aside from her conviction that she's been betrayed. Which also, of course, opens up an ugly sort of girl-on-girl catfighty misogyny now that the genders are reversed--blame the other girl for "stealing" the guy, rather than holding the dude accountable for being fickle and sneaky. Sigh. I hate to be overly critical because, like I say, I think the DC's back catalog is ripe for people to reinvent, but singers have to be able to match all the intelligence that Neil has built into these songs for the covers to actually be worth a damn.

Patton Oswalt's My Weakness Is Strong. I have nothing critically interesting to say about this, only that I LOVE IT. It's not as 100% solid from front to back as Werewolves and Lollipops, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the pro-Obama stuff will probably make you wistfully sad/nostalgic for early '09, the way it captures the time before things got all kinds of ugly with health care and whatnot, but even with that--hell, especially with that--there is so much pure joy and silliness throughout. Dude is very clearly operating at the top of his game here. Hopefully you've also read Pitchfork's very sharp review of the album and Patton's AV Club interview.

Japandrooooooooooooids! Caught these guys at a freaking 3 pm show, of all things, at Schubas earlier this month, and it just reminded me why Post-Nothing has been one of my surprise favorite albums of '09. The songs are loud and fun and dumb in the right ways, and I just wish I had a car and a stretch of open road so I could blast this stuff into the warm night air. I also totally didn't realize that they're Canadian, so there's an extra layer of delight when, after you've been pummeled with all that meaty guitar and electrifying drum work, Brian King starts gushing uber-politely about how grateful they are that we've showed up to support them. Adorable. I snapped a few pictures that you can check out here.

Be safe out there, tonight, my darlings, if you are getting dressed up and partying.