Room for Rhombuses, Too

OK, I give up. There's no way I can even pretend that I'm not geeked about seeing this movie. Behold, Nacho Libre (via), starring Jack Black, directed by Jared Hess, and written by Mike White. I think my inner twelve year old boy just had an asthma attack of unadulterated giddiness. (Maybe these links will be of some interest to the good folks who occasionally stumble upon my blog while looking for actual wrestling information?)

As long as I'm admitting embarrassing things this week, I might as well admit that I have a real soft spot for John Mayer. (So does ?uestlove.) Um, does this Radiohead cover (via) earn him any cred at all? Or does it just make things worse? I think it's tits.

Go nominate a blogger you love for one of the Best Sentences of 2005 (via). The deadline to submit is tomorrow. Seriously, this isn't a boomerang-style hint to nominate me or anything; I would just love to see some deserving alterna-media folks get the credit they're due outside of something as relatively insular as the Bloggies. I know I've quoted it before, but this sentence about Franz Ferdinand from Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog was the first thing to come to mind. It still makes me smile and is worthy of commendation (as is most of the rest of his blog, both the writing and the music he highlights).

Though twitchy funk is their bread and butter, I definitely prefer them with their Franz-o-meter set to Ultra-Jaunt, which makes them sound vaguely like late period Grant Lee Buffalo decked out in Dior.

Destroyer's Rubies

This album has got its hooks into me and hard.

The music snob in me hates to have to admit this in a public forum, but it occurs to me that I, mostly, listen to music for comfort, which is as much a function of where I listen to music as why. (Who wants to be additionally challenged on the El in the morning? Not me. This is probably why I resent the level of commitment the Fiery Furnaces are asking of me and why I remain basically content to ignore them.) Dan Bejar's voice is not comfortable. But, where it jars on a New Pornos album, because most of the rest of the thing can be listened to for comfort (c'mon, those of you who have a copy of my best of '05 liner notes have read all my bullshit about climaxing "hey las" and whatnot--what is that other than feel-good comfort in the guise of some kind of passive catharsis?), it is essential to the experience of listening to Destroyer's Rubies, inextricable from it, no matter what kind of contortions I have to do to be able to deal with it. Destroyer's Rubies cannot be listened to comfortably, no matter how much the music perfectly resembles the kind of thing I usually go in for--which is exactly what has seduced me right into it. But, that voice. It's like I'm listening to two albums while I'm listening to Destroyer's Rubies. Or maybe even three. I'm letting the music groove and bubble under me, while I'm holding Bejar's voice at arm's length in front of me like a frying pan full of sparking, boiling oil pricking at my skin and I'm holding the lyrics like a pail full of milk, sloshing, overflowing, propped against my right hip bone. Listening to this album is an event. I feel part of an artistic moment listening to it.

All the trainspotting discussions of intertextuality I've encountered on the Interslice (which are themselves becoming more and more twistily and twistedly self-referential; witness the 'Glow's convention of capping BEJAR and the endless linking to Zoilus, which of course I am flagrantly guilty of as well [but, cheers to this review for referring to Bejar as "the New Pornographers' elusive beardo"]) bore me more than a little. Yeah, it's because I've pretty much shrugged off my former English major tendencies and have come to grips with the fact that my temperament is not at all suited to that kind of analysis, but it's also probably because I'm a Destroyer neophyte and wouldn't get any of the references to his previous albums anyway. It rankles because I don't want my experience of this album as a self-contained object taken away from me. Obviously, of course, duh, I know no album is ever a self-contained object, but you dig where I'm coming from. I don't want to feel like I'm being implicitly told that the relationship I'm beginning to forge with this album is somehow compromised because I don't have the requisite mental hyperlinks to the Destroyer back catalog. That pesky snob in me got a little sad when I read that Carl Wilson wrote of the album back in December, "...All of which helps make the album 'accessible' to those who don't necessarily have the preoccupations shared by Dan and, I suspect, many core Destroyer fans up till now. But the real reason this album is going to be embraced by many, many people outside that inner circle is that it's so luxuriantly musical." Oh my poor little inner snob! I've just been called out onto the mat: I'm late to the party, and, in the end, I'm only there for the music. Recipe for l-a-m-e. But, fuck it. What am I gonna do about it? This is obviously the kind of treatment Bejar courts with his whole approach, and if I can't roll with it, I'm just going to have to grab at what I can. Oh, but even for a neophyte, there's so much to grab! This is a delicious, irresistible album and it will not be denied. Approach at your own risk, but for heaven's sake, I have to keep reminding myself, approach with complete abandon.

My Instant Reaction? Pure Glee

Remember my series of posts last summer about how much I love Malcolm Gladwell? Those of you who occasionally visit my MySpace page may also remember the period of time when my "who I'd like to meet" paragraph ended in a swoon with Señor Gladwell's name. Well, be still my heart: he's blogging now (via). Maybe he'll see my blog linked to his through Technorati and he'll send me an e-mail thanking me for my support and we'll fall in love (at first site, natch) and get married and have whip-smart little babies with big hair and endlessly excitable intellects capable of processing complex ideas into wonderfully digestable yet memorable and thought-provoking nuggets of information.... Nerd crushes rule!

You've Got What They Call Bad Equilibrium

I don't know when this turned into a hip-hop blog, but: for those of you who, like me, were somewhat disappointed with 8 Mile when it came out a few years ago, please be sure to check out Hustle & Flow. (::sigh:: It seems like all I've been doing for the past month and a half is catching up with movies and music I missed in '05. I've yet to see or buy anything that's legitimately been released in '06.) LK and I watched it last night, and it's really pretty great. It's everything 8 Mile wanted to be. It took all that dusty, street intelligence and went one step beyond to infuse it with genuine passion. (The relative bloodlessness of Hanson's approach was my main criticism of 8 Mile way back when.) It would have been absurdly easy to hate Hustle & Flow (and a good handful of people did; scroll down through Metacritic), considering how it leans pretty cornily on the redemptive power of music and populates its landscape with some broad stereotypes of pregnant, abused, and otherwise put-upon ho's, then has the temerity to make its theme song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." (Which, following again in 8 Mile's footsteps, is, in fact, nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar this year.) But, I kind of think that's exactly the point. It's reminding us that everyone is worthy of our sympathy, that there are no easy choices in life, that feelings of disenfranchisement or confusion don't necessarily break down along rigidly prescribed gender (or even racial) lines, that anyone who struggles to do the Right Thing can help inspire (oh, that word) those around him/her to also try to integrate the messy aspects of their lives into a more seamless whole. It loosely bats around blaxploitations tropes, thwarting our expectations in all the right places, and thrills us with the power of creation. It's really no cheap accident that the main female love interest spends the whole movie walking around, like, seventeen months pregnant and that the most exciting scenes take place in the cushy, womb-like comfort of the jerry-rigged home studio where DJay and his two co-producers sweat and struggle and strain to birth a demo with the potential to become a radio hit. (Um, hello, how much like placenta is that lava lamp on the mixing board?) Anyway, it's a great little movie that will make you care about hip-hop at the same time that it assures you that if you think hip-hop is all it's about, you're totally missing the point.

Are all you other music-heads keeping up with the great quantity of pixels being spilled about Destroyer's Rubies? (Stream it from the Merge Records website here and download the first of three free MP3s from Salon's Audiofile here.) From the little of the album I've listened to, I think the melodies are outstanding and the arrangements gorgeous, and I'm sure the lyrics will reveal themselves as wonderfully intricate and thoughtful when I have a chance to really sit down and ponder them, but I just don't care for Bejar's voice. And, I don't think it's just a knee-jerk reaction. I've never really warmed to his tunes on Twin Cinema, even for as awesomely rocking as "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras," et al., are. He's just slightly more nasal and yelpy than my ears can comfortably or willingly handle. However, if anyone is going to get me to stay patient with and probably purchase this album, it's Carl Wilson over at Zoilus. He says, "it's getting to the point where all I want to do is argue for the richness of Dan's comedy, but the reviews are making it clear that lots of people don't share this sense of humour, and I honestly do not get how it's possible to enjoy it otherwise, and certainly to feel the sense of tragedy. Which is (?) maybe why folks feel it's all about some preoccupation with intellect?" Shit, man, if there's anything I'm a sucker for in criticism, it's an insistence on allowing the richness of comedy to pull you into the art of the thing.

More on comedy? I couldn't agree more with Said the Gramophone's assessment that the Flaming Lips' leaked "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" is "exactly the sort of thing for people...who don't have much time for Lips albums but who love their best singles." I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I feel about the Lips, but I've been listening to this song incessantly on my Nano, and the screechy, annoying, completely nutty "ah-ah-ah" bit in the third minute cracks me up every time. (The inherent humor of people singing gloriously out of tune would always send MLBO'D and I into seizures of delight during high school choir concerts and community theater productions.) And, despite the fact that I was about to rave on about the greatness of the Ricky Gervais podcast after listening to one belatedly downloaded episode a week or so ago, now I'm not so sure. After listening to the new one that was just released this weekend, something about hearing Gervais mercilessly goad cohost Karl Pilkington into giving his opinions on increasingly bizarre "what if" scenarios just so he (Gervais) can laugh at the outlandishly odd things he (Karl) says made me supremely uncomfortable. Comedy doesn't come from asking someone with a slightly offbeat sensibility "well...what about this?"; it comes from creating an atmosphere where the conversation can wander to those what if places so that the wacky opinions and observations can arise naturally. Gervais's set-ups feel about two steps removed from the bullies in primary school asking the handicapped kid to explain where babies come from. I love British comedy, and I want to like Ricky Gervais, but I somehow always run up against stuff like this that grates on me enough to keep me at a distance. I suspect Stephen Merchant is the actual comic mastermind at work here.

The Brown Line Shall Rise Again

As I was exiting the Rockwell station for the last time in its current incarnation yesterday evening, I saw that someone had tied a bunch of black balloons to the bike rack right outside Lake Claremont Press. A bit overdramatic perhaps, but it felt right. Not counting the months I lived in London, this (admittedly, temporary) station closure will mark the longest distance I have ever had to walk to/from my own home in order to access public transportation during my commute. Is it 2009 yet?

Love Love Love

"Some things you'll do for money / and some you'll do for fun / but the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one."

Lyrics from one of the most healing songs I can think of. And yet, they're only as true as we allow them to be, kittens. I invite you to join me in trying to make them a little more true today than they were yesterday.

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.

Songs

I'm having trouble thinking of a song that has made me laugh out loud as often as, or has made me smile one of those stupid, smirky, "I'm trying hard not to smile so I don't look like a maniac, but I'm not exactly succeeding, am I?" public transportation smiles as often as, the RETARDED BRILLIANCE of The Kevins' "My First Glass of Champagne." That part where they laugh, and then sigh, and then muse, "you're a funny girl" is one of the most motherfucking charming things to have hit my ears in recent memory. "Is that real leather?" Golden. Please listen to it.

I was also going to fawn about The Guillemots' "Trains to Brazil" (which I originally found here), but it turns out the proprietor of Green Pea-Ness (link via StG) has already said it all for me, about a month and a half ago to boot. (Bonus points for one of the more interesting discussions of the Arcade Fire phenomenon I've read.) Sometime I'm going to have to make a mix of great songs to play first thing in the morning; this would definitely be on the list, and not just because of the sublimely cheesy alarm clock sound effect. In addition to the "Come on Eileen" comparisons, I would add that it also feels like a less obnoxious relative of "Walking on Sunshine," especially with those joyfully honking horns.

Jens Lekman's "Maple Leaves" is a low-fi stunner. (I prefer the 7" version, but the EP version is good, too.) The churning drums that morph into a shrugging and shucking beat that massages the aching shoulders of the Scott-Walker-o-Maticized strings that tickle the clever "make believe" / "maple leaves" wordplay all just serve to keep you swooning long enough not to realize how vulnerable you are to being suckerpunched by the lines "so we talked for hours / and you cried into my sheets / and you said you hated your body / that it was just a piece of meat / I disagree / I think you're beautiful / but it's impossible to make you understand / that if you don't take my hand I'll lose my mind completely / madness will finally defeat me." This is epically compact songwriting at its finest, kittens.

This is all a very elaborate and somewhat pretentious apology to those of you who were hoping for some snark about the Grammys. I wasn't home last night and totally missed them. Defamer, maybe? Pink Is the New Blog (even though he hasn't posted as of this writing yet today)? (UPDATE: and here's Pink's recap.)

(BTW, HB JRM, if you get around to reading this. I hear it's a perfect day to chase tornados.)

Lovely and Excellent

Ah, the internets can be quite a lovely place when nice people say such nice things.

Sayeth John Darnielle: "Suffrage gave woman the vote; Betty Friedan gave them hope, and the power to dream, and in so doing she brought us all a step closer to liberation. For if we tolerate a world in which our mothers — and our sisters; and our daughters, and our wives; our closest friends and dearest companions — are not free to follow their dreams and to chase down their passions, in short to seek out their true selves, then that world is a paltry thing, and our own lives within it are greatly diminished."

Sayeth Alex Ross: "Mozart did not come from nowhere. He was the product of a society that was avid for music on every level, that believed in the possibility of an all-encompassing musical genius. The society we live in now believes otherwise; we divide music into subcultures and subgenres, we separate classical music from popular music, we locate genius in the past. Today, a young man with Mozart's abilities would very likely labor in obscurity, and perhaps give up in frustration. As I once wrote, if Mozart were alive today, he'd be dead. If you really want to celebrate Mozart's world, Mozart's culture, Mozart's life, you would ignore the man himself and listen to music by a living composer. . . . Celebrate Mozart another time, when he's not being rammed down your throat."

Sayeth the rabbit: "You see what's out there, the stupid messages, the dumb comments, the countless people who don't get it, who want to tell you how you've failed, how they're better than you because they've been locked into the same rigid concepts and followed the same prescribed path from the time they were infants. You see all of that and you say, 'That's the way it is. Fine. Whatever.' And then you move on to what you are - separate from all of that. None of that shit has anything to do with you. Fuck the statistics. You have a great job, you look good, you're pretty happy. . . . [G]et out, open up, own how great you are, stop apologizing. Fuck the statistics. Fuck the sad stories. Nothing is standing in your way."

Excellent food on Friday at Pizza D.O.C, excellent lexicographical silliness on Friday night with the birthday boys and crew, excellent Matthew Kerstein / Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin / Catfish Haven show at the Subterranean Saturday night, excellent drinking and carousing even later Saturday night at Club Foot. Most excellent indeed.

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.

Obligatory Frey Post

Fuck the whole James Frey controversy. I wanna see Oprah stage an "oh no you di'int!" smack-down with Elmo and his potty pals (potty pals=best euphemism for incompetent, money-grubbing editors ever). "You betrayed millions of potty-training toddlers, Elmo! This isn't sad for me, this is embarrassing."

(Elmo link via the newly redesigned You Can't Make It Up.)

Laura Veirs

Laura Veirs is totally my new BFF.

Saw her open for Colin Meloy at the Park West last night, and she is absolutely the cutest thing evuh. There's a really beautiful childishness about her that stops just short of innocence or preciousness. She traverses a similar landscape to the one Bjork does, that place where visions of wood sprites tippling absinthe-laced oolong tea collide with horizon-size images of blood and bone and muscle and sinew. She's like Heavenly Creatures set to music, this tiny woman with an epic imagination that finds wonder in the power of nature yet also finds delight in the familiarity of the mundane. Her precise and almost affected diction, the way she would sway from side to side while she was playing the guitar, and the exuberance with which she used her looping machine to harmonize with herself all helped create the impression that she probably just does this to amuse herself when she's home alone. There's something undeniably special about her. I chatted her up a bit at the end of the night, told her how much I love Year of Meteors, and had her sign the copy of her previous album Carbon Glacier that I'd just bought at the merch table. I didn't feel too bad about spazzing out on her; I figured she'd get where I was coming from.

And then there was Colin. Ah, Colin. I so love these solo shows that he does; they make me feel like, "ah yes, I get to spend an evening with my old pal who's visiting town for the day." His music is such a huge part of my life now; I kind of got emotional a couple of times throughout the night just because hearing him sing his songs felt so comforting and made me so happy. He played a nearly perfect variety of stuff from each of the albums and the Five Songs EP, as well as one song from his tour-only disk of Shirley Collins covers, one old Tarkio tune (in honor of Kill Rock Stars rereleasing an anthology of their stuff), and two new songs. One of the songs was for Fetus Meloy, as expected, and the other was inspired by/in honor of the Shankill Butchers, whom he'd recently read about in a book of Irish history. It's another one of those hilariously grisly Struwwelpeter-type songs he does so well, full of admonitions to children to mind their mothers or else the Shankill Butchers will cut them in their sleep. The overly earnest and worshipful audience, full of chubby drama geeks who arrived as soon as the doors opened so they could line the lip of the stage in reverence, was stone-silent through the whole thing; I don't think they got that it was supposed to be funny. In addition to the Shirley Collins song, he also reached the requisite indie-cover quota by ingeniously tacking one verse of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on to the end of "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" and finishing his always-impressive solo version of "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade" with the Decemberists' wonderful funeral dirge arrangement of The Smiths' "Ask." It was a beautifully paced, emotionally satisfying show, smooth without being soulless. (Yes, that was pointed at you, Mick.)

Mille Grazie

To the best, most generous, and sneakiest friends a gal could have: thank you, thank you, and thank you again!

Tell Me "Snack Hamster" Doesn't Sound Like a B-52s Song

A weird day for weird animal behavior in urban environments: snakes and hamsters hanging out amiably in a zoo in Tokyo (thanks for the link, Nora Rocket) and a whale swimming up the Thames in London. This makes Mike O'D's joke about the dead pigeon on my backdoor staircase asking me in a Groucho Marx voice, "wha? Ya mean'ya never saw'r a dead pigeon before?" seem almost possible.

A brief but surprisingly bold defense of religion in indie rock today on Pitchfork.

I have recently taken to enhancing my hot beverages with French vanilla Coffeemate, and, boy howdy, does it make me feel a little less apathetic about my life right now. It's especially good with the Celestial Seasonings Perfectly Pear White Tea. Mwrowr.

Dear ambiguously accented, fast-talking waiter from the Wildfire last night: you get funnier the more I think about you. You were a fine waiter and all, and I mean no disrespect, but, seriously, are you part cartoon? Were the formative years of your childhood spent in an RKO comedy? Never has anyone actually said to me, in apparent earnest, "thass veruh, veruh nahce. Eggggcellent choissse." I couldn't have asked for a more perfect complement to the retro steakhouse ambiance. Bogart's Charhouse could use a few of your ilk to help class up the joint.

Can I Give Props to Ray Charles, Too? Just for Snicks?

You know what they always say: a journey of three billion miles begins with a single launch. We're going to Pluto today, kittens! Isn't that fantastic?

Blockbuster Books of the Bible, including "Deuteronomy, Where's My Car?", "Daniel Darko," "2nd Chronicles of Riddick," and "Zephaniah and Hutch."

Speaking of The Chronicles of Riddick, here are the Top Thirty Facts About Vin Diesel, including "Crop circles are Vin's way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down" (thanks, Nora Rocket).

I know I linked to the Who's the Boss website about a million years ago, but the drawing in the "featured commentary" section here just makes me unspeakably happy.

The Golden Globes, in summary:

• We like Felicity Huffman, Michelle Williams, and Cynthia Nixon.


• Geena Davis redeemed her dress by lying in her speech about her presidential role's impact on young girls.


• A History of Violence is by far the best of the movies it was nominated against in the Best Motion Picture–Drama category (and probably still the best even if you throw the Musical or Comedies in there, too), but I'm not surprised Brokeback Mountain won.


• The Desperate Housewives displayed an unacceptable amount of giggling. I'm just sayin', none of the actors giggled when Lost won.


• The only thing going through the audience's heads while John Williams was walking to the stage to accept his Best Original Score award was "DUN. DUN. DUN. DUN DA-DUN. DUN DA-DUN!" I hereby nominate him to be put out to pasture already!


• Do you think Mel Brooks was sad about being at the ceremony alone this year?


• Props to Zach Braff for drinking a fucking bottle of Bud in the midst of all that Moet.

I'm only scratching the surface here. For those of you who crave the snark, Defamer has some of the best Globes wrap-up on the blogs (with pictures!).

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.

Woody? No, He Would Not

I know what you're thinking, and, no, the oatmeal latte at Cafe Descartes isn't as good as you'd think it would be.

Neither is Match Point.

"I worked for a book publisher, and actually attempted to turn down Harry Potter. The first Harry Potter title came in, and we had an editorial meeting about it, and I said, 'This is just absolute rubbish. There are so many better children's books that aren't being published.' And I was overruled": an interview with The Clientele, a recent "discovery," whose album Strange Geometry (#17 on Pitchfork's year-end top 50 list!) is aces.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, kittens!

I went down to the Hilton with BAK and JP during the lunch hour today and protested W's appearance in Chicago. It felt good.

Beg, borrow, steal, forge a loved one's death certificate so you can take a bereavement day off from work, do whatever you have to do to go see this man live.

This is the best, most hopeful, interesting, and thoughtful analysis of celebrity worship I've ever read. (I gotta go check Pink now.... It's the noble thing to do for humankind, right?)

CTLA and I used to joke about how much we wished we could CGI Alan Rickman into the Keanu Reeves role in the movie version of Much Ado About Nothing just so the film would be rounded out with a genuinely satisfying bad guy and, y'know, someone who's actually able to deliver the language. Well, going to see Rumor Has It... with my sister last weekend was one of the only times I can remember wanting to CGI an entire movie into and on top of another entire movie. God, it was execrable. I love pop culture in all its guises, and I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the middlebrow in general, and the practice of going to the movies is just inherently thrilling to me anyway, so it wasn't like I was dragged kicking and screaming, against my will to the theater. If it's something a family member expresses a desire to see, I'm usually inclined to tag along and will absolutely feel I've gotten my money's worth if I can spot an interesting performance or a savvy little bit of writing or an unexpected moment of humor or emotion between characters. But, bzzzzzt. Came up short this time around. Which is unfortunate, because there's actually a neat little movie hidden, deep, in the concept, somewhere. It could have been a melancholy, twisted Michel Gondry-ian take on a woman's journey to discover the hidden truths about her family and thus about herself, refracted through the prism of a classic film, with the potential for some surreal imagery commenting on how we inevitably fictionalize and/or mythologize our families' backstories to deal with them more handily or fill in gaps that we've never quite been able to have sufficiently explained to us. But instead, we had the Team Aniston mascot waffling prettily about how confused she is about everything (dude, if I had to constantly peer out at the world through that thick curtain of hair, I'm sure everything would look a little skewed to me, too), a not-quite-ironic-enough-to-be-
cool-again-yet Kevin Costner sleaze-a-thon, Shirley MacLaine phoning it in with a few bitchy lines and soused double entendres, a minor incest subplot inexplicably played for laughs, and a cheery-bright mainstream commercial movie sheen slopped all over both the lighting and the general tone. Mark Ruffalo, at least, did his part to put everyone to shame, infusing the token "nice guy gets screwed over but eventually wins the girl in the end" mensch role with that beautifully dark rage and indignation he does so well. ::sigh:: What's that Buddy Fiddler line from City of Angels (the musical)? "I saw the whole movie in my head. It's a pity we can't sell tickets to my head; we'd save a fortune."

Race to the Finish Line

OK, I've been playing media catch-up over the past week or so, consuming (mainly) music and movies as fast as I possibly can before the end of the year, while still attempting to give them their due.

I'm finally taking time to digest Extraordinary Machine, which grows on me, almost despite myself, with every listen (does anyone have a download of the Jon Brion version I can borrow or copy? I'd be curious to hear it and compare). I just got around to picking up Late Registration, which, at this early stage in my appreciation of it, I think might actually be better than The College Dropout (can it possibly be true?). And, I recently bought The National's album Alligator, which, if you squint, is about one flugelhorn away from being Cousteau, except for the fact that it's totally not cheesy at all, doesn't flaunt its sterilizing-your-bullet-hole-with-bourbon lyrics like "Karen, put me in a chair / Fuck me and make me a drink," and has way more than mood going for it. Plus, I loves me some world-weary baritone.

Went out to see Good Night, and Good Luck on Tuesday night, at long last. Yeah, it's kind of a glorified PBS special, and the plot, such as it is, is really just a vehicle for the archival footage and the commentary on the state of journalistic integrity in this country, but it's gripping as all get-out and rabble-rousing in just the right way. The evocative black and white visuals, though perhaps a predictable stylistic choice (really, though, what the hell else are you going to do with it?), are absolutely gorgeous. Clooney's turning into quite the little director, isn't he? I've heard folks make comparisons to Clint Eastwood, but I think between Clooney's leading man persona and his occasionally smarmy self-satisfied, self-righteous attitude, the more apt comparison might be to—wait for it—the Golden Boy, Robert Redford. There's a very Quiz Show vibe in the 1950s / loss of innocence / TV-insiderness of Good Night.

King Kong is nothing short of spectacular, in both the connotational and denotational sense of the word. As CTLA has often been known to say, I laughed, I cried, I took notes. Peter Jackson can do no wrong. He's one of the rare directors I can think of who possesses the ability not only to ratchet up the thrills way beyond anything you've ever seen on screen before, but also to then use and build on that visceral response he's just elicited from you in service of deepening your emotional reaction to the story. In one of the most brilliant edits I've ever seen, the movie cuts from the heart-pounding dinosaur stampede on the island to a shot of Ann Darrow getting dropped from Kong's palm when he returns safely to his lair. Far from being just an ADD-induced switch to the next scene, Jackson and his editor knew it was imperative to harness our exhausted, breathless, terrified, ecstatic excitement and transfer those feelings, seamlessly, over to Ann. When you literally feel like you've spent a couple hours in her shoes on this grand, confusing adventure, the heartbreak at the end is all the more potent. Highly recommended. Bonus points for catching the Sumatran Rat Monkey inside joke when they're taking a tour of the boat.

And then, of course, there's Brokeback Mountain. Ah, disappointment is such a loaded word, isn't it? Now, I know I'm going to sound like a pretentious wanker for saying this, and I'm totally, 100% willing to be proven wrong, but I just can't shake my suspicion that the medium of film itself is fundamentally unsuited to tell the story this story is telling. "Brokeback Mountain," the story, is a masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Annie Proulx devotee, and I only just read it two or three weeks ago, but I was so immediately taken with its power that I knew it was going to be (no pun intended) an uphill battle for a movie to do it justice. The translation from page to screen is admirable; it gets everything from plot points and main characters to, in a general sense, the spare, stoic tone pretty much right. But, not to get all film schooly here, I don't think Fang Lee (yeah, I know it's Ang Lee, but I heard Hugh Grant once call him "Fang Lee" and I thought it was the funniest thing ever) sufficiently accounted for the way the sexualizing gaze of the camera would transform it from a love story that happens to get tangled up in homosexuality into a homosexual story that happens to get tangled up in love.

Maybe I'm just being immature, but considering how rife the tropes of the traditional movie Western are with homosexual undertones (as Stephen Holden aptly points out), it took everything in me not to want to snicker like a madman each time, pre-consummation, the two characters so much as glanced at one other, not to mention anytime anyone said anything about "fishing," "hunting," or "horseback riding." There's even a latent giggle in my tendency to, however affectionately, refer to the movie as The Gay Cowboys. I shouldn't have wanted to do that. I would never even be tempted to give the short story that nickname. I could stick a pen in my eye for temporarily reinforcing the unbelievably still-lingering, century-old fallacy that cinema can't summon the psychological richness that literature can, but, goddamn it, the visuals kind of trivialize what Proulx was trying to do here. Even without nudity or explicit sex scenes, film invites us as viewers to voyeuristically consider bodies in motion and when those bodies belong to two beautiful men kissing rapturously on the mountainside, then, by golly, you've got yourself a gay cowboy pitcha, no matter how much dialogue and how much Method is expended in service of the idea of it being about greater social issues or, yes, even capital-L Love.

The way I see it, this story is not about sex. It's not about homosexuality. It's about love. I know it's a slippery slope to talk about love in the context of gay rights, or, hell, even just general societal acceptance, but that's exactly what's so fascinating, to me, about Proulx's story. She posits this situation where two people who are the loves of each other's lives, and use their sexuality as a means of expressing it, don't know what to with themselves or the intensity of their feelings because they live in a culture that hasn't built room for the possibility of romantic/erotic same-sex relationships. In a variation on the drum that Dan Savage has been beating in this repressive, reactionary Bush era, our collective ability to deal with the reality that men will want to have sex with other men and women will want to have sex with other women should have fuck-all to do with notions of love or fidelity precisely so that when love does enter the equation, as it so clearly does in the case of these two characters, it doesn't result in the large-scale destruction of a person's family, other relationships, and sense of self. Of course, what better way to dramatize this conflict than in the context of stereotypically rigid gender roles carved out of the myth of the West. (Paging Dr. Higgins, ABD.) This place where public pressures collide with private certainties is the crossroads of heartbreak and tragedy. The last line of the story says it all: "There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

My point being, did I get any of that out of the movie? I don't think so. (Please, by all means, let me know if you did.) I got a sense of heartbreak, a sense of "that sucks," and even a sense of poignancy in that final shot, but the fact of its being filmed added nothing to what was already present in the story. It just shifted it to another medium that leans a little more heavily on our heartstrings and robs some of the interesting tension that comes from what Nick Hornby described in this April's Believer as literary fiction's "ability to be smart about people who aren't themselves smart, or at least don't necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states."

Are all you other filmies keeping up with Slate's annual Movie Club? (Thanks to Mike O'D for reminding me the exchange had begun.) It's an awful lot to take in one go, but fun to rub your own opinions against. One of my favorite turns of phrase this season, courtesy of A.O. Scott: "I of course am pro-evil, anti-Christmas, and in favor of Brokeback Mountain being taught alongside Darwin (and, for that matter, Darwin's Nightmare) to schoolchildren." Also, Rosenbaum gives a very cool shout-out to his "friend and favorite film academic" Jim Naremore, whom I would probably describe with those two terms as well.

Happy fourth anniversary to the O'Ds today! And happy new year to the rest of all y'all, as I doubt I'll be posting again until we flip to '06. Cheers.

Viva Harvestime!

Attention denizens of Lincoln Square: the Harvestime grocery store has been remodeled! And not just remodeled, but expanded! I hadn't been shopping in a week or two, so imagine my surprise when I stopped in last night and saw that the wall behind the former produce section had been completely knocked out so that the store could take over the entire adjacent building. My sister didn't quite understand why I was reeling for the first five minutes or so as we explored the newly spacious floor plan, but I assured her that, to those of us who live in the 'hood and shop there regularly, this is a very big deal. Check it out.

I'm glad to see that so many other bloggers on Ye Olde Internette have been providing links to this weekend's "Lazy Sunday" Narnia rap from Saturday Night Live, because it's incredibly funny, but my sister and I have been in continual hysterics about a different sketch that appeared later in the show, "Two A-Holes Buying a Christmas Tree." For the past two days, during pregnant pauses in conversation, we've taken to saying to each other, "you look like a rabbit."

Pitchfork lists their Top Fifty Albums for 2005 today. As suspected, Sufjan's Illinois is tops.

And, speaking of best-of 2005 lists, big, big love goes out to the Real Slim Chaney for his gorgeous work on the packaging and liner notes for my CD compilation. That's right, kids, pin.monkey.press will make all your craft dreams come true! Out of towners, I'm going to try to put the packages in the mail today. In towners, if I haven't called you personally yet, be sure to get in touch with me before you leave for the holiday if you want yours for the road. There's only a limited number of schmancy packages available, so if you snooze you lose. (Though, I'll of course be happy to burn you a copy of the disk itself.)

Best of 2005
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

Track list:

1. Swimmers—Broken Social Scene (Broken Social Scene)
2. The Bleeding Heart Show—The New Pornographers (Twin Cinema)
3. Fire Snakes—Laura Veirs (Year of Meteors)
4. Ultimatum—The Long Winters (Ultimatum EP)
5. Fake Palindromes—Andrew Bird (The Mysterious Production of Eggs)
6. This Year—The Mountain Goats (The Sunset Tree)
7. Is This Love?—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
8. When I Turn Ninety-Nine—Devin Davis (Lonely People of the World, Unite!)
9. Dogs Were Barking—Gogol Bordello (Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)
10. Scripts—Stratageme (Mis Amis)
11. Tippin Toxic—Mike Jones vs. Britney Spears (Hollertronix—Vol. 2, EP)
12. No More Shoes—Stephen Malkmus (Face the Truth)
13. Missing—Beck (Guero)
14. My Mathematical Mind—Spoon (Gimme Fiction)
15. Chicago—Sufjan Stevens (Illinois)
16. Brothers on a Hotel Bed—Death Cab for Cutie (Plans)
17. The Engine Driver—The Decemberists (Picaresque)
18. Sadie—Joanna Newsom (The Milk-Eyed Mender)

Up Jumps Da Button

Who knew I was such a freakish anomaly? I've recently discovered that, apparently, I am the only person I know who buttons her shirts from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. The vigorous indignation that this admission has aroused in the past three days when I have questioned a series of friends and loved ones about it seems even more heated than the ire provoked by other perennial favorite us-versus-them chestnuts like "pop or soda" and "toilet paper unrolling over the top or from underneath." I try to reason with these sartorial Stalins by likening my directional preference to the zipping up of a zipper, but that logic has been roundly met with dismissive snorts and/or eye rolls preceding the supposedly irrefutable proof, "it's called a button-down shirt, Allison." For the love of God, are there any other button-uppers out there? Should we start a support group? I just want to be loved for who I am! Dare to proudly come out of the closet* with me!

*You know you were waiting for me to say it

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.

She Used to Have a Carefree Mind of Her Own

Oh my God, my heart almost seized up this morning in a contraction of pure delight when I read this: Britt Daniel will cover Elvis Costello's "Veronica" on an upcoming episode of Veronica Mars. It's a real Christmas miracle! (I love saying that anytime something even mildly pleasant happens during December. The cuffs of my pants didn't get soaked in the snow and slush? It's a real Christmas miracle! My tom yum soup came to the table spiced just right? It's a real Christmas miracle!) Somebody better rip an MP3 off their TiVo and make it available online after it airs.

I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that Gimme Fiction is the number one album on my personal top ten list this year. How'd it sneak past Sufjan and Laura Veirs and the Decemberists? Hell if I know. But, as much as I've tried to look at it from every possible angle, there's no denying it at this point. It's just the right length, it's creepy and cryptic and somehow optimistic (the Addams fam-i-ly ::snap, snap::), it's an incredibly earnest meditation on the role of artiface artifice in our lives, and, of course, it's a magnificent vehicle for Daniel's voice. I would probably love any band that featured a vocalist as charismatic and precisely balanced on the edge of chaos and razor-sharp control as he is, so it's just a massive, massive bonus that Spoon is also so interesting musically. Gimme Fiction, ladies and germs, Gimme Fiction. Me and Steven King, man, we're riding this one into the sunset. (Ed. note: ::gag::)

Speaking of top ten lists, the Onion A.V. Club covers the year in music in this week's issue. Essential reading, as always.

Has anybody else been watching House on Tuesday nights? It doesn't really have any of the traits that are usually prerequisites for me to get into a television show (cumulative emotional attachment to richly drawn characters, intricately layered storylines that build on each other over weeks and months and years, supernatural events and/or sports writers), but I nonetheless have come to genuinely look forward to flipping over to Fox after Gilmore Girls is over. Oh, how I do love Hugh Laurie, and it's always good to see the once and future Bobbi Bernstein getting steady work. A killer Cynthia Nixon guest spot last night, too.

You Can Read My Dorky Summaries or Just Click on the Links

Though I have a fairly healthy appreciation for the surge in esteem comics and comic artists are garnering in mainstream culture (what with my natural affinity for geekiness of all stripes), I've yet to take the time to actually educate myself about any of the major players and their work (recommendations, DS, or anyone?). However, I do know the hotness when I see it: Chris Ware illustrates the cover for a new edition of Candide, as the first in a new series of classic works from Penguin Books featuring fresh, sexy covers by contemporary comic artists. Drool-worthy stuff indeed.

The Decemberists sign to Capitol. I officially have no opinion about this. Colin Meloy's lady Carson Ellis is also expecting a baby, which is cool. I just hope that the inevitable song for the baby that will no doubt appear on a future album isn't annoying and/or lame. However, I am thrilled beyond belief that Tucker Martine is helping Chris Walla with producing duties when the Decemberists go back into the studio. I think he has the potential to be huge on the indie scene, based on the lusciousness of his work with both the Long Winters and Laura Veirs this year.

Richard Pryor

It's not exactly like no one saw this coming, but it's still a bit of a punch in the gut to hear that Richard Pryor passed away today. I will be forever thankful to CTLA for loaning me his rented DVD of Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (which appears on Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of his 1,000 favorite films in Essential Cinema). It's an astonishing bit of stand-up comedy, one that is based in extraordinarily sophisticated storytelling way more than it is in cheap joke-telling. Anyone who wants to talk about the "honesty" of a performer, be it musician, actor, or comedian, needs to calibrate her yardstick to the naked, raw personal exposure offered up by Pryor here. My other treasured cinematic memory of him is, of course, his appearance as the eponymous fraud in The Wiz. The film hasn't exactly aged well or anything, but the final, maybe, twenty minutes are still absolutely emotionally scorching. The fear of being found out that you see in his eyes when Dorothy finally confronts him in the cold, echoing hangar where he sleeps on a ratty old cot, hiding away from the eyes of everyone who expects him to be the grandest of the grand when he's really just a quivering mess of insecurity and failure himself, is so private and so potent, it's almost difficult to watch, and even more difficult not to interpret as an utterly truthful representation of the clammy fear his own fame and success forced him into. He will be missed.

I'm One Step Away from Glow Sticks and Pop Rocks

My lovely houseguest (the third, for those of you keeping score at home) was in town this past weekend to complete the second four-day portion of her Thai yoga massage workshop at the River West branch of the Moksha Yoga Center. She invited me to come along with her to a holiday potluck/talent show gathering at the studio on Saturday night. I went mostly as a gesture of good faith, since she'd come with me to a party with my friends the night before. (Which was all kinds of fun, by the way, C&LLA. Thanks for hosting.) But, what with leaving my cozy, recently Christmas-ized apartment in the sleety snow and anticipating feeling awkward standing around in a room full of sexy yoga practitioners, I'd pretty much already made up my mind that I wasn't going to have a good time. (That doesn't sound like me at all, does it?) Let me tell you, though, all the awkwardness was TOTALLY WORTH IT when the final act of the night took the stage. They were two guys from Chicago's Spunn dance company (yeah, I'd never heard of them either), and all the pent-up anxiety I was feeling about being there came out in a cathartic rush of sudden, unexpected tears because of the pure beauty of what they were doing. I know it sounds kind of ravey and lame to describe; they were basically just spinning around with some fluorescent tie-dyed flags under a black light. But, in that moment, it was the most wondrous thing I'd ever seen. (Shut it, haters—I was totally sober and un-chemically altered.) I was electric with thankfulness to be alive and there to see it. I felt like Dana Whitaker after going to The Lion King on Broadway: "It was really quite something. It was exactly where I was meant to be at that moment. It was like church. I didn't know we could do that; did you know we could do that?" (Why does everything in my life have to come back to Sports Night?)

(Speaking of my being electric: I shocked myself in the ears last night. No joke. I was wearing my headphones, which were plugged in to my portable CD player, which was zippered in to the front flap pocket of my messenger bag, which was sitting on my lap as I was on my way home on the El. I wanted to transfer my plastic H&M shopping bag from my right hand to my left, but as I passed it across the front of my body, the static electricity leapt off the bag and traveled through the zipper, up the wire, and straight into my skull. It was one of the most ridiculous and ingenious ways I've ever mildly injured myself.)

I don't think there's ever been a contest I'd be more capable of winning: Said the Gramophone is asking folks to make their top ten album list for 2005, then write a haiku about it.

If the time ever comes when the whole husband and baby thing becomes a viable option for me, I want my marriage to look like this. BAK recently turned me on to Dooce, which is my new favorite blog. She's the mimi smartypants of Utah.

A Perfect Day for Banana Phones, and Other Stories

Banana phone,
originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

OK, so this is just the most recent in a long line of photos I've taken of my sister in ridiculous situations (e.g. posing with the fuzzy purple tire monster in the kids' corner at the auto parts store [?], sitting on the edge of the fountain in front of the garbage dump in Northwest Indiana, etc.). I was trying to kill the roll of film and insisted she needed a funny prop. (Bananas in your ears? Always funny; am I right?) She's stopped protesting as much when I tell her to do these things; I suspect she's actually beginning to enjoy it. (More random new, semi-recent photos here.)

Wow. Somebody found some old, undiscovered Jeff Mangum demos in a house in Louisiana. It's been a resoundingly good year for NMH fans between the release of Kim Cooper's 33.33 book on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mangum's surprise guest appearances onstage with Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power in New York, and Pitchfork enshrining In the Aeroplane as a classic 10.0 album.

Monkeys with accents, also always funny.

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.

Happy Bowieday

Two David Bowie-related links in one day? He really is omnipresent:

David Bowie's Area (thanks, Nora Rocket—you've excelled with the phallic links this week).

Bowie joins the cast of Christopher Nolan's new movie, playing Nikola Tesla (via Pink Is the New Blog)! Sounds like it has the potential for much awesomeness.


"Well, let’s just say I usually take a break from my pro-life policies on Thanksgiving day...." (Thanks for the picture, Lisa Ro.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It's Also Björk's Bjïrthday

Music for Robots freaks out about the goddamn fucking awesomeness of The Long Winters' "Ultimatum" today. My breath actually caught in my throat a little bit when I was scrolling through my live bookmarks this morning and saw the words "my arms miss you, my hands miss you" pop out at me. Good to see that someone else is with me on this.

Let's welcome pin.monkey.press to the sidebar, shall we?

You've gotta be kidding me. (Thanks, Nora Rocket.) What, no "ribbed for her pleasure" option?

Local photographer Johnny Knight has a cute series of photographs called Her Special Day, showing brides doing unbridelike things. My favorite, as many of you will probably guess, is the graffiti bride, though the oven bride and the pickup bride are pretty awesome, too. (Thanks, Lisa Ro.)

Ladies and germs, I've found my blog-brother. I was googling something or other a few days ago and stumbled upon—wait for it—"You're Tacky and I Hate You: Where the Streets Are Paved with Cock." Are we talking best ever or best ever?!

I swear to God, if you go see Walk the Line, you will preface every sentence that comes out of your mouth for at least the next 24 hours with "Hi...I'm Johnny Cash" in a nice basso profundo rumble. You will also likely want to have nothing but cigarettes and beer for your next meal.

Big, big love goes out to my best girl on her birthday today.

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.

Save Me from Myself!

You know how diabetics and people who are allergic to penicillin have those bracelets with their special medical information on it in case they have health trouble when they're out alone somewhere? Well, I think I need one that says "Do Not Let This Woman Talk to Rock Stars, Ever." I was out at the Devin Davis show last night, having a great time, catching up with newly engaged SC and CP whom I randomly happened to run into, and, just before I ducked out the door to head home, I swung by the merch table to tell Devin how much I love the album. Well, any modicum of coolness or self-possession I may have had earlier in the night flew right out the side of my brain and into the chilly November air. This is not the first time this has happened, kittens. I get all spazzed out and tongue-tied in that moment when I'm finally face to face with some talent I'm digging on, trying to convey my admiration while striving to also be concise, witty, nonchalant, genuine, and unaffected. Granted, standing around the merch table at the end of the night isn't really the time or place to say much more than "good show" or "I like your work," and, what can he possibly be expected to say in response other than "thanks a lot" or "glad you liked it," but still. I'd rather not have to ride the El back home with my Miss Dork Patrol USA sash on display for all to see.

Despite the fact that, by all accounts, it was a relatively creaky show (the sound was pretty ass-tastic), I still had a hell of a good time. I've previously extolled the virtues of the Monday night rock show and this one even improved on the formula by getting me home by 10:15. (It helps when the person you're going to see is the opener for the main act.) Devin is adorable; he looks like a Bottle Rocket–era Luke Wilson, which is to say, kind of lanky and awkward and long-haired and adorable. His band is everything you'd (that is, I'd) want out of a group of musicians assembled to play songs from an album called Lonely People of the World, Unite!—they all looked like the dorky kids with genuine chops I knew in high school band, played the hell out of the material, and weren't afraid to look like they were really having fun doing so. I guess it's hard to be pretentious when the onstage instrumentation includes a maraca with a monkey head, a keytar, and a theremin. They played everything from Lonely People... except "Transcendental Sports Anthem," "Sandie," and "Paratrooper with Amnesia," but included one new song that rocked out in a jaunty 6/8. Their penultimate song was "Giant Spiders," which they started off with—get this—a short percussion jam using shakers and agogo bells and whatnot. How totally dorky is that! And how much did I love it! I had the biggest, stupidest smile on my face during the whole song, and not just because I think it's one of the strongest tunes on the album. Anyway, Devin and his boys put on a great show, and Chicagoans will have another chance to check him out when he plays The Empty Bottle, opening for Rogue Wave, on the 25th.

The Harry Potter Legal Age Countdown Clock: sick, sick, sick. I love it!

There's some really interesting discussion going on in the comments section of this Stereogum post about the continuing popularity of classic rock versus the anticipated long-term musical/cultural viability of today's big indie rock bands.

Fell in Love with a Michel

Boo! Hiss! The bastards finally did it: Arrested Development got canceled. I haven't exactly been keeping up with the new episodes, but I still would count it as one of my favorite shows, based on my love for the first season alone. Let's hope it can survive a Buffy-esque shift to another network, cable or otherwise.

Those of you who know me well know of my obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Giddy would often come home late at night and see the DVD case open on the floor near the television, every bit as incriminating as an addict's dirty needle. The next morning, I usually got a mock-accusing, "Did you watch it again?" to which I, sheepishly, had to reply, "...yes. It's just the only thing I ever want to watch anymore!") Anyway, I only bring that up to contextualize the mind-bending excitement I felt watching Michel Gondry's Director's Series DVD over the past two evenings. What a flipping genius. I'm absolutely enamored of the way he combines dark childhood whimsy, French self-deprecation, a magician's sleight of hand, a technician's precision, and his own obsessive-compulsive repetition of certain themes/images (skeletons and skeleton costumes; trains; multiple, disparate realities impinging on each other until they result in either messy, chaotic havoc or a kind of infinite regression) to create these eminently charming and sweetly melancholy visual poetry bombs. (All this being said, I suppose I should link to the new Stripes video [via Stereogum], which doesn't disappoint.)

When You Believe They Call It Rock 'n' Roll

Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog is only the most recent example of passionate Spoon defenders/apologists/(fuck it) FANS I've been tracking online since my own heart and ears were won over by Britt & Co. earlier this year. Here he talks about seeing them live in NYC last weekend. I've never paid much attention to the lyrics of "The Beast and Dragon, Adored," as it's not really one of my favorite songs on the album, but the way he tied them in to the "recurring theme in the Spoon catalog - 'Believing Is Art'...(Or more simply: 'You Gotta Feel It')" gave me chills. Props.

Personifying sloth with the name "Chad McBro" in the fourth line of the first paragraph here nearly made me choke on my own tongue with the kind of laughter that's half being amused by the turn of phrase itself and half wordlessly acknowledging the right-on truth underneath it.

I wiped out on the sidewalk spectacularly last night. I must have hit a wet leaf or something, I don't know quite what happened, but it's another Fleet-Footed Felus tumble for the record books. I started off walking at a good pace on the right edge of the sidewalk, felt my right heel slip out in front of me, started lurching sideways into the splits, realized I wasn't going to successfully regain my balance, so decided the best thing to do would be to hurl myself toward the berm on the left edge of the sidewalk, where I landed on my back. There was no one around to witness this (I was on a quiet neighborhood street in Evanston after dark), but when I was finally able to compose myself and start walking again, replaying the whole sequence of events made me start laughing uncontrollably for the next four or five minutes. Which made me look even more drunk and insane. Something about seeing my little bundled-up self in my own mind's eye slipping and sliding and stumbling in this ridiculously wide trajectory through space in such a condensed period of time struck me as really, really funny. (No scars to remember it by this time, though.)