Spring Awakening

OK, despite the fact that, intellectually, I know that no good can come of being ashamed of one's musical tastes and that the notion of "guilty pleasures" in music is terribly fraught, I still often have a hard time publicly copping to some of the shit that I love. A perfect example is Duncan Sheik. I can't think of anyone more hideously uncool, but, guys, I secretly looooooove Duncan Sheik! I'm not even kidding. It's been really hard for me to get up the nerve to admit it in this forum, but I have to: I own all his albums (except for the one that came out early this year; just haven't gotten around to it yet), and, what's more, I still actively listen to them. It's not like they're moldering in the back of my closet--I tend to take Phantom Moon with me when I travel on airplanes (makes a nice pairing with Elliott Smith's Either/Or--somehow all the acoustic guitar soothes me when I'm in midair) and his self-titled debut remains one of my favorite things to listen to in the dead heat of summer. I downloaded the soundtrack to Spring Awakening when it came out, and, even though I didn't listen to it all that much, I was still pleased as punch that he gained so much recognition for it. So, you best believe that I was super-psyched to have a chance to actually see the show now that the touring production is playing here in Chicago for a few weeks. Coming of age stories? Florid Broadway storytelling and emotions? Duncan Sheik's delicate Nick Drake-esque melodies and arrangements? Sign. Me. Up.

Benji and I went on Wednesday night, and I really enjoyed it. I didn't go apeshit-level bonkers or anything, but I really enjoyed it. Mostly, though, I was delighted by the fact that it, with all its relative perversity intact, has achieved such great success in the current Broadway landscape that seems to be otherwise dominated by jukebox musicals and retreads of marginally successful Hollywood movies. The second act is a bit weak--it gets kinda punitive toward the characters and then tries to make up for it by becoming more stereotypically "Broadway" with bites from Les Miserables (ghosts singing inspiration from beyond the grave!) and Into the Woods (children will liiiiiiiiiisten!). But the first act is amazing. The lights came up for intermission and the first thing I said was, "I can't believe all that just happened in the first act. There's a lot going on there."

The one major drawback to this performance was seeing it at the Oriental Theater, rather than in a more intimate black box. The actors all have youth and beauty on their sides, but they don't quite yet have the chops to fill a room that big with their voices or their presence. Nor should they necessarily need to. Though the emotions and topics in this play are huge, to retain their power, they should still end up feeling like whispered secrets, and there's nothing whispered or secretive about a venue that big. Wouldn't it have been awesome if they could have figured out a way to book a stint for the show at, like, the Empty Bottle or the Vic? But, as Benji pointed out, if you can sell out the Oriental Theater, why wouldn't you sell out the Oriental Theater?

Despite all that, once I figured out how the songs were functioning, rhetorically, in the context of the plot, I fell totally in love with the piece. When I first listened to the soundtrack in isolation, I felt frustrated that I couldn't quite follow the storyline. But seeing it on stage, it all becomes clear: they're updating the notion of a rock musical by using the songs as external expressions of internal teenage sexual frustration, confusion, torment, and longing rather than as ways to advance the plot or for characters to relate to each other. It's so simple and so smart; I don't know why no one's ever really done it before (at least on such a large scale). I mean, much of my own internal monologue really still is flashing lights and dance sequences and bits of songs, so it felt easy and natural to slide into this world where that level of drama needs musical accompaniment to fully embody all that emotion. What was even nicer for me, though, is, since I'm so secretive about my Duncan Sheik fandom anyway, hearing those familiar chord voicings and melodic intervals in the context of a narrative all about unspoken pleasures gave the experience of the play a nice little meta-twist. Like I wrote in my post about false musical memories, there's a sweet warmth in being waved to by your past in this unexpected way.

Don't forget, kittens: King Sparrow (who've been getting all kinds of big love from big places this week) plays TONIGHT at the Subterranean. Come rock out and take refuge from the rain and all the collateral Lolla madness.

Well, Hello There, Stranger!

My darlings! I have to catch you up on all the fabulous goings-on around these parts lately. Usually when this blog is quiet, it's just because I'm being a lazy-pants, but this time it's actually because I've been too damn busy to sit down and write (in addition to being a lazy-pants). We gotta get through this briefly or we'll be here all day:

The Flight of the Conchords, Live at the Arie Crown Theater
I'm not a huge fan of the Flight of the Conchords or anything--I've only ever seen the first season of the TV show and don't own the CD--but someone offered me a free ticket, so hell if I was going to turn that down. The show was at, of all places, the cavernous Arie Crown Theater. As soon as I walked in, I thought, surely the size of this room will be death to whatever charms there may be in this show. But, damned if those guys didn't prove me wrong. Though the show would probably have been much better in a smaller venue, they have soooo much stage presence that they managed to keep the place humming with laughter and energy for their entire (surprisingly lengthy) set. Of course, it helps that they let a good chunk of their real-life charisma seep into the songs, rather than playing up their helpless sadsack shtick from the show--these guys are pretty fucking funny and pretty fucking talented, and you know they know it, and that's not a bad thing. By the end of the night, it was feeling a bit like sugar overload, but overall, I'm supremely pleased I had the chance to catch the show. Pictures here.

Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, Live at the Lakeshore Theater
When I visited my brother in San Francisco last year, he scored us some last-minute tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Mary Lynn Rajskub do some stand-up comedy. It was an incredible night, and I stole a ridiculous amount of material from Janeane's set (the most notable being her bit about "the gravy boat"--I'm sure most of you who spend any time with me in real life are infinitely annoyed by my constant reuse of the term by now). When I saw that she was going to be coming to the Lakeshore Theater with Marc Maron (from whom I've also stolen a ridiculous amount of material over the years), I couldn't wait to have the chance to catch her again. I went with some gay boyfriends, and we had a delightful time. She's such an amazing talent. I almost got a little choked up after the show was over thinking about how big a part of my adult consciousness she's been. I'd always been a stand-up comedy nerd, even when I was probably too young to be watching much of what I was watching, but I feel like seeing her stand-up specials on Comedy Central when I was in high school was this amazing shift. She looked like me and was angry like me and was just ranting on this amazing tear, rather than delivering punchlines with the more typical stand-up comedy rhythms like (as much as I adore them) Judy Gold or Joy Behar or Rita Rudner. And for her still to be around, and still to be operating at this ridiculously smooth, high level feels like such an amazing gift.

Aleks and the Drummer, Live at the Empty Bottle
It was hard for me to believe that I'd still never seen Aleks and the Drummer play live in a proper venue (last year's brief set at the Wicker Park Street Festival barely counts), so I made the effort to catch their show at the Empty Bottle earlier this month. They're really a fabulous band, towering over the current proliferation of other boy/girl drums/keyboards groups. I think this is due mainly to their appealing weirdness--Aleks is just about as bat-shit crazy as they come (in a good way--that voice! those clothes!), and Deric, in his spasmodic ferocity, absolutely stands as one of the best rock drummers around town (and I'm seriously not just saying that because he's a pal). Catch 'em while you can, Chicagoans. Pictures here.

Leonard Cohen, Live at the Chicago Theater
Leonard Cohen's always been one of those guys I knew I should be into, but just never took the time. Oh sure, I'd heard him sing some of his songs here and there, as well as all the covers, of course ("My penis is like a Leonard Cohen song: everyone likes it better when it's covered"), and just kind of figured "OK, I got it. Deep voice, poetic lyrics, female back-up singers. Done." Well, what I never took the time to properly realize is that fandom is the aggregate of letting Leonard Cohen work on you--you can't just listen to one song and leave it at that. You have to be willing to absolutely drown in Leonard Cohen for a while, and then you'll be baptized as a hysterical drooling fan. Which is exactly what happened to me at the Chicago Theater. Benji--who's been a fan ever since he heard a DJ playing Cohen Live as he was packing up at the end of the night at the bar in Bloomington--offered me one of his two tickets, and I'm infinitely grateful that he did. It was an absolutely magical night. First and foremost, of course, were the songs. And when I say songs, I don't just mean "bits of music and lyrics written and played by a singer and his band"--I mean, these are songs. There's just no denying the craft at work there. There's a reason why people cover his stuff all the time; it must feel like putting on a really well-tailored set of trousers or expensive pair of shoes. They're just that well done. But the man himself was absolutely oozing with energy and joie de vivre. He played for something like two and a half hours, literally skipping on and off the stage between sets and encores. His reverence for both the act of performing and for the other musicians on stage with him was deeply touching. He would step back and hold his fedora to his heart whenever anyone was taking a solo, and the two times he went around the stage introducing everyone individually, he bowed to them all with true respect, humility, and affection. And as all this was unfolding, it was hard also not to be reminded of his age, how this might be one of the last times any of us might ever see him perform live on stage. It didn't feel like a victory lap in the lazy or self-congratulatory sense--it felt like a man preemptively saying farewell on his own terms. Needless to say, I was a teary-eyed wreck by the end of the show. You can be sure I'm a huge Leonard Cohen fan now. Pictures here.

State of Play
If you're gonna go in for an elegy-to-newspaper-journalism movie, you'd be far better off with The Soloist. State of Play isn't bad, necessarily, it's just a bit...thin. (Unlike Russell Crowe, amiright? Hey-oh!) The cast is full of amazing actors (oh, Helen Mirren, cradle me to your bosom and insult me, please), but the script felt incredibly flat. It's hard to imagine what would have attracted so much talent to the project, other than maybe working with director Kevin Macdonald hot off his success with The Last King of Scotland.

Baby Teeth, Live at the Empty Bottle, with My Dear Disco
What the hell--springtime on a random Thursday: might as well go check out a Baby Teeth gig. They're getting ready to release their next LP this summer, and they brought a shitload of new jams to the Bottle last week. It really made them step up their game a bit, too. They played with an almost nervous intensity I've rarely seen in them before--and it suited them well. Perhaps they were also encouraged by the shit-hot opening set from Ann Arbor's My Dear Disco (between them and Nomo, what the FUCK is in the water up there?!). Imagine a version of Maroon 5 populated by a bunch of dorky yet adorable college-age dudes and a set of uilleann pipes, and you can kind of envision what they're up to. Apparently they usually work with a female singer, too, but her voice was blown out, so she wasn't on stage that night. I can't even imagine how much more over-the-top awesome that would make the group, though. They had incredible energy and incredible musicianship. I'll look forward to seeing them again soon. Pictures here.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Despite having been obsessed with the movie since its release in 2001, I'd never had the opportunity to see the show live on stage. The American Theater Company has been putting it on this month, though, and I knew I had to jump at the chance for tickets. Ohhhh, kittens, let me tell you how hard I sobbed. Going in, I pretty much knew I'd be a goner by the end at least, but I wasn't anticipating how much just hearing the songs themselves would kill me. I forget what an emotional attachment I have to them. All it took was the opening notes of "The Origin of Love" and I was like, "oh. Right. This music" and the waterworks just started flowing. I don't know that the production itself was necessarily exceptional--though the wardrobe person wins major points for putting Hedwig in a punked-out Obama "CHANGE" t-shirt dress for her entrance--but there's just something incredibly special about the show itself. Even though it's been a number of years since I've actually sat down and watched the movie, it was fascinating to see the emphasis the two media put on different aspects of the story. When you're not distracted by the physical presence of Tommy Gnosis, the relationship between Hedwig and Yitzhak gains so much more resonance and importance. Giving her back her power at the end of the show and ending with her on stage while Hedwig walks off, almost stripped bare, becomes such a beautiful gesture after you've spent an hour and a half watching her sit there, seething quietly, literally on the periphery of the stage and our awareness. And because we haven't been distracted by the actual sight of Tommy and Hedwig's love affair and we're not craving the sugar rush of that "first love" narrative, the D/s dynamic is allowed to flourish in a much more organic way here, whereas it always felt like kind of an afterthought to me in the movie. Anyway, I'm super, super glad I finally had a chance to see it live. (I snapped a quick picture of the awesome set design.)

Angels & Demons
Sublimely hideous. This thing was so talky it should have been a radio play, while also being gratuitously, graphically violent (to compensate?). Tom Hanks does a game job of trying to keep the thing afloat, but it's really Ewan McGregor's movie. The choice that he makes to play his character as perpetually soft-spoken was kind of brilliant. And the plot twist involving the helicopter totally sucked me in; I jumped right to the assumption they wanted me to make and loved them for playing on my gullibility. I found the overall logistical simplicity of the movie amusing, though. It seems that an easy attack that people often make on faith and Western religions especially is that they're reductive and binary--good/evil, right/wrong, eye for an eye, etc. But this movie was doing the same thing with "knowledge"/"research." It was never a matter of truly interpreting anything; it was just "here is a symbol; do you know what the symbol means? If yes, then proceed to the next plot point."

Destroyer (solo), Live at the Empty Bottle
Dan Bejar is becoming one of those musicians that I will immediately, reflexively go see if he's playing in town. It just feels like a compulsion, like I need to be in his presence if he's here, maybe as some sort of energetic exchange for all the pleasure that his music brings me. He played a solo set at the Bottle on Sunday night, and it, appropriately, felt like something holy. He reached deep into the Destroyer back catalog, thrilling the fanboys clustered around the edge of the stage, while also hitting us with some Swan Lake and New Pornos ("Streets of Fire"). I will also stand by my assertion that not nearly enough people give this guy credit for being as funny as he is. His ability to perform a meta-narrative of Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert at the same time that he's giving us a legitimately gorgeous Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert was just brain-ticklingly awesome. "Did I play anything from Your Blues?" he mumbled into the mic at one point about halfway in to the set. The place went bonkers with people shouting out song requests. "Forget it. That album's too hard," he mumbled back, not so much shooting down the idea as making it clear he never meant it in the first place. A lot of times that night I found myself laughing like I laugh at Wes Anderson movies--alone, in the odd corners around the jokes, not even so much at anything funny that's happening. He's really such a singular talent. Pictures here.

Less germane to the usual pop cultural subject matter of this blog, but no less time-consuming and significant in my life recently: I did another 30-day juice fast, lost ten pounds, cut off all my hair, and spent a weekend helping out around the Zen Buddhist temple that I attend during the celebration of the Buddha's birthday (kinda like Buddhist Christmas). So, yeah. It's been a busy few weeks. How about you, my darlings? What's going on in your corner of the world?

Trifecta of Dorkiness

So, I know many of you out there grew up like, y'know, actual teenagers, engaging in typically teenagery behavior and listening to legitimately cool music, and it must be awesome for you when bands like Pixies reunite and go on tour and release new material and stuff like that. But, do you want to know what the pop cultural equivalent is for me? How it looks when the stuff that's inextricably linked to memories from my late teens and early twenties (and, in all fairness, those of some of my closest comrades) all of a sudden comes back to prominence? Well, look no further than a few of this week's headlines and other newsworthy happenings:

~Ben Folds is releasing an album full of a cappella groups' interpretations of his songs

~The Decemberists have released their latest album, The Hazards of Love, which is, like The Tain writ large, basically a big, gay rock opera

~Steve Martin has bankrolled a high school production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile in Oregon after a bunch of parents signed a petition protesting it's too racy.

Yep. Somewhere in the universe, the 18-year-old version of myself is exulting over this news. Here, in Chicago, the 30-year-old me is faintly wincing.

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.

Happy Leap Day

All right, former Pirates of Penzance cast members, sing it with me: "for I was born in leap year / and that birthday will not be reached by me til 1940!" "Oh, horrible!"

Do something ridiculous and indulgent today, my kittens, and enjoy your extra 24 hours.

The Prestige

Gapers Block recently informed me that Jonathan Rosenbaum and J.R. Jones are now blogging for the Reader. Filmies rejoice! Just in time for the year-end smackdowns.

Speaking of J.R. Jones, he got it all wrong in his capsule review of The Prestige. I wouldn't ascribe any "elegant contours," other than those belonging to the distractingly young-looking Jessica Biel, to the utterly lightweight Illusionist. Sure, The Prestige's plot might be cluttered, and, as with Nolan's Memento, I'm not altogether convinced it's going to hold up over repeated viewings, especially when you know what the big reveal at the end is, but I was transfixed by every minute of the movie just the same. I've joked here previously about people who go into ecstasies about what a great actor Christian Bale is, as if they've just discovered what the rest of us have known for about half our lifetimes, but fo rizzle? The man absolutely devours everything (and everyone) around him with this performance. It's shocking how good he is. I mean, I'm about as big a fan of Hugh Jackman as one can be without being an X-Men fan-girl, but Bale is just so, so good, he makes Jackman's performance seem flat and dimensionless by comparison. Michael Caine is really the only actor who doesn't get eclipsed by Bale when they share the screen, and, fair play to him, y'know, seeing as how he's Moykle blaady Cayne and all. Dare we even mention the non-splash that Scarlett Johansson makes, outclassed as she is here? I've carped before about the "jittery informality" (to, embarrassingly, quote myself) of this generation of younger actors, but her lack of poise, especially in her scenes on stage as the magician's assistant, just made me really sad. Why do we no longer expect our movie stars to be able to move with any semblance of grace? Her shoulders were all scrunched and her neck was all giraffey when she was trying to make these grand voila! gestures. It was like she had no control at all over the way she was moving her body through space. And she's held up as a paragon of womanly excellence among screen actors? Whatever charms she possesses (and she can be a fine performer--she was truly winning in Lost in Translation) were just not well suited to even this relatively unimportant role. It was made abundantly clear that she was cast in the film as a gambit to bring a certain demographic of moviegoers into the theater. (This is a bad habit I'd like to see Nolan break before it's too late. From the fierce strength and intelligence of Carrie-Anne Moss and Hilary Swank he goes to the whiny schoolgirl prettiness of Katie Holmes and Johansson?) Anyway, the first entrance of David Bowie as Nikola Tesla alone might have been worth the price of admission, and what would a holiday-season blockbuster be without Andy Serkis? Sure, there are some tonal missteps that tend toward the cheesy and on-the-nose, but, for the most part, the movie is deliciously tense without being jump-out-and-give-you-a-heart-attack scary, and as far as plot complications and sleight-of-hand intrigue go, it more than made up for what I wished The Illusionist had been. And, if nothing else, it's worth it to see in Bale an actor really hitting his stride.

Slate does a noble job of looking into the so-called Pitchfork Effect.

Insofar as I can be said to have heroes or role models of any kind, Betty Comden would certainly have to be one, and I was greatly saddened to read that she died last week. Well, yeah, at age 89, so she clearly lived a long, full life. A long life full of wit and music and movies and the theater and Leonard Bernstein. (If memory serves, my dear MLBO'D actually got to meet both Comden and Green before they died, when she was performing in IU's production of On the Town in the spring of 2000.) Elisabeth Vincentelli has more, and some MP3s to sample, over at The Determined Dilettante.

The Notorious Jimmy James

OK, if there are any pussified and whiny indie kids out there who want to start a band so they can wear cool clothes and sing about their feelings and chat up pretty emo girls with pixie haircuts and facial piercings, LISTEN UP. You are forbidden to do any of this until you study at the feet of My Morning Jacket.

Other than a vague perception of them being jammy and Southern-fried, I knew nothing about this band, and largely because of the aforementioned perceptions, didn't think I needed to know anything about them, before I saw them play on the Northwestern campus last night. Kittens, I have been touched by the power of ROCK. Those motherfuckers walked on stage looking like they'd just been released from prison somewhere and played their fucking hearts out. They could have phoned it in for this student show in the gym. They could have fooled us by hiding behind the bluster and momentum of their hair and beards. But, no. They flung their bodies across the stage and whipped that hair around and screamed and sweated and went through some kind of public musical catharsis for our benefit. It was spectacular, in the truest sense of the word. I mean, yeah, there was a fair amount of guitar wankery, but, my background in jazz being what it is, I have infinitely more patience with semi-indulgent soloing in a live setting than I do on a recording. Not to mention that the kind of music they play is best experienced like a blast from a furnace at the gates of hell: hot, loud, and overpowering, which is to say, not through the tiny plastic earbuds plugged in to your iPod. It deserves a stack of amps and groovy lighting and the reverence of a crowd of kids who were inspired to shout things like, "why don't you just play all night!" I have a better understanding now than perhaps I ever did why Pamela des Barres wrote I'm with the Band, and why she lived it before she wrote it. Oh, and they played maybe four or five songs, and then, by way of greeting and introduction, lead singer Jim James steps up to the microphone and, perfectly framed against a bastketball hoop and the gray cinder block walls of the Patten Gymnasium, drawls, "I hear you don't have a fencing team here at Grover Cleveland. Well, I'm going to do my best to start one up for you." I nearly died.

Oh, yeah, and Stephen Malkmus played a solo set (which I unfortunately missed but I'm told was chockful of older Pavement and Silver Jews material) and the New Pornographers, including Neko Case, were the second band on the bill. Did I forget to mention all that in the heat of my excitement about MMJ? Pretty much best concert ever. Thanks again for the heads up, KP and DS. (I still owe you for the ticket.)

The reason I missed Malkmus's set was because I was en route from Navy Pier to Evanston after seeing A Flea in Her Ear at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Ah, who doesn't love a good, fast French farce? GH asked me a while ago to tag along with her and her gals to their season-subscription seats, and the show, while by no means revelatory, was still a delightful, brightly colored bit of piffle. Rick Hall was so effective in his dual role as man-of-the-house Chandebise and bellboy Poche that I found myself illogically wondering how in the world they were going to stage a face-to-face confrontation between the two characters.

This just in! Christianity is repressive, men are assholes, and the U.S. government hates pornography. All this, and not much more, courtesy of The Notorious Bettie Page, the kind of biopic that gives biopics a bad name. Lots of shuttling from plot point to plot point with only the skimpiest of G-strings connecting them to a greater theme or raison d'etre. Now, I don't necessarily go to movies based on true stories or real people looking for historical accuracy or trenchant re-creations of a larger social context, but I do, at the very least, expect to be entertained. The one-note-ness of Bettie Page was not only reductive in its simplifying of the character and the era, but deeply boring as well.

Sure, Gretchen Mol (Rounders, anyone?) looked great and was sexy as hell in the title role (though I do tend to agree with Violet Blue [beware the link; NSFW] when she says Mol doesn't exactly fill out Page's "ruffle-butt panties"), but, when basically all the part required of her was the repeated furrowing of her immaculately tweezed brow in earnest consideration every time her boundaries were being pushed by the series of increasingly fetishistic photographic demands being made of her, looking good is pretty much the most a person could ask for. She does work extra hard in one of the final scenes showing her, after recommitting her life to the Church (which, after a garish and blatantly sexualized "conversion" sequence, complete with her kneeling all dewy-eyed in front of the preacher man, is mainly dramatized by showing her buttoning a white sweater up over a black brassiere), reading from the Bible to (ahem, mostly male) passersby in an autumnal-looking park somewhere. Though her leap from slightly daffy but deliriously exuberant pin-up queen to devout evangelist has, despite some heavy-handed foreshadowing, no sense of dramatic inevitability whatsoever, Mol does her absolute best to translate her radiance from the flesh to the soul. Yet despite Mol's best efforts here, this fact of Page's personal history is just one more inconvenient episode to be gotten through until director Mary Harron can show us Bettie dancing (in homage to this ridiculous yet adorable video? [she's fully clothed and completely SFW here]) over the final credits.

Though I think Bettie's pictures and persona are totally awesome, I've never been one of those leopard-print, cat-eye-glasses hipster gals who would cite her as a major hero or sexual influence or anything, so my complaints here don't really stem from any kind of proprietary sense that no one's ever gonna do my Bettie justice. But, I did want to leave the movie theater feeling like I knew even a little bit more about her and her milieu than I did when I went in; I wanted to feel like I had something to chew on, some tangled tensions to try to resolve in my own head in idle moments of pondering on the train or at lunch this week. And this isn't to say that I didn't glean a few factoids about the nature of her work with Irving and Paula Klaw and Bunny Yeager and the Kefauver hearings on juvenile delinquency. But, Harron tips her hand so strenuously in favor of Bettie's heroic place at the center of a very thin slice of 1950s female sexuality, with only the barest, Walk the Line-esque examination of the events that led her there, that, quite apart from accounts of Page's post-cheesecake life, there was no ambiguity in this version of her story at all. It's all, yay Bettie, yay sexytime, fuck anything that distracts us for a moment from images of her frisky smile and plump bum, including the messy complexities of the woman herself. Yet, as we all know, the most effective titillation requires a little something be left to the viewer's imagination.

Poetry in an Empty Coke Can

I absolutely can. not. wait. for Brick to open here. Everything I've read about it sounds right up my alley, and the fact that I'm totally gaga for Joseph Gordon-Levitt after loving the fuck out of Mysterious Skin last year (it's funny that that's the second time I've linked to that old post within the past week and a half) is only fluffy bunny frosting on the kitten whiskers cake. According to the official site, Chicago is included in this coming weekend's limited release roll-out. Rawk. Chickety check Salon's brief interview with director Rian Johnson here.

Mr. Green Pea-Ness writes with passionate, breathless, furious intensity about Nelly Furtado's unstoppable new single "Maneater" (which similarly blew me away when I got around to downloading it this weekend), about what it means when Voxtrot covers the Talking Heads, and about seeing the Guillemots live.

Speaking of the Guillemots, their From the Cliffs EP compilation disk doesn't quite live up, back-to-front, to the promise of "Trains to Brazil" (then again, what could?), but their "Made Up Lovesong #43" has to be one of the silliest, happiest, swooniest things I've heard in ages. It's not just a song about love, it's a song that makes you feel like you're falling in love. If you see me walking around town with a goofy grin on my usually scowl-marked face and a bounce in my otherwise leaden step, I'm probably just listening to that song on my Nano. Approach with caution; I might huuuug you!

The Hype Machine recently pointed me in the direction of Joanna Newsom's predictably stunning cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Angel." I've never been able to figure out exactly why Jimi's music in general, and this song in particular, touches me so deeply. The reaction he elicits in me is a totally distinct beast from the respect I have for the rest of his contemporaries in the rock canon. I mean, I was putting "Angel" on mix tapes in high school when I thought "classic rock" meant those cheesy recordings of guitar shredders interpreting Mozart sonatas and shit (kidding; I wasn't that bad off), and I remember getting emotional at the EMP in Seattle with Holla Mossick and LBLA a few summers ago as we strolled through a room that reverently displayed the first draft of his lyrics for "Angel" scribbled on the back of an envelope or napkin or similar scrap of paper. Anyway, all of this is to say that, despite the shoddy quality of the live recording, for me, this MP3 provides a potent and irresistible combination of Joanna's otherworldly harp, her gift for singing way more than just the notes, and Jimi's divinely inspired (haha, not a pun, you bastards) composition.

I forgot to post this last week: Liza Minnelli losing her mind on Larry King.

Her almost-spit take when that guy calls up and says he's a musical theater major in Arizona is classic. Whatever demented asshole edited this thing together deserves an Emmy. Also, I love that some bastard on YouTube has tagged the clip with "trainwrecks." (Thanks, Benji.)

Had the chance to support some local art this weekend. LK and I popped by the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts on Friday night for the opening of Columbia's Interdisciplinary Arts & Media Thesis Show, featuring Liz Wuerffle's lovely series of pieces combining maps, pictures, and other memories of a life spent on the move. Dan Schwarzlose's synesthesia installation was also really cool, though I'm not sure how the interactive portion of it will be handled when he's not there behind the bar taking orders for stuff like hearing Yellow and touching Buddha Nature. On Sunday, I saw Seanachai's production of A Whistle in the Dark (at the Victory Gardens until May 14), which is certainly worth a look for the slowly burning, quietly seething rage that Coby Goss does so well and for Dan Waller's tour de force performance of tightly coiled menace shot through with scrappy, wounded pride.

A Child's History of Bombing

I know no one really wants to go out on a Friday night and pay $15 to feel bad about the state of the world, but. I would encourage all you Chicagoans to check out A Child's History of Bombing at the Neo-Futurarium. Word on the street (and by street, I mean box office) is that not many reservations have been made for Friday, March 3, so if you're at all inclined to attend, I would strongly recommend that you consider doing so tomorrow night. Regardless, please try to make it out before it closes on the 11th. It's a vital and truth-seeking piece, filled with great humility and curiosity about some of the most epic tragedies of the past century. Kudos to DS and co-creator Greg Allen for compiling and presenting this information with a perfect balance of personal horror and statistical magnitude, buoyed by the very best of what experimental/
multimedia theater can do. And, if you go, just be thankful you won't have to sit behind the Curtis LeMay fanclub like I did.

Scattered Thoughts

Here's a fun game to play the next time you're hanging out in the Borders cafe in Evanston: homeless guy or Northwestern professor?

I'd forgotten how much I like David Foster Wallace's essays. Sometimes thinking too much about David Foster Wallace's David Foster Wallaceness obscures the really appealing reasons why David Foster Wallace is David Foster Wallace. Reading the first few pages of "Big Red Son" in Consider the Lobster last night brought me back into the fold. (Mimi Smartypants agrees, or, I should say, I agree with her.)

I can't decide if I should make a snarky comment dismissing this survey or print out a hard copy of it and use the sheet to slowly papercut myself to death. (Via the Rabbit Blog.)

Oh the digital, futuristic isolation of it all! Listening to OK Computer on my iPod yesterday made me actually feel my thoughts start turning into 1s and 0s.

Best band name ever (revised and updated edition): The Kevins! BAK thinks the website is creepy; I say it's like a panda bear made out of marshmallows: twee, self-conscious, and fucking adorable. (Via Said the Gramophone.)

The more I think about Freygate, the more it genuinely upsets me. Not so much his role in any of this, but Oprah's appalling behavior. I suppose it's her prerogative to whip the whole thing into a frenzy in the service of "good television," but it completely invalidates any of the earth mother lovey-doveyness she fancies herself to be the living embodiment of. Her spectacular failure to treat this man, who is clearly in need of some genuine forgiveness for his admittedly shady behavior, with any semblance of grace is, in its own way, just as damning an example of misplaced American indignation as any of Dubya's fucked-up revenge politics. When will our collective national "me, me, me" temper tantrum finally die down?

I was all set to write a big post praising Soderbergh's Bubble the other day, but I kept getting tangled up in my own thoughts about it. I hope to gain some clarity soon, even if it's just some clarity about my own mutated ambivalence.

DS has a new show opening this weekend. It's called A Child's History of Bombing and will be playing at the Neo-Futurarium weekends through March 11. I plan on checking it out soon.

A big happy birthday shout-out to my beany brother today. Too bad he never reads this blog.

I'll Talk About Drinking Later, I Promise

Caught up with Rent and Capote this weekend. I tend to want to agree with the good folks at the A.V. Club about the former, which I think is actually more telling as a generational stance than a critical one. I shouldn't have been surprised that several older, more established/establishment critics, such as A.O. Scott, Owen Gleiberman, and even J.R. Jones, took the "yeah, it's cheesy, yeah, it's Disneyfied and reductive, but it still put a lump in my throat and won me over in spite of myself" cop-out instead of excoriating it for the completely uninteresting waste of time and talent it so clearly is. I was thankful, then, to find Nathan Rabin had as little patience for the soured milk in this time capsule as I did, which I'm going to chalk up, in a flailing belly flop of probably faulty logic, to the fact that we're younger and closer in age to the characters and have a more visceral memory of both the era in which the show is set and the heyday of the musical itself. Somehow that proximity seems to allow for a clearer perspective on where it went oh so wrong and a willingness to call it like we see it.

I guess I just have a hard time letting this movie slide by with a shrug, despite the fact that I was never really a Renthead back in the day. I just love musicals so much, and they're such a huge part of me and will probably always inform a great deal of my musical and artistic tastes, and I want, and expect, so much from them that I feel personally let down when they don't live up to my expectations, or, even worse, do live up to the cliched expectations of what a musical is "supposed" to be (cheesy, overwrought, culturally irrelevant, etc.). Not to mention that, in a world where the very nearly perfect stage-to-screen translation exists in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, there's just no fucking excuse for a movie musical—especially a moderately rock 'n' roll movie musical—not to have a healthy dose of self-awareness, formally. I think part of what subconsciously galled me most about the whole thing was its increasingly nested levels of abstraction: a movie based on a musical based on an opera using most of the original Broadway cast members playing characters a good decade younger than they are, filmed in the mid '00s but written in the mid '90s and set in the late '80s, on a San Francisco soundstage version of a New York milieu that doesn't really exist anymore. In another, more capable director's hands, this project could have gone to some thrillingly Brechtian places with a few meta gestures here (without resorting to the goofy "we're putting on a show in the desert" thing that Jesus Christ Superstar does), but Columbus, big shocker, simply wasn't up to the task.

(Amusing sidenote: on the brown line platform at Randolph and Wabash around 7:30 on Thanksgiving evening, a bunch of young DePaul students were keeping us all warm with how much they were flagrantly flaming in their discussion of appropriate lip gloss for the cold air and whether they should see Rent or the new Harry Potter movie later that night. The train eventually pulled up and an upper middle class, upper middle aged white lady who had been quietly sitting by herself on a nearby bench the whole time meekly offered to one of the boys as we were all stepping into the same car together, "oh, I saw Rent on stage when it was here in Chicago." Ha! Classic. That exchange totally made my night.)

On the complete other side of the tonal spectrum, I admired Capote for its restraint. I liked that there were no big, obvious Oscar moments, that the score was both fairly spare and used minimally—and never overly ham-fisted when it was—and that the acting was nicely nuanced and not necessarily splashy in the usual biopic way. However, having never read In Cold Blood, I don't feel like I have much more to say about it.

Finally saw Andrew Bird perform live for the first time this weekend and was every bit as wowed as I expected to be. BAK said she was disappointed that it was a relatively low-energy show, but, having nothing to compare it to, I was just blown away. Any performer who can captivate an audience so intensely and so thoroughly is clearly something special. Each song he played from Mysterious Production instantly became my favorite song from the album, at least until he played the next one, and I don't think I've ever yelled louder at a relatively demure show than I did at the end of "Fake Palindromes," which was just impossibly awesome. Bird somehow seems to burn a little more cleanly as a human; I get the sense that he's probably a vegan and most likely has come close to levitating a couple of times during what I imagine to be his early morning yoga and meditation regimen. All this is to say: the focus, my God, the focus. He actually walked by me at the end of the show as I was on my way to the bathroom, and I was so breathless with excitement I could barely force enough air out of my lungs to croak "brilliant show" at him. Which, right after I said it, immediately felt as pointless and irreducible as telling the Eiffel Tower that it is certainly is a pretty structure.

Oh, the tragicomic Romeo and Julietness of it all! The headline says everything you need to know: Teen with Peanut Allergy Dies After Kiss. (Note also that the URL defines it as "canada_deadly_kiss".) Kinda awesome in its own sweetly sad way. That poor kid is going to need so much therapy.

Get ready to have some strong opinions about this, one way or another: Dating Without Kundera—Milan, that is (via mimi smartypants).

Now for the Liz Armstrong portion of the post: and then I got really drunk last night and fell down. Big love to the Pimp Ninja, who once again was responsible for getting me out for a fair bit of alcohol-related mischief on a school night.

Ready? OK!

My father is fond of telling a story about the time he went to a Don Ellis concert at some point in the mid-'70s and was nearly brought to tears when the crowd spontaneously began to clap in 7/8. Ellis was renowned for his play with odd time signatures (one of his songs is titled "33 222 1 222" because that's the subdivision of one measure of that tune in 19/8), but he swung them so hard and so smooth that they felt completely funky and completely natural. I had my own version of that experience on Saturday night at the Sufjan Stevens show at the Metro when the crowd spontaneously began to clap in the 11/8 of "The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders: Part I—The Great Frontier." Feeling those "one-two-three-four CLAP, six-seven-eight-nine CLAP CLAPs" rising up from the ground floor was like feeling the perfect distillation of that place in his music where the complex becomes simple and the simple becomes complex (or the universal becomes personal and the personal becomes universal or however you want to say it). It was love and it was joy and it was respect and it was understanding and it was intimacy and it was participation and it was appreciation. I feel like that's what being a fan of Sufjan is all about. Plus, as anticipated, there were Illinois-themed cheers and a human pyramid, not to mention both "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and "Chicago" played as encores. I was a very happy kitty. (I also picked up another concert poster; check it out here. I didn't take the picture, but that's what it looks like . . . except for the fact that, unbeknownst to me, some chucklenuts stepped on it before it got rolled up and rubber-banded and handed to me, so there's a big fucking footprint in the middle of it that I discovered yesterday when I opened it up to flatten it out. Grr.)

A longish interview with Carl Newman on Pitchfork today.

Yes, childrens, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Don't disappoint me. Or Colin Meloy. Or the good folks at 826 Valencia. Of course, the only pirate-speak that comes to my mind at the moment is Gilbert and Sullivan's, which, depending on where you're standing, is either totally weak or totally fitting. MLBO'D and CTLA, say it with me now, in the best Beard-bellow you can muster: "A keener hand at scuttling a cunarder or cutting out a P. & O. never shipped a handspike!" (Thanks, Berianne.)

G.B. and A.C.

Not that I really have much by way of point of reference, but the Gurlesque Burlesque show at the Abbey on Saturday night was amazing. Aside from being sweaty, drunken, hilarious, rowdy, political, inclusive, and sexy as hell (um, and did I mention sweaty?), it served as a potent reminder that we so often overlook imagination as a key component of sexuality and eroticism. The unbelievable creativity on display in the performers' choice of music, motif, and message turned the night into this anything-goes party where everybody was desirable, everybody was a star. The room felt united in this friendly, communal, participatory celebration of the place where the delights of the body and mind intersect, rather than being a slimy, leering, onanistic spectacle to be consumed solely for pornographic titillation. This allowed for a two-way street of maturity and respect between the performers and the audience, which, oddly enough, generated a vibe that felt almost innocent. (Which was enhanced, of course, by the reverence with which many of the performers held all things World War II– and Cold War–era.) We cheered as they shed their clothes, not solely because we were turned on (though these fine specimens were most definitely hawt, in their splendid array of sizes, shapes, colors, ages, experience levels, and attitudes), but also because we were so thankful—thankful for their sharing their talents with us, thankful to be hanging out together for the night, thankful that this wonderful art form has been revived with such a genuine passion for the lessons it can teach us about gender and sexuality in an engaging and non-militant way. And, aside from only a handful of cheap jokes, which seemed to be all in good fun, there wasn't an overabundance of hatin' on the straights in the crowd, which is always nice. Highlights for me included the amazing song stylings of Nomy Lamm, a performance by the Hellcat Hussies that I'll bet damali ayo would have approved of, the smokin' hot Michelle L'Amour and her award-winning Snow White dance, the thrillingly bizarro Lady Ace, and the inspiring grande dame and headliner Satan's Angel.

I've been loving the New Pornographers' new album Twin Cinema. I can't fully support this theory yet, but I think it might make an excellent companion piece to Spoon's Gimme Fiction in the way they both use, uh, cinema, as jumping-off points for these rangy, jangly sonic treasure maps of texture and emotion. Neko Case nearly brings me to tears on "These Are the Fables."

A big welcome back to LBLA and CTLA and a shout-out to the cutest baby in the world, whom I finally got to meet this weekend.