Dave Chappelle's Block Party

As suspected, Dave Chappelle's Block Party was a brilliant and delightful little film. Before watching it, I'd just read The Believer's interview with director David Levine (fascinating and highly recommended), so my brain was very much attuned to ideas of performance. Where does it start, where does it end (both in terms of duration as well as the boundaries around the performer's "job" and his/her private life), where does it belong (on stage, on film, in a gallery, on the street, a little of all of them), who is it for, how is it financed--and all these things are hit on, totally organically, in the film.

Watching Chappelle play the street like an instrument was such a beautiful thing. Although he is very funny throughout, I'm not sure he should even be called a comedian, at least not in the context of this film. Nor is he an actor or, of course, a director. He really is some sort of performance artist--in a way, what he's doing is kind of similar to Andy Goldsworthy, except instead of working with the ephemerality of nature, he's using the materials of the city (its sounds, its scenery, its people) to create something equally beautiful yet fleeting. It's almost like the long dinner party scene in To the Lighthouse (a scene I think about fondly, and often), with one supremely magnetic personality gathering a huge group of people in one specific space to create not any one "thing" as such, but a tender moment of vivid, exuberant togetherness. Time and fellow feeling become his project.

Gondry, as a director, obviously understood this aspect of the proceedings in an extremely sensitive and reflective way, which I'm sure is why there's so much focus on the couple living in the Broken Angel house. Aside from just being, y'know, catnip for a documentary film crew (real crazy people! living in a crazy cool location! that we just stumbled upon! and can film basically to our heart's content!), there's a parallel sense of visual and emotional poetry in their story, where two people who are marching to the beat of their own drummer have constructed something illogical and patchwork and uniquely their own out of random chunks of material and then live inside it. The main difference between them and Chappelle, though, is at least they're unapologetic about it, whereas Chappelle's art, in the context of this film, seems performed almost as an act of penance for the collective weight of his relatively recent fame and success. I'm sure Gondry was also responding to this undercurrent of hesitancy or insecurity in his persona, in much the same way that he sought to pull that little-boy-lost quality in Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine.

For all that, though, the film is also just a flat-out good time. I was absolutely filled with delight for the entire hour and forty-five minutes. It's so rangy and charming and relaxed and easy-breezy. Nothing really happens, of course, but it's just nice to spend time with these people. There's no part of me that isn't completely fascinated by ?uestlove, and something in my soul positively shuddered (in a good way) every time Erykah Badu was onscreen. Plus, it made me really, really fucking ridiculously excited for my upcoming trip to New York.

Also recommended in this month's issue of The Believer: Todd Pruzan's essay "Mental Chickens," nominally about a late-90s movie soundtrack from New Zealand, but really about friendship and living in cities and growing old and people disappearing from your life. There's a paragraph near the end of the piece where he talks about an old photograph of a friend that all but made me spontaneously burst into tears.

"Everthing Ricky Gervais has done has made me hate him. Everything. He seems utterly devoid of humanity."

I confess, though I like it on a surface level, I'm having trouble getting more deeply into Noble Beast. I agree with Scott Pretty Goes with Pretty that it sure does seem like a looong album, especially in that opening stretch--and then again in the back half, too. But, I would disagree that Armchair Apocrypha is "upbeat" and would also disagree that Dosh's electronic programming on "Not a Robot but a Ghost" doesn't serve Bird well. In fact, I think that's why Apocrypha is my favorite Bird album to date and why the one-two punch of "Not a Robot but a Ghost" leading into "Anonanimal" is my favorite part of Noble Beast at this point: there's a sonic darkness to them both that heightens the ooky-spookiness that's always lurking in his lyrics. His folksy/pastoral violin excursions are great and all, but I think he could stand to get darker. I want more plaintive keening. I want his emo album.

This Week's Reader

Hey, Chicagoans. If you happen to pick up a copy of the Chicago Reader this week, be sure to check out the cover story, "As Del Lay Dying." It's actually a huge excerpt from one of our books, The Funniest One in the Room, which is the first full-length biography of improv comedy guru Del Close. We're all super, super proud of it.

I'm Getting Tired Of...The Banjo

"When you are listening to a rock & roll song the way you listen to 'Jumping Jack Flash,' or something similar, that's the way you should really spend your whole life. That's how you should be all the time: just grooving to something simple, something basically good, something effective and something not too big. That's what life is. Rock & roll is one of the keys of the many, many keys to a very complex life. Don't get fucked up with all the many keys. Groove to rock & roll and then you'll probably find one of the best keys of all." --Pete Townshend

I grew up reading Rolling Stone thanks to my father's general addiction to periodicals and inability to throw anything away, and, though its cultural relevance is only a cold, pale shadow of what it once was, I recently opted to receive a few free issues through a special deal that came with my subscription to Salon. Lucky me, I was just in time to receive the big 1000th issue, which you may or may not have seen screaming at you on newsstands in lurid, holographic 3D. I feared that its bulk and overly glossy packaging would make me want to puke with its self-importance and self-referentiality, but it's actually really stellar. I spent a good portion of the weekend devouring it. There are the predictable contributions from Jann Wenner, Cameron Crowe, and Greil Marcus (who cites the above Pete Townshend quote from the eighteenth issue of the magazine in 1968 in his longish piece on RS's early years), but there's also some extremely enjoyable guest essays, perhaps my favorite of which is Bret Easton Ellis's meditation on Tom Cruise's appearance on the cover in 1990 (Days of Thunder era). Referencing the scene in American Psycho when Patrick Bateman shares an elevator ride with Cruise, Ellis writes, hilariously, "I keep thinking about that scene in the elevator in American Psycho and how different it would be played today. Would Bateman, the man also obsessed with appearances, either see a kindred soul or--after witnessing the couch-jumping, the hectoring on the Today show, Scientology, the thing called Vanilla Sky--quietly back away and hope to go unnoticed?"

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a beautiful essay about the famous photograph of John and Yoko taken on the day of his death (writer Scott Spencer ruminates, "Remembering Lennon's boyish boast about the Beatles' being more popular than Jesus, and seeing again the profound artistic sympathy with which Leibovitz composed this last portrait of him, we realize: Here is our Pietà") and many in-their-prime photos of some of the sexiest motherfuckers ever to have worked in popular music. I'm thinking here specifically of this shot of Mick & Keith and this shot of Bowie paying intentional homage to James Dean. Yes, yes. As Giddy once famously said of me, in jest (somewhat), on her Friendster page, I like magazines.

In Eddie Izzard voice: We've got suits of babies! We've got babies on suits!

Did everybody read the Fork's looong interview with Sufjan today? I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that part about his "small obsession with birds" ("I think I might have gone a little overboard, because I have three field guides, I'm saving up for a pair of binoculars, and I want to buy the elephant folio book of Audubon prints of birds of North America. So I've probably invested a little too much time in this"). Sure, sure, on the surface it looks like it can just be chalked up to all the research he did to write the "Lord God Bird" song for NPR, but the Wrestling Entropy family knows better--there must have been some weird voodoo going on with the avian-themed packaging Chris conceived for my 2005 year-end mix and the inclusion of "Chicago" thereon. (Just like when Ben Folds and Neil Hannon went on tour together a few years ago, and CTLA claimed I magically made it happen by rubbing their albums together in my big CD binder.)

And a big ol' happy birthday to BAK today!!

Lanky Brunettes with Wicked Jaws

The boys at Coke Machine Glow can bark and chase each other around the rec room all they want, nattering earnestly but ultimately pointlessly about whether music criticism should be objective or whether it's an inherently subjective pursuit. Meanwhile, Robert Christgau just gets shit done. Yes, I know it's not exactly fair to hold a couple of young turks up to the Dean's standards (and, hey, at least they're attempting to really wrestle with some big ideas, right?), but it's nice for everyone to be reminded occasionally of the thrilling places pop music criticism is capable of going. A stunning article for anyone who's ever had a passing interest in the Marshall Mathers / Eminem / Slim Shady phenomenon.

"I'm a Ukrainian-Russian-Lithuanian-Roma mix, and I can identify with any other spirit, but the Roma aspect is important because it brings you straight to the intersection of art and human rights, and all music and art that always interested me had that element of . . . reaching out through borders": Carl Wilson interviews Eugene Hutz.

Has anybody watched The Thin Man recently? This movie is 72 years old and it doesn't show its age at all. It's one of those classics that I'd somehow never caught up with, and after reading both the formidable Amy Sherman-Palladino and Mimi Smartypants make references to it as a favored and influential movie, I put it in my Kittenflix queue and watched it this weekend. I could give a shit about the mystery plot. It's all about the oft cited chemistry and sparkling dialogue between William Powell and Myrna Loy. Delightful company to spend a Sunday afternoon with.

My feelings about Natalie Portman usually fall somewhere between complete indifference and exasperated skepticism, but when I saw her on the cover of this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly I had about ten years' worth of awe and reverence instantly downloaded into my brain, Matrix-"whoa, I know kung-fu"-style. Holy hell, what a beautiful human.

People fucking delight me. I was in the grocery store yesterday, wandering around in the state of bewilderment that that chore always induces in me. Studying my hastily scribbled list and drifting to a stop in front of one of those wall-length coolers, I heard a gentleman standing nearby quietly mutter in my direction, "you buy some eggs, girl." Ha! When did my Saturday morning errands turn into an R. Kelly song?

Big thanks to JWard for burning me a copy of Neko Case's stunning Blacklisted. It was about time I started catching up with her non-Pornos work, and this was a perfect place to start.

Soul Meets Body

In case there's anyone left among my readership who doubts that librarians are, in fact, superheroes, I submit, for your consideration, my roommate, who saved our apartment building from burning down on Friday afternoon (yes, Friday the 13th) because she gets home from work a good two hours before all us other 9-to-5ers and was thus able to call the fire department before the nascent blaze in the basement did too much damage. One of the firemen even told her, "if this had gone another half an hour, you wouldn't have had a home to come home to." Since we're not anticipating any actual thanks or appreciation from our landlady, I would like to ask you all to join me in thanking her for keeping those books shelved and for keeping a roof over our heads. Thanks, LK!

There's an outstanding article in last week's issue of The New Yorker called "Prairie Fire." It's written by Eric Konigsberg and it's about a fourteen year old genius from Nebraska who somewhat recently committed suicide under mysterious circumstances and how his parents, his friends, and the "gifted educators" who studied him under a microscope his whole life are dealing with his death in their own slightly self-deluded ways. It's fascinating stuff, and extraordinarily insightful and well written. Be sure to check it out if you have the means.

OK, how disappointingly bad was the hotly anticipated Scarlett Johansson/Death Cab SNL? The skits were horrible, Ben's voice was uncomfortably shaky, and Scarlett loves herself way too much. But, I did like the Swedish Chef ringtone bit, the "Daddy, why won't Shakira wrestle an alligator?!" punchline to the My Super Sweet 16 sketch, and Tina Fey's joke about Alito's wife being so upset during the hearings that she had to leave the room to get an abortion. I, somewhat sheepishly, also find myself being won over by the shaggy haired charms of Andy Samberg. Here's hoping next week's Peter Sarsgaard/Strokes pairing will fare better.

RIP, Shelley Winters. Alas, her final death scene!

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, everyone. Salon provides a valuable public service and posts recordings of a few of his interviews and speeches (incl. "I Have a Dream") to ignite your ears, and your soul.

Dandelions Induce Smooches

Leave it to The Believer to make me give a damn about popular countercultural artists I generally have no interest in. September's interview with Sarah Silverman and this month's interview with Devendra Banhart lured them both out of their respective brands of skewed preciousness that usually bug the crap out of me, helping me understand a little more readily what so many people find so appealing about them. There was a delicacy in Sarah's discussion of the mechanics behind her humor that pleasantly undercut the thick coating of ironic narcissism and self-satisfaction that I just can't get beyond in her naughty girl persona (her calling Rushmore "a perfect movie" certainly elevated my opinion of her as well), and Devendra temporarily dropped the stream of consciousness crazy-talk (he didn't mention yams once!) to quote Miles Davis and lucidly shed some light on his perspective of the different phases he's already gone through as a songwriter. (Side note: did everybody else but me know that he was born in 1981? I'm usually not the kind of person to get all bent out of shape about feeling old, but this knowledge stresses me out. Brutha is the unofficial representative of a whole musical movement, and has been for the past two years or so, and he's only 24? ::sigh::)

I find that once or twice a year I'll get really fired up about some ad campaign either because I love it ("Tito: Enjoy the empanadas and Coke. Love, Mom") or because it annoys me so severely that looking at it everyday in magazines and on El platforms becomes like the pleasureable pain of pressing on a bruise. This season's irritation comes from those Starbucks "it only happens once a year" ads that have started popping up everywhere. Arrrrrrg. It's a clever concept that just went horribly, horribly wrong. It's not bad enough that the corporate appropriation of the indie-annointed style of willfully cutesy-poo monochromatic drawings with delicately elogated limbs (sort of Marcel Dzama meets Edward Gorey) is like the most cloying burnt sugar topping on an otherwise tasty little bit of pastry—no, no, the text has to fuck with your brain's ability to parse the grammar at a glance. I can't tell you how long it took me to resolve the phrase "plants prompt kisses" the first time I saw it on a billboard. It was the first example of those ads I'd seen, so I didn't know what the gimmick was yet, and it was too far away for me to clearly make out the mistletoe the man in the drawing is holding above his head, so I thought that, based on the way the woman is kissing him on the cheek, it meant "drinking a peppermint mocha will make people give you immediate kisses"—plants (Web 11: verb, 'to place firmly or forcibly') prompt (Web 11: adj., 'performed readily or immediately') kisses. In the name of Steven Pinker, I can't believe no one in the Starbucks marketing department would have considered the possibility for misinterpretation here! Sure, it's not like there's an offensive double entendre hidden in the homophone or anything egregious like that, but still, ads live or die in their ability to cut to the chase without too much mental labor. So now, even though I've seen that ad a million times, I still can't help but read both meanings simultaneously, which gives me the kind of dull headache you get from staring too hard at one of those "is it a vase or two people looking at each other?!" optical illusions. And, of course, that headachy association can't help but rub off on all the other sweater/dancing/decorating variations as well. Fleh.

CBCM in the News

For those of you who are curious as to why I've been waking up at 5 AM on Friday mornings so that I can be downtown between 6 and 6:30, check out this article about the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors from today's Sun-Times. You can also look for the link to the main CBCM website in the sidebar at left.

The bird-related synchronicity in my life has increased to an almost comical degree this year, but, perhaps more than anything else, as I'm riding the brown line toward the Loop, watching the sun rise over the lake, I always think, with great fondness, of this quote from Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction:

I found out a good many years back practically all I need to know about my general reader; that is to say, you, I'm afraid. You'll deny it up and down, I fear, but I'm really in no position to take your word for it. You're a great bird-lover. Much like a man in a short story called "Skule Skerry" by John Buchan, which Arnold L. Sugarman, Jr., once pressed me to read during a very poorly supervised study-hall period, you're someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because "they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit--those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°." Probably just like this John Buchan man, you thought many thrilling related thoughts; you reminded yourself, I don't doubt, that: "The goldcrest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!" It would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper's nest, but I feel, at least, that I know him--you--quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now.