Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick in The New Yorker (via).
James Green Pea-ness on why the Nintendo DS game Elite Beat Agents is a stunning piece of interactive pop criticism.
And, though only an excerpt is available online, Nick Hornby's interview with David Simon in the August '07 issue of The Believer is so good it's just unreal. Luckily, the bit that is available on the web is absolutely one of the high points of the whole exchange ("Like many writers, I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions"). Do yourself a favor and seek out the issue for the full thing.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Women in Music and Danny Boyle's Sunshine
Is it just me or have the past two years been really outstanding for music made by women? In 2006 we had insanely great albums from Regina Spektor, Camille, My Brightest Diamond, Kaki King, Christine Fellows, CSS, Joanna Newsom, and Neko Case (not to mention Cat Power, the Pipettes, and Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife), and this year has already (already? the year's like more than half over, AF--ed.) brought new stuff from Bjork, Laura Veirs, Amy Winehouse, Lucky Soul (featuring the chirpily powerhouse vocals of Ali Howard), the Long Blondes, Tracey Thorn, Feist, Polly Paulusma, and St. Vincent (who comes the closest I've ever heard in contemporary indie rock to emulating/channeling/updating the great Jackie Cain's playful yet mournful yet musically sophisticated singing style). I have no hypothesis or commentary about this or anything, I'm just sayin'. It's awesome. (Alt: "I'm just saying it's awesome!")
One-liner of theweek month year decade? Be sure to explore his site for a bit while you're clicked through, especially the running tally of films seen in '07. I couldn't agree more on the point that the pleasures of Ocean's 13 (and 11 as well, I suppose; 12 remains dead to me) are largely tangled up with ideas of work. Of course, sexiness and silliness abound in these trifles, but it's also nice to get lost in a place where people are really good at what they do, confident in their abilities, eventually rewarded for their effort, and surrounded by equally talented and supportive associates. I mean, Vegas and Brad Pitt's bone structure to one side, this is the dream, right? This is what we're all looking for in one way or another?
Finally had a chance to catch Sunshine this weekend (the new one on the spaceship, not the older one with Ralph Fiennes's soapy D). Despite my affection for Danny Boyle, or maybe because of it, I'm willing to concede it was a swing-and-a-miss. It was ambitious as hell, which not enough movies are anymore (at least intellectually), and I have a feeling a lot of the visuals are going to stick with me for a while (esp. the many times we see the wonderful Cliff Curtis standing in the observation room, silhouetted against the glowing mass of the sun). But, the plot was giving me a serious case of the "huh?"s (and not in the good way), especially toward the "climactic" ending, and the script was laden with way too much dumbed-down exposition, a fact which was not helped by the bafflingly miscast crew. Now, my feelings about Cillian Murphy perhaps need not be stated, but come on--he's the one you're going to choose as your shipboard physicist on your suicide mission to the sun? Please. Likewise the rest of the beefy, generically handsome dudes, especially Chris Evans with his almost comically needless and situationally inappropriate perpetual huffiness. Michelle Yeoh gets a pass because, well, she's Michelle Yeoh, but the role was a joke and she was clearly doing everything she could to redeem it, and Rose Byrne was essentially doing a pale imitation of the genuinely sweet, smart strength of Jewel Staite as Kaylee in Serenity/Firefly. I'm sure most of these actors have their charms, but, on the whole, everyone was just too damn good looking. I longed for the sight of a few of those gloriously lumpy Scottish mugs in Trainspotting, or Brendan Gleeson from 28 Days Later. And while a years-long mission through the solar system with a tiny crew in constant contact and constant awareness of their own mortality should have been a perfect vehicle to examine Danny Boyle's usual interest in the ways that social groups break down under the weight of their own entropy, there was nothing about the degradation of the crew's relationships that seemed earned or organic. From the start, they were nothing more than walking representations of the most sophomoric ideas of character conflict, and without any lingering past affection established between them at all (Yeoh's deep connection to the plants in the greenhouse being the one possible exception; Murphy and Byrne's sleepytime discussion of their surface-of-the-sun nightmares decidedly not), there was no room to move within the realm of cynicism and distrust. The rot had already infected everything on screen, and not in an interesting or nuanced way, and so the only stakes left seemed to be vague, lofty ideals about their duty to the rest of the human race. Reverse those two, and then maybe you have a movie worth caring about and not an inadvertent dramatization of our current administration's rhetoric. Anyway, there's no way I'm giving up on Danny Boyle; I criticize because I care!
One-liner of the
Finally had a chance to catch Sunshine this weekend (the new one on the spaceship, not the older one with Ralph Fiennes's soapy D). Despite my affection for Danny Boyle, or maybe because of it, I'm willing to concede it was a swing-and-a-miss. It was ambitious as hell, which not enough movies are anymore (at least intellectually), and I have a feeling a lot of the visuals are going to stick with me for a while (esp. the many times we see the wonderful Cliff Curtis standing in the observation room, silhouetted against the glowing mass of the sun). But, the plot was giving me a serious case of the "huh?"s (and not in the good way), especially toward the "climactic" ending, and the script was laden with way too much dumbed-down exposition, a fact which was not helped by the bafflingly miscast crew. Now, my feelings about Cillian Murphy perhaps need not be stated, but come on--he's the one you're going to choose as your shipboard physicist on your suicide mission to the sun? Please. Likewise the rest of the beefy, generically handsome dudes, especially Chris Evans with his almost comically needless and situationally inappropriate perpetual huffiness. Michelle Yeoh gets a pass because, well, she's Michelle Yeoh, but the role was a joke and she was clearly doing everything she could to redeem it, and Rose Byrne was essentially doing a pale imitation of the genuinely sweet, smart strength of Jewel Staite as Kaylee in Serenity/Firefly. I'm sure most of these actors have their charms, but, on the whole, everyone was just too damn good looking. I longed for the sight of a few of those gloriously lumpy Scottish mugs in Trainspotting, or Brendan Gleeson from 28 Days Later. And while a years-long mission through the solar system with a tiny crew in constant contact and constant awareness of their own mortality should have been a perfect vehicle to examine Danny Boyle's usual interest in the ways that social groups break down under the weight of their own entropy, there was nothing about the degradation of the crew's relationships that seemed earned or organic. From the start, they were nothing more than walking representations of the most sophomoric ideas of character conflict, and without any lingering past affection established between them at all (Yeoh's deep connection to the plants in the greenhouse being the one possible exception; Murphy and Byrne's sleepytime discussion of their surface-of-the-sun nightmares decidedly not), there was no room to move within the realm of cynicism and distrust. The rot had already infected everything on screen, and not in an interesting or nuanced way, and so the only stakes left seemed to be vague, lofty ideals about their duty to the rest of the human race. Reverse those two, and then maybe you have a movie worth caring about and not an inadvertent dramatization of our current administration's rhetoric. Anyway, there's no way I'm giving up on Danny Boyle; I criticize because I care!
Monday, July 30, 2007
Cassette Culture and Weekend Movies
I'm not really one of those people who overly fetishizes cassette tapes and cassette tape culture. I like tapes, especially mix tapes, just fine, and I'm glad to have somewhat recently salvaged a bunch of them from my childhood home, but there's no part of me that harbors too many romantic feelings about their extra-musical significance/signifiers. That being said, however, finally listening to Voxtrot's self-titled full-length album made me kind of wish I'd encountered it first on tape. There's a kind of slick 1980s listlessness to it that would have felt and sounded perfect on the plastic-smelling clackety-clack of a cassette. I think I mean that as a compliment?
Caught up with both Once and Broken English this weekend, two movies that made me pine for the simple joys of just hanging out with someone new and special whose company intrigues and delights you. Of course Once also folds in the thrill of actively doing something creative with a group of like-minded (but not too like-minded) individuals, which is its own kind of seduction, but it was those shots of the couple just wandering through the city streets, chatting, or sharing music and a meal in someone's dingy apartment that seemed most compelling in their simplicity. Broken English loses points for lifting, basically wholesale, the explosively dramatic final two or three lines from Before Sunset ("you are gonna miss that plane") and using them for essentially the same purpose--but the same purpose without ten additional years of backstory and tension and longing. Some of the dialogue is plenty stilted and some of the scenarios strain credibility, but the casting was impeccable (though I do wish they'd given Michael Panes--one of the best and most memorable and sexiest things about The Anniversary Party--more to do as Glen, instead of just being the dorky/schlubby coworker), and its preoccupations with how hard it is to find and keep and sustain romantic love seem right.
As much as I enjoy his work, why does it seem like Romain Duris is suddenly everywhere right now? The posters for his movies Dans Paris and Moliere were practically hanging side by side at the theater this weekend, and there seems to be a real publicity push for Moliere in particular, based on how often I've seen the trailer by this point. It seems especially suspect to me that these French movies are being more or less actively promoted in the U.S. Why has this handful of movies, specifically, been annointed as appropriate for Amurr'can consumption, and what is it about Duris that has turned him into the new go-to leading man for crossover appeal? It's probably a tricky stew of his looks, talent, and charisma and the surprise (?) stateside success of L'auberge espagnole, Russian Dolls, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (my review here), but it is something to be pondered at any rate.
New rock and roll photo crush! Kirstiecat is Chicago-based, apparently goes to a lot of the same shows that I do, and keeps a totally groovy music blog. Be sure to check out her sets from this year's Pitchfork fest (day one, day two, day three) to get a better sense of the personality of the weekend than I was able to manage with my (relatively) crappy point-and-shoot.
Shit, I'd just assumed he was dead already. Anyway, RIP, Ingmar Bergman.
UPDATE: Also RIP, Michelangelo Antonioni, who apparently died on the same day as Bergman. I'm bummed that I pretty much missed this summer's Antonioni retrospective at the Siskel.
Caught up with both Once and Broken English this weekend, two movies that made me pine for the simple joys of just hanging out with someone new and special whose company intrigues and delights you. Of course Once also folds in the thrill of actively doing something creative with a group of like-minded (but not too like-minded) individuals, which is its own kind of seduction, but it was those shots of the couple just wandering through the city streets, chatting, or sharing music and a meal in someone's dingy apartment that seemed most compelling in their simplicity. Broken English loses points for lifting, basically wholesale, the explosively dramatic final two or three lines from Before Sunset ("you are gonna miss that plane") and using them for essentially the same purpose--but the same purpose without ten additional years of backstory and tension and longing. Some of the dialogue is plenty stilted and some of the scenarios strain credibility, but the casting was impeccable (though I do wish they'd given Michael Panes--one of the best and most memorable and sexiest things about The Anniversary Party--more to do as Glen, instead of just being the dorky/schlubby coworker), and its preoccupations with how hard it is to find and keep and sustain romantic love seem right.
As much as I enjoy his work, why does it seem like Romain Duris is suddenly everywhere right now? The posters for his movies Dans Paris and Moliere were practically hanging side by side at the theater this weekend, and there seems to be a real publicity push for Moliere in particular, based on how often I've seen the trailer by this point. It seems especially suspect to me that these French movies are being more or less actively promoted in the U.S. Why has this handful of movies, specifically, been annointed as appropriate for Amurr'can consumption, and what is it about Duris that has turned him into the new go-to leading man for crossover appeal? It's probably a tricky stew of his looks, talent, and charisma and the surprise (?) stateside success of L'auberge espagnole, Russian Dolls, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (my review here), but it is something to be pondered at any rate.
New rock and roll photo crush! Kirstiecat is Chicago-based, apparently goes to a lot of the same shows that I do, and keeps a totally groovy music blog. Be sure to check out her sets from this year's Pitchfork fest (day one, day two, day three) to get a better sense of the personality of the weekend than I was able to manage with my (relatively) crappy point-and-shoot.
Shit, I'd just assumed he was dead already. Anyway, RIP, Ingmar Bergman.
UPDATE: Also RIP, Michelangelo Antonioni, who apparently died on the same day as Bergman. I'm bummed that I pretty much missed this summer's Antonioni retrospective at the Siskel.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Someone to Take Care Tonight
Here's the trailer for Wes Anderson's new one, The Darjeeling Limited (via Kottke). Squee! Aside from the easy/obvious nose jokes, I think it's brilliant that he's working with Adrien Brody. Polanski doesn't get acknowledged often enough as an influence on Anderson's style, and Brody hasn't really done much work worthy of his talent since The Pianist (I know I've kind of come around in my estimation of The Village and loved King Kong when I first saw it, but it's not like either of those are the best showcases for what he's capable of). I'm really eager to see what they're going to pull out of each other. (Or, more likely, how they're going to be kind of melancholicly stoic together.) Plus, I didn't realize the movie was coming out so early in the fall. Even if the limited release schedule doesn't bring it to Chicago until October, that's still, basically, right around the corner. Get excited.
It's a deceptively simple gag, but it slays: in response to the whole Boing Boing-ified Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks thing, Carl Wilson shares a pal's take on William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" as it perhaps would have been written by Jonathan Richman. It's, of course, called "Hey! Little Red Wheelbarrow!" and it's brill.
Foodies and Chicagoans (and Chicago foodies), have you heard the sad news about Grant Achatz? Not to make light or anything, but, goddamn, it's like something straight out of fucking O. Henry. How awful.
I read the first sentence of this review, rolled my eyes, and clicked away to a new page. Fuck that shit.
In continuing to think and talk about Spoon's new one, I love how we can all agree they're one of the best bands out there, but not on what that means and why. There are the old school Telephono and Series of Sneaks devotees, the ones who view Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight as the dead-center of the current indie rock canon, and those (incl. myself) who think they're doing their most vital and exciting work now with Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. How can that not be a sure indication of their surpassing brilliance?!
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga continues to stun, and album-closer "Black Like Me" is so good it just makes me want to puke all over the place. I'd been so blinded by the beauty of that broken fourth wall at the end of the song ("all the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want") that I'd kind of mentally glossed over the actual final line, "someone to take care tonight" (which I've been somewhat willfully mishearing as "someone should take care tonight"). It feels to me like one of the Streets' personal accountability songs collapsed into one line. Linking his own desire to be taken care of by an absent someone with a more universal longing to be taken care of that we all feel, he's also, I think, stepping up to the plate in that moment to become someone who will take care. (Assuming, that is, that the weird kids up front are clamoring for a piece of him, their beloved rock idol.) Masterful. I quite like Matos's review of Gax5 (via Largehearted Boy), especially for his reading of Gimme Fiction, but I'd call that last line of "Black Like Me" anything but an obscure angle.
It's a deceptively simple gag, but it slays: in response to the whole Boing Boing-ified Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks thing, Carl Wilson shares a pal's take on William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" as it perhaps would have been written by Jonathan Richman. It's, of course, called "Hey! Little Red Wheelbarrow!" and it's brill.
Foodies and Chicagoans (and Chicago foodies), have you heard the sad news about Grant Achatz? Not to make light or anything, but, goddamn, it's like something straight out of fucking O. Henry. How awful.
I read the first sentence of this review, rolled my eyes, and clicked away to a new page. Fuck that shit.
In continuing to think and talk about Spoon's new one, I love how we can all agree they're one of the best bands out there, but not on what that means and why. There are the old school Telephono and Series of Sneaks devotees, the ones who view Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight as the dead-center of the current indie rock canon, and those (incl. myself) who think they're doing their most vital and exciting work now with Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. How can that not be a sure indication of their surpassing brilliance?!
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga continues to stun, and album-closer "Black Like Me" is so good it just makes me want to puke all over the place. I'd been so blinded by the beauty of that broken fourth wall at the end of the song ("all the weird kids up front / tell me what you know you want") that I'd kind of mentally glossed over the actual final line, "someone to take care tonight" (which I've been somewhat willfully mishearing as "someone should take care tonight"). It feels to me like one of the Streets' personal accountability songs collapsed into one line. Linking his own desire to be taken care of by an absent someone with a more universal longing to be taken care of that we all feel, he's also, I think, stepping up to the plate in that moment to become someone who will take care. (Assuming, that is, that the weird kids up front are clamoring for a piece of him, their beloved rock idol.) Masterful. I quite like Matos's review of Gax5 (via Largehearted Boy), especially for his reading of Gimme Fiction, but I'd call that last line of "Black Like Me" anything but an obscure angle.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Avoiding the Inevitable Pun
I am approximately as sick of hearing about Bush's colon as I am of hearing about Harry Potter.
That is all.
That is all.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Pitchfork Music Festival 2007
Whoops. So, I guess this is coming, like, a week too late, huh? Anyway. Um, Pitchfork. Right, so that happened.
I kind of can't believe it's over already. The weekend came earlier in the month than it did last year, and, as such, it really snuck up on me and then whizzed by fairly breathlessly. So let's just jump right into it, shall we?
Because that's pretty much what it felt like last Friday night, taking the train down to Union Park after a full workday: jumping right into it. I felt like I'd landed in a foreign country when I arrived there, dizzy and out of sorts and nowhere near as drunk as I needed to be to get loose and have fun. I'm not really knowledgeable at all about any of the three albums that were being played front-to-back that night as part of the Don't Look Back thing, so I guess it was kind of refreshing to walk in without any expectations to manage. Slint were very cool, and I can only imagine how great that album would sound if I were suddenly sixteen and full of suburban angst again. GZA's performance of Liquid Swords got a weekend full of hip-hop highlights rolling in fine style. The epically geeked enthusiasm of all the white boys approx. ages 25-32 in the crowd who very clearly spent a large portion of their early adolescence listening to and loving the Wu-Tang Clan was utterly adorable. From where I was standing, there were a lot of supremely patient and indulgent girlfriends/spouses in the house that night, sweetly feigning (and/or being swept up with) enthusiasm as they watched their otherwise mature and responsible bfs throwing up some Wu. As far as my day-to-day listening habits go, I've totally missed the ball on getting into Sonic Youth--because, as with my similar intimidation of Yo La Tengo's or even Pixies' back catalogs, where does one even begin listening?--but I was, of course, thrilled to get to see these legends perform live that night. The passion and energy and pure physicality that these grand elders of rock put into their show made me feel slightly ashamed of how tired I was just standing there watching. Thurston Moore may, in fact, be the coolest man alive.
I had hoped to make it down to the park last Saturday for the Twilight Sad and Califone, but the public transportation situation was atrocious that day, so I rolled in later than I would have liked, to the sounds of Voxtrot giving off a sugar-rush of good cheer. Seriously, I think I started laughing out loud, in that good and happy way, when I got swept into the whole circus and saw Ramesh Srivastava bouncing around on stage in his black-and-white stripy shirt. I still have to make a point to pick up their first full-length.
I've never fallen in love with Grizzly Bear the way I thought I might, but, that being said, I was way more excited about seeing them on Saturday than I thought I would be. The harmonies really are everything they're cracked up to be, and when they start getting those wonderfully dense thunderstorms of sound rolling...wow. The only drawback was the fact that their time slot was at 3, when the sun was high and their tendencies toward cough-syrupy soporifics started putting everyone in the mood for a nap. Subsequent acts Beach House and Iron and Wine suffered the same kind of pacing troubles, which, I dunno, the pessimist in me feels like may have been intentional on Pitchfork's part, just to make the weekend feel like it had some sort of arc or build to it over the course of the three days. No one wants to peak in the middle of the afternoon on the second day, though, right, so I guess I get it. But still, it did kind of feel like the dumping ground for acts that they maybe didn't quite know what else to do with. I mean, going from Grizzly Bear to Battles? Then from Battles to Iron and Wine to Mastodon? Just kind of awkward. Anyway.
I had been told by JWard in no uncertain terms to be sure to catch some of the Beach House set in order to witness the awesome charisma of her former schoolmate, lead singer Victoria Legrand, but the side stage area where they were performing was quite crowded by the time I was able to get over there, so I was squeezed in at a sufficiently bad angle that only allowed me brief glimpses of Alex Scally's head. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to really sink into the mood they were creating, so the whole thing just kind of came off sounding like an underwater roller rink. And I'm bummed that, for all that, I didn't even get to hear "Tokyo Witch."
Having been burned in the past by seeing other technique-driven spastic freakout bands perform live (Niacin, I'm looking at you), I didn't feel much need to get too close to the stage for Battles, despite my passing interest in John Stanier's drumming. (I must be getting soft in my old age: I should have been annoyed by the whole four-foot-high ride cymbal thing, but instead I just found it kind of cute.) I got as much of them as I needed watching the monitor on the other side of the lawn and listening with one ear.
Tim Tuten, Hideout main man and repeat-offender MC for the fest (along with ex-Trenchmouth and current Eternals member Damon Locks), kept his shambling intros much shorter this year, but was definitely long on the funny. Going into his rant about staying hydrated to the crowd assembled for Iron and Wine's set, he stopped himself and said, "What am I saying? You guys are Iron and Wine fans, not Iron and…Vomit. I should be making this announcement before the Mastodon set." Again, maybe I'm just getting soft, and maybe I was more forgiving since there weren't as many acts at the fest this year I was already rabid about, but I found this all wonderfully amusing. Go Tim!
I really don't give too much of a shit either way about Iron and Wine, and even tend occasionally toward the suspicious (seriously, Beam, man, let the beard go), but I think I was one of the few people in the crowd that day who wasn't bored to tears by their set. (Well, maybe I should modify that to "one of the few bloggers in the crowd who wasn't bored to tears," based on some of the sniping I've read online this week.) The whispery lo-fi-ness I usually identify as a hallmark of their sound couldn't really be sustained in a live festival setting like that, which for me was a good thing, in that it allowed the pleasantness of his songs not to get overshadowed (undershadowed?) by his usual wind-in-the-trees crooning. Not to mention that the new, versatile band members beefed up their whole sound with a little more heft and variation. It felt kind of nicely hippiesque.
Again, not to harp on the bad scheduling that day, but putting Mastodon on stage around 6, when a lot of folks were experiencing crashing blood sugar levels and were in need of some dinner, was just kind of sadistic. Standing in line, caked in dust and sweat, with slaughteringly loud and intense metal shredding seeking me out across the park grounds like some sort of malevolent, low-lying fog, made me feel despairing, hateful, and slightly homicidal. (Um, the pad thai was worth it in the end.)
But, fucking Clipse, man. These guys were awesome. Standout set of the day, by far. The sort of standard hip-hop "we're the best" trope wasn't just posturing on their part that night; they knew they were lighting the place on fire. Maybe it was just that the sound coming out of the speakers was finally loud enough, maybe it was the exquisite tension of the minimalism in their beats (ohhhh man, that single tambourine shake in "Mr. Me Too" just sounded like the best thing in the world to me at that point), maybe they were just a little bit more willing to hustle for the crowd's appreciation rather than relying on previously established goodwill, but they truly owned the attention of anyone within earshot--no small feat in a setting so full of fickle, easily distracted indie rock kids.
From there, unfortunately, Cat Power was just a big snooze. I never warmed much to The Greatest (why would I not just listen to Dusty in Memphis instead?), but I know an awful lot of people who find her awfully marvelous, no matter where she happens to be on the spectrum of crazy at any given point, so I was keen to check out what she was doing. The set wasn't bad, it just wasn't right for that second-to-headliner slot. She must have been having sound problems in her monitors on stage that weren't translating out into the crowd because she kept apologizing after every song ("I'm really sorry, y'all!"), and the band was content to just lay back, all noodly-spoodly tasteful. Not that tastefulness is a bad thing, of course, it just wasn't what the overall vibe needed at that point. By all accounts, Girl Talk should have been on that main stage instead. We tried to head back there to the third stage to watch him do his thing, but we couldn't get near enough to see what was happening, or even hear all that well, much less dance, so we just headed back to the main part of the field, letting Chan's vocals kind of wash over us.
God bless Yoko for being a million years old and still being willing and able to shriek her lungs out on stage in front of a rock band--there's no denying that's just kind of unassailably rock and roll of her. But…ugh. I have no problem with "challenging" music in a slightly more controlled climate when I'm really able to ponder why something's challenging me in a particular way, but I was just not up to those mental/aesthetic gymnastics in that environment at that point in the day. So we fled, along with many other folks who were assuredly less forgiving in their assessment of her than I.
After using the day on Saturday to basically regain my festival-going sea legs, I was ready for action on Sunday. And action--thy name is Deerhunter.
I have no eloquent defense for what I like about this band. All I know is it's clear they're having a moment (as declareth the 'Gum), and I find them totally intoxicating. This comparison might be sacrilege to some, but I imagine that the kind of feeling I get listening to and watching them must be akin what it felt like to see Iggy and the Stooges in their prime. (In fact, when people start griping about Bradford Cox's behavior, I always think of this Lester Bangs quote: "I'd just like to ask some of these spikedomed little assholes if they think when Iggy formed the Stooges he sat down and said, 'Okay, boys, let's be punks: we'll get fucked up all the time and act like assholes and make a point of not knowing howta play our instruments! It'll make us famous!'...Iggy was just a fucked-up kid who took too many drugs and wanted to have the most fucked-up band in history so as to externalize his own inner turmoil.") Nothing really scandalous happened on stage, though I think most of us assembled there on that bright and beautiful afternoon were secretly hoping for at least a little of something. But, more importantly, they sounded fantastic. For all the hype and notoriety surrounding them, they really do play some remarkably well-crafted music, too. I'm consistently amazed at how relatively accessible their stuff is. The nearly seamless blend of droney, psychedelic swirl, buoyant basslines, and sweet-and-salty melodies is addictive, in the best way possible. Please be sure to check out Cryptograms if you haven't yet.
I spent a good chunk of the middle of the day bouncing from stage to stage, enjoying solid sets from bands I didn't have the burden of feeling emotionally connected to in any way. (This was a good thing.) Local kids the Ponys ran up against the technical difficulties with the sound system that seemed to be hanging like a cloud (one of the only clouds, both literal and figurative) over the weekend, but the audience was patient and stuck it out, which I was mildly surprised by. Maybe I was just craving a more stereotypical festival experience, but their brand of fairly straightforward rock 'n' roll was exactly what I wanted to hear that afternoon. Although I still don't think I'm quite ready to jump on the Menomena bandwagon, I did like them about 700x more on Sunday than I did last fall when I heard them open for the Long Winters. I have to admit my inner band geek always gets a bit of a thrill when they pull out that baritone sax. I mean, that's just not something you joke around about. Junior Boys brought the funk a bit later--who knew they were Canadian? Not me. I didn't stick around for much of their set, but was impressed when they got the audience clapping 3 against 4. Took a detour over to the side stage where I was utterly delighted to stumble upon the jazzy afrobeat groove of Nomo, improbably hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan. A cute blonde chick on trumpet, a bald, female, black, left-handed singing bass player, resilience to power through a shit-ton of feedback that was no fault of their own, and the chops to throw down some Sun Ra shit? What's not to love?
In an example of remarkably appropriate pacing/programming, the Sea and Cake took the stage in the glow of the late afternoon, and their sunshiny 60s pop never sounded better. I was standing next to a skinny young superfan who completely flipped out when they kicked into "The Argument" off '97's The Fawn. "This is, like, my favorite song!" he crowed to a small, dark-haired girl standing next to him. His enthusiasm was such that it was difficult for me to determine if they even knew each other before that moment.
Who the fuck is Jamie Lidell? I don't mind admitting that I thought this to myself pretty much every time I saw his name on the roster for the weekend. I even scribbled it down in my notes right as he took the stage. I think I'd been getting him confused with one of those James Blunt-y wet noodle singer-songwriters and was expecting some acoustic guitar bullshit out of him. I was surprised, then, when he started crooning some Otis Redding-style soul. Notes: "He looks weird, but he sounds great." I was temporarily unimpressed by the fact that he turned out to be singing to a prerecorded track rather than with a live band. But then...he let loose his looping, beatboxing, scatting aural assault on the masses, and I became an instant fan. Seriously. Notes again: "British blue-eyed soul to RULE THE WORLD." He was def the revelation of the fest for me. Like the other best acts of the weekend, he was reaching out beyond the lip of the stage, really connecting with the audience and completely filling the space with energy and sound. (Right before, perversely, kicking into a subdued and gentle ballad, he declared, "there's nothing I love more than making a NOISE!") I think one of the things I found most interesting about him is how this good-looking British guy with such an appealing, powerful, soulful voice turned into such a...well, such a freak of a performer. (The same can be asked of Kevin Barnes, but more on that later.) I don't know anything at all about his background, but it strikes me that he probably could have taken the wet-noodle easy-choice career path if he'd wanted to. Dudes who can croon like that don't have to be interesting musicians. Lucky for us, then, that he turned into the type of maniac who'll wear a gold lamé robe/smoking jacket and a crown of flowing metallic streamers on stage while laying down his own beats, live, and igniting us with the thrill of experimentation supported by some seriously sophisticated melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sensibilities. According to his post-fest Pitchfork interview (scroll down), he's currently in the studio working on a new album (his first since '05's Multiply); can't wait to see what those sessions yield.
Aaaaand, Malkmus. He didn't blow me away or anything, but he didn't have to. He's Stephen fucking Malkmus. He came out wearing a pink polo shirt and making Jimmy Buffett jokes, fer chrissake. But with the sun beginning to set, the planes passing silently overhead, the trees swaying and rustling, the dust gently kicking up around our feet, the summertime warmth on our arms and faces, and the kids blowing up for the first notes of the Pavement tunes, there was a way that we, collectively, seemed to be saying to him, "tell us about our youth, Stephen." And he obliged, mostly. Full of that signature shambling charm, shrugging off his forgotten lyrics and flubbed chord changes, he didn't have to act important to respect and respond to the fact that it was an important moment for so many of us. (Myself sort of dubiously included.)
Which brings us to--oh God--Of Montreal. If Jamie Lidell was the new-discovery revelation of the weekend for me, then Of Montreal was the "holy shit, I thought I liked them before, but do I ever plan on becoming a superfan now" mind-blower. There is just nothing about their set I didn't like. From the hugely orchestral entrance music to the costumes and silly props to the ineffably catchy songs from Hissing Fauna, the whole thing came off like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Cabaret. Not to mention that, cross-dressing and all--hell, especially considering the cross-dressing--Kevin Barnes is like the sexiest thing in indie rock right now. It's almost difficult to quantify the number of places, psychically and emotionally and intellectually, the band hits you all at once. I usually don't need my favorite musicians to do too many things for me; play a nice song with some nice lyrics and show some awareness of how you're using your stage presence and that's usually enough to satisfy me. But I was completely entranced by the multiple levels they were operating on here: cute as hell with the sugary melodies and childlike wonder in the brightly colored costumes, face paint, and balloons, but also deeply perverse with a twinge of pure fright, bolstered by a strong undercurrent of anything/everything-goes eroticism aiming to turn you on almost in spite of yourself. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that last point seems to be the main difference between the Flaming Lips' stage show and Of Montreal's. I find Wayne Coyne terribly attractive and charismatic, but he's not playing with different notions of sexuality much beyond putting a bunch of hot chicks on stage in alien masks, am I right?) I'm sure much of this is born of pure instinct and the kind of freaky outsider sensibility that seems part and parcel of the whole E6 scene, but Barnes is also very clearly an extremely smart dude (blah, blah, blah, Story of the Eye, yadda yadda), just now coming into the full power of his talent and stage personae, and it would be a disservice not to acknowledge it as such. It shows even in something as simple as the balloons they brought out as props: not content to merely let them flutter around as signifiers for "party" or "whimsy," they recognized that the most interesting thing about balloons is usually popping those fuckers. Impish and mischievous, darkly childlike, mildly violent, and kind of implicitly sexual with the very tangible representations of "tension" and "release." Then, you put paper cut-outs of Kevin's face on a bunch of them, enacting with kind of a wink and a nudge the psychological and neurochemical trauma that forms the core of Hissing Fauna, and, goddamn, if they haven't instantly leapt beyond most of their music-making peers with a simple, wordless gesture. And then to encore with a cover of the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night"? I probably would have cried at the perfection of it all, if I hadn't just lost my mind. I've been dimly aware of these guys at least since The Gay Parade ("Fun Loving Nun" was a staple on my college radio show) and have, of course, been loving Hissing Fauna like everyone else this year, but, like I said, I'm planning on really digging into their catalog now. Thanks, Pitchfork!
I'd kind of half-seen the New Pornographers twice before their Sunday set, so I was looking forward to finally seeing/hearing them with my full attention yet also relieved not to have to get into "OMG, must savor every moment!" mode. There's not really much to say about them that you couldn't assume on your own; consummate craftsmanship, songs perfect for singalongs at dusk, and a hefty dose of anticipation for LP4 Challengers (for those of us who haven't already preordered and digitally downloaded it, that is). No Neko, and of course no Dan, but Carl was surprisingly funny (and also surprisingly snarky; if you haven't already, see also his hilariously meta Pitchfork interview) and Kathryn Calder ably handled female vocalizing duties. They also gestured toward the kind of bombast a band usually needs to play one of these big outdoor festivals by interpolating "We Will Rock You" into the outro of one of their new tunes that they weren't sure how to finish. It delighted the crowd, and myself as well, but I also sensed a bit of (unintentional?) cynicism in it. If nothing else, though, they went out with "The Bleeding Heart Show," which was a real thrill to get to hear live. Hey la, hey la indeed.
If I hadn't already been trending toward increased hip-hop fandom (or at least awareness) for the past year or so, then this weekend definitely would have confirmed that desire in me, and no act moreso than headliners De La Soul. With no other sets to line up for by that point in the night, the entire assembled crowd was focused on their stage and they just showered the place with energy and goodwill. Seeing the magnitude of the audience, right from the get-go Maceo announced, "I like these kind of events because we can learn so much about each other, and that's what hip-hop culture's all about." I dunno, call me cheeseball or call me the exact target for the kind of sentiment needed to gloss over the clear racial disparity between the largely white festivalgoers and a Long Island-born black hip-hop group, but I just felt like that was a nice way to get us all on the same page for the duration of their performance. I danced like an idiot by myself near the midpoint of the grounds, shouted when they asked us to shout, threw my hands up when they asked us to get our hands in the air, and just generally felt awed to be in the presence of these dudes who are so in command of their craft and so willing to really put on a balls-out kind of show. Maybe it's just because I've had some experience performing myself, but I'm always fascinated by performers who can stay in control of what they're doing while also modulating their stage presence to meet the demands of the space they're in. And the fact that they, especially Posdnuos, were able to not just project their charisma and skills out into, but to own the attention, ears, and rears of an entire park full of people totally blew me away. They were, quite simply, the perfect cap to the weekend.
The rest of my pictures from the fest can be found here, and, as ever, big thanks to the pals who hung out with me and tolerated my geekery for any portion of the weekend, and to those of you who've been eager to hear my impressions.
I kind of can't believe it's over already. The weekend came earlier in the month than it did last year, and, as such, it really snuck up on me and then whizzed by fairly breathlessly. So let's just jump right into it, shall we?
Because that's pretty much what it felt like last Friday night, taking the train down to Union Park after a full workday: jumping right into it. I felt like I'd landed in a foreign country when I arrived there, dizzy and out of sorts and nowhere near as drunk as I needed to be to get loose and have fun. I'm not really knowledgeable at all about any of the three albums that were being played front-to-back that night as part of the Don't Look Back thing, so I guess it was kind of refreshing to walk in without any expectations to manage. Slint were very cool, and I can only imagine how great that album would sound if I were suddenly sixteen and full of suburban angst again. GZA's performance of Liquid Swords got a weekend full of hip-hop highlights rolling in fine style. The epically geeked enthusiasm of all the white boys approx. ages 25-32 in the crowd who very clearly spent a large portion of their early adolescence listening to and loving the Wu-Tang Clan was utterly adorable. From where I was standing, there were a lot of supremely patient and indulgent girlfriends/spouses in the house that night, sweetly feigning (and/or being swept up with) enthusiasm as they watched their otherwise mature and responsible bfs throwing up some Wu. As far as my day-to-day listening habits go, I've totally missed the ball on getting into Sonic Youth--because, as with my similar intimidation of Yo La Tengo's or even Pixies' back catalogs, where does one even begin listening?--but I was, of course, thrilled to get to see these legends perform live that night. The passion and energy and pure physicality that these grand elders of rock put into their show made me feel slightly ashamed of how tired I was just standing there watching. Thurston Moore may, in fact, be the coolest man alive.
I had hoped to make it down to the park last Saturday for the Twilight Sad and Califone, but the public transportation situation was atrocious that day, so I rolled in later than I would have liked, to the sounds of Voxtrot giving off a sugar-rush of good cheer. Seriously, I think I started laughing out loud, in that good and happy way, when I got swept into the whole circus and saw Ramesh Srivastava bouncing around on stage in his black-and-white stripy shirt. I still have to make a point to pick up their first full-length.
I've never fallen in love with Grizzly Bear the way I thought I might, but, that being said, I was way more excited about seeing them on Saturday than I thought I would be. The harmonies really are everything they're cracked up to be, and when they start getting those wonderfully dense thunderstorms of sound rolling...wow. The only drawback was the fact that their time slot was at 3, when the sun was high and their tendencies toward cough-syrupy soporifics started putting everyone in the mood for a nap. Subsequent acts Beach House and Iron and Wine suffered the same kind of pacing troubles, which, I dunno, the pessimist in me feels like may have been intentional on Pitchfork's part, just to make the weekend feel like it had some sort of arc or build to it over the course of the three days. No one wants to peak in the middle of the afternoon on the second day, though, right, so I guess I get it. But still, it did kind of feel like the dumping ground for acts that they maybe didn't quite know what else to do with. I mean, going from Grizzly Bear to Battles? Then from Battles to Iron and Wine to Mastodon? Just kind of awkward. Anyway.
I had been told by JWard in no uncertain terms to be sure to catch some of the Beach House set in order to witness the awesome charisma of her former schoolmate, lead singer Victoria Legrand, but the side stage area where they were performing was quite crowded by the time I was able to get over there, so I was squeezed in at a sufficiently bad angle that only allowed me brief glimpses of Alex Scally's head. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to really sink into the mood they were creating, so the whole thing just kind of came off sounding like an underwater roller rink. And I'm bummed that, for all that, I didn't even get to hear "Tokyo Witch."
Having been burned in the past by seeing other technique-driven spastic freakout bands perform live (Niacin, I'm looking at you), I didn't feel much need to get too close to the stage for Battles, despite my passing interest in John Stanier's drumming. (I must be getting soft in my old age: I should have been annoyed by the whole four-foot-high ride cymbal thing, but instead I just found it kind of cute.) I got as much of them as I needed watching the monitor on the other side of the lawn and listening with one ear.
Tim Tuten, Hideout main man and repeat-offender MC for the fest (along with ex-Trenchmouth and current Eternals member Damon Locks), kept his shambling intros much shorter this year, but was definitely long on the funny. Going into his rant about staying hydrated to the crowd assembled for Iron and Wine's set, he stopped himself and said, "What am I saying? You guys are Iron and Wine fans, not Iron and…Vomit. I should be making this announcement before the Mastodon set." Again, maybe I'm just getting soft, and maybe I was more forgiving since there weren't as many acts at the fest this year I was already rabid about, but I found this all wonderfully amusing. Go Tim!
I really don't give too much of a shit either way about Iron and Wine, and even tend occasionally toward the suspicious (seriously, Beam, man, let the beard go), but I think I was one of the few people in the crowd that day who wasn't bored to tears by their set. (Well, maybe I should modify that to "one of the few bloggers in the crowd who wasn't bored to tears," based on some of the sniping I've read online this week.) The whispery lo-fi-ness I usually identify as a hallmark of their sound couldn't really be sustained in a live festival setting like that, which for me was a good thing, in that it allowed the pleasantness of his songs not to get overshadowed (undershadowed?) by his usual wind-in-the-trees crooning. Not to mention that the new, versatile band members beefed up their whole sound with a little more heft and variation. It felt kind of nicely hippiesque.
Again, not to harp on the bad scheduling that day, but putting Mastodon on stage around 6, when a lot of folks were experiencing crashing blood sugar levels and were in need of some dinner, was just kind of sadistic. Standing in line, caked in dust and sweat, with slaughteringly loud and intense metal shredding seeking me out across the park grounds like some sort of malevolent, low-lying fog, made me feel despairing, hateful, and slightly homicidal. (Um, the pad thai was worth it in the end.)
But, fucking Clipse, man. These guys were awesome. Standout set of the day, by far. The sort of standard hip-hop "we're the best" trope wasn't just posturing on their part that night; they knew they were lighting the place on fire. Maybe it was just that the sound coming out of the speakers was finally loud enough, maybe it was the exquisite tension of the minimalism in their beats (ohhhh man, that single tambourine shake in "Mr. Me Too" just sounded like the best thing in the world to me at that point), maybe they were just a little bit more willing to hustle for the crowd's appreciation rather than relying on previously established goodwill, but they truly owned the attention of anyone within earshot--no small feat in a setting so full of fickle, easily distracted indie rock kids.
From there, unfortunately, Cat Power was just a big snooze. I never warmed much to The Greatest (why would I not just listen to Dusty in Memphis instead?), but I know an awful lot of people who find her awfully marvelous, no matter where she happens to be on the spectrum of crazy at any given point, so I was keen to check out what she was doing. The set wasn't bad, it just wasn't right for that second-to-headliner slot. She must have been having sound problems in her monitors on stage that weren't translating out into the crowd because she kept apologizing after every song ("I'm really sorry, y'all!"), and the band was content to just lay back, all noodly-spoodly tasteful. Not that tastefulness is a bad thing, of course, it just wasn't what the overall vibe needed at that point. By all accounts, Girl Talk should have been on that main stage instead. We tried to head back there to the third stage to watch him do his thing, but we couldn't get near enough to see what was happening, or even hear all that well, much less dance, so we just headed back to the main part of the field, letting Chan's vocals kind of wash over us.
God bless Yoko for being a million years old and still being willing and able to shriek her lungs out on stage in front of a rock band--there's no denying that's just kind of unassailably rock and roll of her. But…ugh. I have no problem with "challenging" music in a slightly more controlled climate when I'm really able to ponder why something's challenging me in a particular way, but I was just not up to those mental/aesthetic gymnastics in that environment at that point in the day. So we fled, along with many other folks who were assuredly less forgiving in their assessment of her than I.
After using the day on Saturday to basically regain my festival-going sea legs, I was ready for action on Sunday. And action--thy name is Deerhunter.
I have no eloquent defense for what I like about this band. All I know is it's clear they're having a moment (as declareth the 'Gum), and I find them totally intoxicating. This comparison might be sacrilege to some, but I imagine that the kind of feeling I get listening to and watching them must be akin what it felt like to see Iggy and the Stooges in their prime. (In fact, when people start griping about Bradford Cox's behavior, I always think of this Lester Bangs quote: "I'd just like to ask some of these spikedomed little assholes if they think when Iggy formed the Stooges he sat down and said, 'Okay, boys, let's be punks: we'll get fucked up all the time and act like assholes and make a point of not knowing howta play our instruments! It'll make us famous!'...Iggy was just a fucked-up kid who took too many drugs and wanted to have the most fucked-up band in history so as to externalize his own inner turmoil.") Nothing really scandalous happened on stage, though I think most of us assembled there on that bright and beautiful afternoon were secretly hoping for at least a little of something. But, more importantly, they sounded fantastic. For all the hype and notoriety surrounding them, they really do play some remarkably well-crafted music, too. I'm consistently amazed at how relatively accessible their stuff is. The nearly seamless blend of droney, psychedelic swirl, buoyant basslines, and sweet-and-salty melodies is addictive, in the best way possible. Please be sure to check out Cryptograms if you haven't yet.
I spent a good chunk of the middle of the day bouncing from stage to stage, enjoying solid sets from bands I didn't have the burden of feeling emotionally connected to in any way. (This was a good thing.) Local kids the Ponys ran up against the technical difficulties with the sound system that seemed to be hanging like a cloud (one of the only clouds, both literal and figurative) over the weekend, but the audience was patient and stuck it out, which I was mildly surprised by. Maybe I was just craving a more stereotypical festival experience, but their brand of fairly straightforward rock 'n' roll was exactly what I wanted to hear that afternoon. Although I still don't think I'm quite ready to jump on the Menomena bandwagon, I did like them about 700x more on Sunday than I did last fall when I heard them open for the Long Winters. I have to admit my inner band geek always gets a bit of a thrill when they pull out that baritone sax. I mean, that's just not something you joke around about. Junior Boys brought the funk a bit later--who knew they were Canadian? Not me. I didn't stick around for much of their set, but was impressed when they got the audience clapping 3 against 4. Took a detour over to the side stage where I was utterly delighted to stumble upon the jazzy afrobeat groove of Nomo, improbably hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan. A cute blonde chick on trumpet, a bald, female, black, left-handed singing bass player, resilience to power through a shit-ton of feedback that was no fault of their own, and the chops to throw down some Sun Ra shit? What's not to love?
In an example of remarkably appropriate pacing/programming, the Sea and Cake took the stage in the glow of the late afternoon, and their sunshiny 60s pop never sounded better. I was standing next to a skinny young superfan who completely flipped out when they kicked into "The Argument" off '97's The Fawn. "This is, like, my favorite song!" he crowed to a small, dark-haired girl standing next to him. His enthusiasm was such that it was difficult for me to determine if they even knew each other before that moment.
Who the fuck is Jamie Lidell? I don't mind admitting that I thought this to myself pretty much every time I saw his name on the roster for the weekend. I even scribbled it down in my notes right as he took the stage. I think I'd been getting him confused with one of those James Blunt-y wet noodle singer-songwriters and was expecting some acoustic guitar bullshit out of him. I was surprised, then, when he started crooning some Otis Redding-style soul. Notes: "He looks weird, but he sounds great." I was temporarily unimpressed by the fact that he turned out to be singing to a prerecorded track rather than with a live band. But then...he let loose his looping, beatboxing, scatting aural assault on the masses, and I became an instant fan. Seriously. Notes again: "British blue-eyed soul to RULE THE WORLD." He was def the revelation of the fest for me. Like the other best acts of the weekend, he was reaching out beyond the lip of the stage, really connecting with the audience and completely filling the space with energy and sound. (Right before, perversely, kicking into a subdued and gentle ballad, he declared, "there's nothing I love more than making a NOISE!") I think one of the things I found most interesting about him is how this good-looking British guy with such an appealing, powerful, soulful voice turned into such a...well, such a freak of a performer. (The same can be asked of Kevin Barnes, but more on that later.) I don't know anything at all about his background, but it strikes me that he probably could have taken the wet-noodle easy-choice career path if he'd wanted to. Dudes who can croon like that don't have to be interesting musicians. Lucky for us, then, that he turned into the type of maniac who'll wear a gold lamé robe/smoking jacket and a crown of flowing metallic streamers on stage while laying down his own beats, live, and igniting us with the thrill of experimentation supported by some seriously sophisticated melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sensibilities. According to his post-fest Pitchfork interview (scroll down), he's currently in the studio working on a new album (his first since '05's Multiply); can't wait to see what those sessions yield.
Aaaaand, Malkmus. He didn't blow me away or anything, but he didn't have to. He's Stephen fucking Malkmus. He came out wearing a pink polo shirt and making Jimmy Buffett jokes, fer chrissake. But with the sun beginning to set, the planes passing silently overhead, the trees swaying and rustling, the dust gently kicking up around our feet, the summertime warmth on our arms and faces, and the kids blowing up for the first notes of the Pavement tunes, there was a way that we, collectively, seemed to be saying to him, "tell us about our youth, Stephen." And he obliged, mostly. Full of that signature shambling charm, shrugging off his forgotten lyrics and flubbed chord changes, he didn't have to act important to respect and respond to the fact that it was an important moment for so many of us. (Myself sort of dubiously included.)
Which brings us to--oh God--Of Montreal. If Jamie Lidell was the new-discovery revelation of the weekend for me, then Of Montreal was the "holy shit, I thought I liked them before, but do I ever plan on becoming a superfan now" mind-blower. There is just nothing about their set I didn't like. From the hugely orchestral entrance music to the costumes and silly props to the ineffably catchy songs from Hissing Fauna, the whole thing came off like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Cabaret. Not to mention that, cross-dressing and all--hell, especially considering the cross-dressing--Kevin Barnes is like the sexiest thing in indie rock right now. It's almost difficult to quantify the number of places, psychically and emotionally and intellectually, the band hits you all at once. I usually don't need my favorite musicians to do too many things for me; play a nice song with some nice lyrics and show some awareness of how you're using your stage presence and that's usually enough to satisfy me. But I was completely entranced by the multiple levels they were operating on here: cute as hell with the sugary melodies and childlike wonder in the brightly colored costumes, face paint, and balloons, but also deeply perverse with a twinge of pure fright, bolstered by a strong undercurrent of anything/everything-goes eroticism aiming to turn you on almost in spite of yourself. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that last point seems to be the main difference between the Flaming Lips' stage show and Of Montreal's. I find Wayne Coyne terribly attractive and charismatic, but he's not playing with different notions of sexuality much beyond putting a bunch of hot chicks on stage in alien masks, am I right?) I'm sure much of this is born of pure instinct and the kind of freaky outsider sensibility that seems part and parcel of the whole E6 scene, but Barnes is also very clearly an extremely smart dude (blah, blah, blah, Story of the Eye, yadda yadda), just now coming into the full power of his talent and stage personae, and it would be a disservice not to acknowledge it as such. It shows even in something as simple as the balloons they brought out as props: not content to merely let them flutter around as signifiers for "party" or "whimsy," they recognized that the most interesting thing about balloons is usually popping those fuckers. Impish and mischievous, darkly childlike, mildly violent, and kind of implicitly sexual with the very tangible representations of "tension" and "release." Then, you put paper cut-outs of Kevin's face on a bunch of them, enacting with kind of a wink and a nudge the psychological and neurochemical trauma that forms the core of Hissing Fauna, and, goddamn, if they haven't instantly leapt beyond most of their music-making peers with a simple, wordless gesture. And then to encore with a cover of the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night"? I probably would have cried at the perfection of it all, if I hadn't just lost my mind. I've been dimly aware of these guys at least since The Gay Parade ("Fun Loving Nun" was a staple on my college radio show) and have, of course, been loving Hissing Fauna like everyone else this year, but, like I said, I'm planning on really digging into their catalog now. Thanks, Pitchfork!
I'd kind of half-seen the New Pornographers twice before their Sunday set, so I was looking forward to finally seeing/hearing them with my full attention yet also relieved not to have to get into "OMG, must savor every moment!" mode. There's not really much to say about them that you couldn't assume on your own; consummate craftsmanship, songs perfect for singalongs at dusk, and a hefty dose of anticipation for LP4 Challengers (for those of us who haven't already preordered and digitally downloaded it, that is). No Neko, and of course no Dan, but Carl was surprisingly funny (and also surprisingly snarky; if you haven't already, see also his hilariously meta Pitchfork interview) and Kathryn Calder ably handled female vocalizing duties. They also gestured toward the kind of bombast a band usually needs to play one of these big outdoor festivals by interpolating "We Will Rock You" into the outro of one of their new tunes that they weren't sure how to finish. It delighted the crowd, and myself as well, but I also sensed a bit of (unintentional?) cynicism in it. If nothing else, though, they went out with "The Bleeding Heart Show," which was a real thrill to get to hear live. Hey la, hey la indeed.
If I hadn't already been trending toward increased hip-hop fandom (or at least awareness) for the past year or so, then this weekend definitely would have confirmed that desire in me, and no act moreso than headliners De La Soul. With no other sets to line up for by that point in the night, the entire assembled crowd was focused on their stage and they just showered the place with energy and goodwill. Seeing the magnitude of the audience, right from the get-go Maceo announced, "I like these kind of events because we can learn so much about each other, and that's what hip-hop culture's all about." I dunno, call me cheeseball or call me the exact target for the kind of sentiment needed to gloss over the clear racial disparity between the largely white festivalgoers and a Long Island-born black hip-hop group, but I just felt like that was a nice way to get us all on the same page for the duration of their performance. I danced like an idiot by myself near the midpoint of the grounds, shouted when they asked us to shout, threw my hands up when they asked us to get our hands in the air, and just generally felt awed to be in the presence of these dudes who are so in command of their craft and so willing to really put on a balls-out kind of show. Maybe it's just because I've had some experience performing myself, but I'm always fascinated by performers who can stay in control of what they're doing while also modulating their stage presence to meet the demands of the space they're in. And the fact that they, especially Posdnuos, were able to not just project their charisma and skills out into, but to own the attention, ears, and rears of an entire park full of people totally blew me away. They were, quite simply, the perfect cap to the weekend.
The rest of my pictures from the fest can be found here, and, as ever, big thanks to the pals who hung out with me and tolerated my geekery for any portion of the weekend, and to those of you who've been eager to hear my impressions.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Gimme Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
The new Spoon album is so good it's like it's always been there. I can't imagine it never having existed. I can't imagine myself having existed without it. A stunner. An instant classic. A step away from Gimme Fiction. A step back toward Girls Can Tell perhaps. But also a defiant step forward. I don't want to overstate the case for fear of raising expectations beyond reason, but damn. (Be sure to check out this illuminating interview with Britt Daniel about Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga over at eMusic.)
The new Interpol is also quite good. Stabs at honest-to-God warmth, both in Paul's voice and in the production. I only got through it once before Ga(x5) entered my life, so I don't have much else to say about it at the moment. But it shows promise. My enjoyment of these albums seems to be inversely proportional to everyone else's: I like Turn On the Bright Lights the least of the series and each subsequent release has surprised and excited me more.
Pitchfoooooooooooooork! Hope to see some of you kids out there this weekend.
The new Interpol is also quite good. Stabs at honest-to-God warmth, both in Paul's voice and in the production. I only got through it once before Ga(x5) entered my life, so I don't have much else to say about it at the moment. But it shows promise. My enjoyment of these albums seems to be inversely proportional to everyone else's: I like Turn On the Bright Lights the least of the series and each subsequent release has surprised and excited me more.
Pitchfoooooooooooooork! Hope to see some of you kids out there this weekend.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Recent Items of Interest
So, I just discovered this great little band that goes by the name of the White Stripes. Perhaps you've heard of them? There's an iTunes-exclusive track called "Baby Brother" that came bundled with my Icky Thump download, and it's the stupidest and most wonderful thing I've heard in a while. Makes me think of Lilo and Stitch with its Elvis/rockabilly nods and the "although your head is blue / think the world of you, baby brother" line. Recommended. (Speaking of which, be sure to check out 29 Thoughts on the New White Stripes Album over at Nerve. Chockful of comedy gold, I says! I wish I were sharp enough to have written most of it, but #16 most especially.)
I think Sasha Frere-Jones is right in his uneasiness (fourth paragraph down) about Feist's current vogue among the indie-rock set and how that relates to their stereotypical unwillingness to give the time of day to "commercial pop like the Bee Gees or Sade." (John Roderick also hints at this in his Bonnaroo blog: "I didn’t hear cheering anywhere else like the cheering for Leslie Feist — she’d arch her eyebrow and the place would blow up — which always makes me wonder what the heck is going on....She must be code for something that I haven’t figured out.") I'd go even deeper, though: in some of those plaintive, back-of-the-throat notes she holds at the end of a phrase, she sounds like nothing so much as the indie rock Ani DiFranco, a singer the hipsters definitely aren't rushing to rally around. How does she do it? How does she make it work for her? She's damn cute, and the songs do lilt damn pleasantly. Is it the Canadian factor? Anyway, many thanks to MS for loaning me The Reminder. It feels like a good summertime album right now.
Need to catch up on a bunch of music you may have missed so far this year? Then be sure to check out Marathonpacks's midterm mixes (1, 2, and 3). If nothing else, worth it for "Josh Homme: 'Hey where's my mojo' / Liars: 'WE ARE HAVE YOUR MOJO'."
Did everyone else miss James Green Pea-ness like I did? Well, he's back, motherfuckers, and ready to sear your eyeballs all over again with his epic flights of prose.
Happy Spoon day tomorrow, kittens. Here's the video for "The Underdog" in case you haven't seen it yet.
And the hits just keep on coming over at Daytrotter: an outstanding session with the National (including a slightly funkier, up-tempo take on Boxer stand-out "Slow Show") and some quiet, melancholy ruminations on the band's after-midnight appeal from the estimable Mr. Moeller: "It’s a land where the talking stops and men and women take their relationships to the mattress, to die or to galvanize them against all possible contrivances and conditions. It’s usually the former that takes shape and burns through the superficialities of the daytime hours. A night – a midnight – tolerates no bullshit."Interview, apparently, still t/k. Interview up now. Read all about Matt Berninger getting mowed down by a Lincoln Town Car in front of a bus full of little kids!
I broke my camera, but then I got a new one.
Joe Meno continues to rule my early-July reading habits. Just polished off The Boy Detective Fails. Reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums with its sickly dread of adulthood and unwillingness to grow past early childhood triumphs, it's maybe slightly over-long, but brings us, among other sweetness, this lovely little bit of weirdness from one of its tiny, almost apologetic, interstitial chapters:
I think Sasha Frere-Jones is right in his uneasiness (fourth paragraph down) about Feist's current vogue among the indie-rock set and how that relates to their stereotypical unwillingness to give the time of day to "commercial pop like the Bee Gees or Sade." (John Roderick also hints at this in his Bonnaroo blog: "I didn’t hear cheering anywhere else like the cheering for Leslie Feist — she’d arch her eyebrow and the place would blow up — which always makes me wonder what the heck is going on....She must be code for something that I haven’t figured out.") I'd go even deeper, though: in some of those plaintive, back-of-the-throat notes she holds at the end of a phrase, she sounds like nothing so much as the indie rock Ani DiFranco, a singer the hipsters definitely aren't rushing to rally around. How does she do it? How does she make it work for her? She's damn cute, and the songs do lilt damn pleasantly. Is it the Canadian factor? Anyway, many thanks to MS for loaning me The Reminder. It feels like a good summertime album right now.
Need to catch up on a bunch of music you may have missed so far this year? Then be sure to check out Marathonpacks's midterm mixes (1, 2, and 3). If nothing else, worth it for "Josh Homme: 'Hey where's my mojo' / Liars: 'WE ARE HAVE YOUR MOJO'."
Did everyone else miss James Green Pea-ness like I did? Well, he's back, motherfuckers, and ready to sear your eyeballs all over again with his epic flights of prose.
Happy Spoon day tomorrow, kittens. Here's the video for "The Underdog" in case you haven't seen it yet.
And the hits just keep on coming over at Daytrotter: an outstanding session with the National (including a slightly funkier, up-tempo take on Boxer stand-out "Slow Show") and some quiet, melancholy ruminations on the band's after-midnight appeal from the estimable Mr. Moeller: "It’s a land where the talking stops and men and women take their relationships to the mattress, to die or to galvanize them against all possible contrivances and conditions. It’s usually the former that takes shape and burns through the superficialities of the daytime hours. A night – a midnight – tolerates no bullshit."
I broke my camera, but then I got a new one.
Joe Meno continues to rule my early-July reading habits. Just polished off The Boy Detective Fails. Reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums with its sickly dread of adulthood and unwillingness to grow past early childhood triumphs, it's maybe slightly over-long, but brings us, among other sweetness, this lovely little bit of weirdness from one of its tiny, almost apologetic, interstitial chapters:
"In our town, we feature a variety of adult-themed bookstores; we think you may be familiar with the kind. Along the narrow and dusty aisles are thousands of doe-eyed women caught in the most mysterious of poses. Why are there so many terrible places like this in our town? Because the heart is terrible--like a rotten tooth, it is small and soft and weak. It has a terrible requirement, and that terrible requirement is mystery. For example, there is one particular magazine in one particular aisle in one particular dirty bookstore in our town called Girls in Turtlenecks. That is all there is: shot after shot of blushing gals in tight-fitting turtlenecks, naked from the waist down. We stare at a copy and feel flush. And somehow, silently, we know the truth: Airbrushed and honeyed, they are still no match for the feeling we get waiting to kiss."
Thursday, June 21, 2007
The Ground Is So Proud Just to Hold Us Up
It's been a Roderiffic week for us Long Winters fans. J.Rod's Bonnaroo blog for MSNBC is worth its weight in pull-quotes, and now Daytrotter has posted an interview with the man and an unbelievable live session to go along with it. "Clouds" has always quietly been one of my favorite songs on Putting the Days to Bed and it just sounds so free and nice and loose here. And, hearing a live take on "Scared Straight"--a song that I could barely make a mix CD without for a span of about two years--makes me so excited I could just puke. I swear, as days go by, I'm becoming less an eloquent defender of my favorite movies, books, and music and more a hysterical, squealing, geeked-out fangirl.
Speaking of Bonnaroo, I've been obsessed for a while now with the Flickr page of a wonderful New York-based photographer, Elizabeth Weinberg (surprise, surprise--I was first introduced to her stuff thanks to her lovely portraits of the Long Winters on tour), and she's got a KILLER set from this year's 'Roo. They're all gorgeous, but be sure to check out what she has for the Hold Steady, the Flaming Lips, and Spoon.
Happy solstice, my bebes.
Speaking of Bonnaroo, I've been obsessed for a while now with the Flickr page of a wonderful New York-based photographer, Elizabeth Weinberg (surprise, surprise--I was first introduced to her stuff thanks to her lovely portraits of the Long Winters on tour), and she's got a KILLER set from this year's 'Roo. They're all gorgeous, but be sure to check out what she has for the Hold Steady, the Flaming Lips, and Spoon.
Happy solstice, my bebes.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
'Fork & Spoon
Ohhh, you know what's awesome? Go lay in a tanning bed for a while and crank up Deerhunter's Cryptograms while you're in there. You'll feel like you're in a David Lynch movie or something.
Pitchfork previews The Underdog off Spoon's forthcoming new one Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm sure the Jon Brion fan-boys and -girls will be geeking out about his production work here, but I'm of the mind that the specialest special effect that's going to be found anywhere on the disk is Britt's voice. Love that howl. Get excited.
LOL, that's my hand.
I didn't have a chance to write up anything about the Animal Collective show I went to at the Metro a few weeks back, but Pitchfork has a great short review and some representative shots from that night, and Stereogum caught a show last weekend in New York that sounds every bit as good as the one I saw here. I'm definitely turning into a big Collective convert.
Pitchfork previews The Underdog off Spoon's forthcoming new one Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. I'm sure the Jon Brion fan-boys and -girls will be geeking out about his production work here, but I'm of the mind that the specialest special effect that's going to be found anywhere on the disk is Britt's voice. Love that howl. Get excited.
LOL, that's my hand.
I didn't have a chance to write up anything about the Animal Collective show I went to at the Metro a few weeks back, but Pitchfork has a great short review and some representative shots from that night, and Stereogum caught a show last weekend in New York that sounds every bit as good as the one I saw here. I'm definitely turning into a big Collective convert.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
"Enough With This Cicada Bullshit"
From the brilliant and twisted mind of Dr. Benji Kelnardo, a few thoughts on cicadas:
This has to stop. Every single fucking day I turn on the news and some jackass from Schaumburg is fryin' up a pan of the little fuckers or covering them in chocolate and arranging them on a silver platter. People keep sending in pictures of cicadas doing all sorts of gross things. They are making cakes in the form of cicadas and finding dead ones and dressing them up like a rock band and then freezing them (seen on channel 5, worth checking the website). They have made their appearance in Crown Point and buzz and hum all day long (this is actually kinda neat, it echoes through the whole neighborhood). However, they are so fucking hideous I don't even know where to begin. This is some biblical shit. They are big, ugly, stupid creatures that fly haphazardly into windows, screens, cars, etc. And they shed their exoskeletons. Um, just in case you didn't get that the first time--"they shed their exoskeletons." And they leave them wherever they feel like, driveways, bushes, porches. Yuck. And, matters got much worse today and yesterday as the filthy fucking sea-chickens discovered them. It looks like our neighborhood is a beach or the Southlake Mall parking lot, covered in the flying rats as they peck at the ground and fight each other for the creatures. It is Mother Nature at her ugliest. This sea-chicken phenomenon is apparently happening all over the area according to the
news. That's some sick shit. Fuck them. All of them.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Boxer, and Other Bits & Bobs
Required reading: Joss Whedon's short and impassioned essay about the Dua Khalil murder.
Great interview at the Onion A.V. Club with one of my fave contemporary comedians, Louis C.K.
My opinion of Boxer hasn't really crystallized yet, which is as it should be, considering the way Matt and the brothers like to hide little time bombs of feeling throughout their songs that are designed not to explode on you for months. But, man. I just hear those opening piano chords of "Fake Empire" and instantly feel like I want to burst into tears. That's got to be a good thing. So far the album seems to breathe best over actual stereo speakers, rather than through headphones. All the empty space around Matt's vocals comes through a little more clearly, and poignantly, that way. And, though I take exception with the way Pitchfork asserts that this is "a drummer's album" with the phrase "Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here" (emphasis mine), as if he's suddenly gotten good out of nowhere, as if the previous albums aren't chockful of brilliant drumming, the point is well taken. Those snare snaps and other fills in "Mistaken for Strangers" are every bit as likely to get stuck in your head as the chorus.
Happy Towel Day, everybody!
And, of course, happy 30th to my girl HLo-M. (That looks like the symbol for some sort of chemical compound.)
Enjoy your holiday weekend, my kittens!
Great interview at the Onion A.V. Club with one of my fave contemporary comedians, Louis C.K.
My opinion of Boxer hasn't really crystallized yet, which is as it should be, considering the way Matt and the brothers like to hide little time bombs of feeling throughout their songs that are designed not to explode on you for months. But, man. I just hear those opening piano chords of "Fake Empire" and instantly feel like I want to burst into tears. That's got to be a good thing. So far the album seems to breathe best over actual stereo speakers, rather than through headphones. All the empty space around Matt's vocals comes through a little more clearly, and poignantly, that way. And, though I take exception with the way Pitchfork asserts that this is "a drummer's album" with the phrase "Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here" (emphasis mine), as if he's suddenly gotten good out of nowhere, as if the previous albums aren't chockful of brilliant drumming, the point is well taken. Those snare snaps and other fills in "Mistaken for Strangers" are every bit as likely to get stuck in your head as the chorus.
Happy Towel Day, everybody!
And, of course, happy 30th to my girl HLo-M. (That looks like the symbol for some sort of chemical compound.)
Enjoy your holiday weekend, my kittens!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Save S/FJ's Photos
I've linked so often, and with so much joy, to Sasha Frere-Jones's blog in the past, I would be completely remiss if I didn't post a link today to his online collection plate. Apparently he had a major hard drive crash this weekend and has lost a great quantity of his beautiful photos. A hard drive recovery service will be charging him an exorbitant fee to recover said photos, and he's looking for some help to defray this cost. Throw a little love brutha's way, wouldja?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Bjork, Live at the Auditorium Theatre
Nice Village Voice write-up on the National's recent stint opening for Arcade Fire in New York (via). I'm just bouncing off the walls with anticipation for Boxer next week and the show at the Metro next month. (Also, LOL: "grandma-throttling enthusiasm". This reminds me of J. Rod's classic line in his report from last year's Bonnaroo about his previous perception of Cat Power's music: "[this girl I was dating] would play Cat Power on her car stereo at a really low volume whenever I was in the car, so that it sounded to me like a field recording of the rape of a thousand grandmas. Bleah.")
OMG, even as a non-Pumpkins fan, I am totally in love with the blinding brilliance of these LOLCorgs (via) and I CAN HAS CORGAN?. "Mah cred, i mournz it!"
I was planning on reading the 33 1/3 book on Steely Dan's Aja anyway, but if we're getting (according to this excerpt, at least) witty wordsmith Donald Fagen dropping Don Ellis references 'n shit, I may have to bump it a little further up the queue.
Um, yeeeah, and I also saw Bjork live for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre on Saturday. Best concert ever? Pretty close to it. I have never heard a group of people cheer that loud, outside of a sporting event perhaps. Everyone in the place was freaking out left and right, and she was just shockingly good. (Or perhaps unshockingly, depending on how you want to look at it.) If I were going to make a mix-CD sampler of her stuff for the uninitiated, I could do worse than copping from that night's set list. It was a nearly perfect representation from all her previous full-lengths. The stuff from Vespertine (one of my top-five all-time-fave albums) brought the tears to the eyes. The only technical difficulty of the entire night was, unfortunately, some feedback at the beginning of "Unison," which did ruin the mood a bit, though. The most impressive technical achievement of the night, on the other hand, would have to be the GREEN LASERS OF DOOM that shot across the hall like lightning bolts during those awesome horn stabs in "Army of Me" ("and if you complain"--wham!--"once more..."). Obvy, I'm sure rigging all that electro-stuff up takes great skills, but the effect was staggeringly perfect in its simplicity. I'm not sure how else I can gush creatively or interestingly about the show other than to say that, aside from every minute of music that filled the theater, perhaps the best thing I heard on Saturday night was a little girl, probably about nine or ten, walking into the lobby behind me with her parents, saying "Mommy, I've got butterflies!" because she was so excited to be there. Me too, kid. Me too.
OMG, even as a non-Pumpkins fan, I am totally in love with the blinding brilliance of these LOLCorgs (via) and I CAN HAS CORGAN?. "Mah cred, i mournz it!"
I was planning on reading the 33 1/3 book on Steely Dan's Aja anyway, but if we're getting (according to this excerpt, at least) witty wordsmith Donald Fagen dropping Don Ellis references 'n shit, I may have to bump it a little further up the queue.
Um, yeeeah, and I also saw Bjork live for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre on Saturday. Best concert ever? Pretty close to it. I have never heard a group of people cheer that loud, outside of a sporting event perhaps. Everyone in the place was freaking out left and right, and she was just shockingly good. (Or perhaps unshockingly, depending on how you want to look at it.) If I were going to make a mix-CD sampler of her stuff for the uninitiated, I could do worse than copping from that night's set list. It was a nearly perfect representation from all her previous full-lengths. The stuff from Vespertine (one of my top-five all-time-fave albums) brought the tears to the eyes. The only technical difficulty of the entire night was, unfortunately, some feedback at the beginning of "Unison," which did ruin the mood a bit, though. The most impressive technical achievement of the night, on the other hand, would have to be the GREEN LASERS OF DOOM that shot across the hall like lightning bolts during those awesome horn stabs in "Army of Me" ("and if you complain"--wham!--"once more..."). Obvy, I'm sure rigging all that electro-stuff up takes great skills, but the effect was staggeringly perfect in its simplicity. I'm not sure how else I can gush creatively or interestingly about the show other than to say that, aside from every minute of music that filled the theater, perhaps the best thing I heard on Saturday night was a little girl, probably about nine or ten, walking into the lobby behind me with her parents, saying "Mommy, I've got butterflies!" because she was so excited to be there. Me too, kid. Me too.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Amy Winehouse, Live at the Vic
I don't know what show all these cranky reviewers were at, man, because it def wasn't the one I was at last night. I mean, really. I went in to this show with insanely high expectations, and it pretty much met every one.
I have no pictures for you, my kittens, because they made me relinquish my camera to the coat check girl after the kind and gentle and patient and sensitive [not so much--Ed.] doorpeople saw my humble point 'n' shoot in my messenger bag, but, honestly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it in my hands as a distraction. I could focus all my attention on the stage, and the show I found there was white hot.
Amy was backed by eight-piece band The Dap Kings (two saxes and a trumpet, two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards) and accompanied by two gorgeous (male) back-up singers. The dudes all wore three-piece suits, the horn section had some subtle but perfectly effective choreography, and the drummer was doing rim-shots when Amy started throwing candy out into the audience. The whole thing would have seemed straight out of central casting if it wasn't, well, right on the money. I felt like it totally transcended its own Motown revivalism by going straight for the heart of the sound, without mucking it up with too much with self-consciousness or self-satisfaction. Not to mention that these guys were all consummate professionals, just jamming away like they were born with their instruments in their hands.
The folks who are whinging about Amy's stage presence clearly wanted some sort of polished professional, and, the way I understand it, that's just not her steez. Even though she didn't throw a tantrum or snort some coke off the mic stand like I was kind of secretly hoping she would, she was a little bit snotty and a little bit spacy--in short, everything I wanted her to be. I read her body language less as insecurity and more as a casual don'tgiveafuck that didn't have to actively demand our attention. It seemed like she just instinctively knew that she deserved it. Not to give her a free pass on the anorexia front or anything, but, she looked fantastic in her jeans and midriff-bearing shirt, white hoop earrings, and huge mound of jet-black hair extensions. (The top of her head seriously looked like some sort of evil cupcake gone to seed.) They played most of Back to Black and, I'm assuming, a few more off Frank (I only knew "Fuck Me Pumps"), and even snuck in a little bit of Lauren Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."
Of course, there were big, big cheers for "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," but the audience was basically losing their crackers before a note was even played. It was amazing. Most rock shows I go to, there's a sense that the audience is cheering for the frontman/woman because they view him/her basically as a more fully realized version of themselves; it's like, I think a lot of kids idolize Colin Meloy or John Darnielle because they fancy "yeah, those are the kinds of songs I would write if I could write songs; they're speaking directly to my experience as a certain kind of consumer of a certain kind of music." But Amy's appeal is so much more nebulous and intangible. (Which is maybe why the cookie-cutter reviews aren't quite able parse it in the familiar vocabulary of the average rock show?) I mean, she's got the sexiness, the voice, the attitude, the Britishness, the notorious reputation, the songwriting skills, but, really, none of those things, even working as a unit, are big enough to contain her. You can't really pin down the thing that inspired such an explosion of love in the room. I dunno. I'm bummed that the haters are hating today, 'cause I had a blast.
The jury's still out for me on opener Patrick Wolf. I'm not overly in love with his songs, but the specific kind of glammy, hammy lllllllllllllllookatme! musk he was giving off on stage reminded me of this time, I think it was last summer, when I saw three friends, two girls and a boy, get on the brown line at Armitage. They were clearly coming home from summer school or summer camp or somesuch, and they each had a plastic spoon and were sharing a white styrofoam cup of strawberry ice cream. The boy, all loose, rangy Jacob's ladder limbs and joints, at one point, a propos of nothing as far as I could tell, leaned all the way over so that he was about an inch away from sticking his nose in one of the girl's ears, the girl he clearly fancied best of the two. There was this obscene, hormonal, yet completely innocent intimacy in the whole exchange. That kind of sexy, sweet, gummy bear gesture of affection (both Merriam-Webster's definitions 2 "fondness" and 7 "the state of being affected" intended/appropriate here) more than made up for what I just wasn't getting out of the music itself.
I have no pictures for you, my kittens, because they made me relinquish my camera to the coat check girl after the kind and gentle and patient and sensitive [not so much--Ed.] doorpeople saw my humble point 'n' shoot in my messenger bag, but, honestly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it in my hands as a distraction. I could focus all my attention on the stage, and the show I found there was white hot.
Amy was backed by eight-piece band The Dap Kings (two saxes and a trumpet, two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards) and accompanied by two gorgeous (male) back-up singers. The dudes all wore three-piece suits, the horn section had some subtle but perfectly effective choreography, and the drummer was doing rim-shots when Amy started throwing candy out into the audience. The whole thing would have seemed straight out of central casting if it wasn't, well, right on the money. I felt like it totally transcended its own Motown revivalism by going straight for the heart of the sound, without mucking it up with too much with self-consciousness or self-satisfaction. Not to mention that these guys were all consummate professionals, just jamming away like they were born with their instruments in their hands.
The folks who are whinging about Amy's stage presence clearly wanted some sort of polished professional, and, the way I understand it, that's just not her steez. Even though she didn't throw a tantrum or snort some coke off the mic stand like I was kind of secretly hoping she would, she was a little bit snotty and a little bit spacy--in short, everything I wanted her to be. I read her body language less as insecurity and more as a casual don'tgiveafuck that didn't have to actively demand our attention. It seemed like she just instinctively knew that she deserved it. Not to give her a free pass on the anorexia front or anything, but, she looked fantastic in her jeans and midriff-bearing shirt, white hoop earrings, and huge mound of jet-black hair extensions. (The top of her head seriously looked like some sort of evil cupcake gone to seed.) They played most of Back to Black and, I'm assuming, a few more off Frank (I only knew "Fuck Me Pumps"), and even snuck in a little bit of Lauren Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."
Of course, there were big, big cheers for "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," but the audience was basically losing their crackers before a note was even played. It was amazing. Most rock shows I go to, there's a sense that the audience is cheering for the frontman/woman because they view him/her basically as a more fully realized version of themselves; it's like, I think a lot of kids idolize Colin Meloy or John Darnielle because they fancy "yeah, those are the kinds of songs I would write if I could write songs; they're speaking directly to my experience as a certain kind of consumer of a certain kind of music." But Amy's appeal is so much more nebulous and intangible. (Which is maybe why the cookie-cutter reviews aren't quite able parse it in the familiar vocabulary of the average rock show?) I mean, she's got the sexiness, the voice, the attitude, the Britishness, the notorious reputation, the songwriting skills, but, really, none of those things, even working as a unit, are big enough to contain her. You can't really pin down the thing that inspired such an explosion of love in the room. I dunno. I'm bummed that the haters are hating today, 'cause I had a blast.
The jury's still out for me on opener Patrick Wolf. I'm not overly in love with his songs, but the specific kind of glammy, hammy lllllllllllllllookatme! musk he was giving off on stage reminded me of this time, I think it was last summer, when I saw three friends, two girls and a boy, get on the brown line at Armitage. They were clearly coming home from summer school or summer camp or somesuch, and they each had a plastic spoon and were sharing a white styrofoam cup of strawberry ice cream. The boy, all loose, rangy Jacob's ladder limbs and joints, at one point, a propos of nothing as far as I could tell, leaned all the way over so that he was about an inch away from sticking his nose in one of the girl's ears, the girl he clearly fancied best of the two. There was this obscene, hormonal, yet completely innocent intimacy in the whole exchange. That kind of sexy, sweet, gummy bear gesture of affection (both Merriam-Webster's definitions 2 "fondness" and 7 "the state of being affected" intended/appropriate here) more than made up for what I just wasn't getting out of the music itself.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Tiny Bits of Funny
I bow at the feet of the genius who wrote this tutorial on LOL Kitteh as a Second Language. This is an absolutely virtuosic display of utter ridiculousness. I could have used the help when I was making this sign. That "have" is just crying out to be a "has."
I fully support Mimi Smartypants's suggestion that we all start using "SCIENTIFIC!" as happy-exclamation slang.
LOL, "Radiohead (my generation’s Arcade Fire)".
Also, it was just announced that the Long Blondes will be touring through the Subterranean in early June. Sooo much good live music coming up this spring and summer. I can't believe Someone to Drive You Home still hasn't been released in the U.S. yet.
I fully support Mimi Smartypants's suggestion that we all start using "SCIENTIFIC!" as happy-exclamation slang.
LOL, "Radiohead (my generation’s Arcade Fire)".
Also, it was just announced that the Long Blondes will be touring through the Subterranean in early June. Sooo much good live music coming up this spring and summer. I can't believe Someone to Drive You Home still hasn't been released in the U.S. yet.
Monday, April 23, 2007
RIP, Old White Guys
Both Boris Yeltsin and David Halberstam in the same 24-hour period? That's not a news story; that's a term-paper anxiety dream I had in college.
Friday, April 13, 2007
They Never Came Close to Guessing
I know I'm a day late at this point, but RIP, Mr. Vonnegut. I've never been the biggest fan, but that's nothing more than a simple error of omission on my part. One of my fondest memories of non-assigned reading during college is of the weekend I spent pouring over Breakfast of Champions, after reviewing the execrable film version for the IU newspaper. I've inscribed this much cherished quote from the novel on the inside covers and in the margins of many notebooks since then: "Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne."
"It's much work, measuring turtles."
Come rock out at the Subterranean with me tonight, kittens, and catch the Bound Stems, some of Chicago's finest, in action. (Eight o'clock rock shows are very appealing to my creaky old lady bones these days.)
"It's much work, measuring turtles."
Come rock out at the Subterranean with me tonight, kittens, and catch the Bound Stems, some of Chicago's finest, in action. (Eight o'clock rock shows are very appealing to my creaky old lady bones these days.)
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Great Turns of Phrase and Other Witticisms for the Day
"OK," says my subconscious, "give me one more reason to be looking forward to the National's Boxer." And MySpace, surprisingly, obliges with many, many more reasons, including the fact that the band "nods toward" Wrestling Entropy fave writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jonathan Ames on the album. Oh. Em. Gee. I'm coming dangerously close to completely ruining my first listen with anticipation now. (Stereogum issues a favorable premature evalution, Boxer drops on May 22, and the band journies to Chicago on June 7.)
How much are you loving this dustup (::guffaw::) about Keith Richards snorting his dad's ashes?
I give you the genius that is Just a Little Guy. (Thx, Michelle.) Go for the otters holding hands, stay for bons mots like "[T]his baby rusty spotted genet is about to snuggle his way right into your colon so he can eat you from the inside out. What are you going to do huh, punch yourself in the colon. Good luck with that."
S/FJ issues a memo to rappers.
I don't know how many of you have, like me, gotten completely sucked into Merlin Mann's online universe, but, for those who haven't, I'd hate for you to miss his excellent, and excellently funny, recent video podcast with J-Rod of the Long Winters. The one with Mountain Goats' bassist Peter Hughes is really good, too. (Thus ends my barely restrained interweb crushing-out for the day.)
Sean Fennessey on Battles' drummer John Stanier: "Like John Bonham on oxycontin, Clyde Stubblefield on steroids, Buddy Rich on calculus."
How much are you loving this dustup (::guffaw::) about Keith Richards snorting his dad's ashes?
I give you the genius that is Just a Little Guy. (Thx, Michelle.) Go for the otters holding hands, stay for bons mots like "[T]his baby rusty spotted genet is about to snuggle his way right into your colon so he can eat you from the inside out. What are you going to do huh, punch yourself in the colon. Good luck with that."
S/FJ issues a memo to rappers.
I don't know how many of you have, like me, gotten completely sucked into Merlin Mann's online universe, but, for those who haven't, I'd hate for you to miss his excellent, and excellently funny, recent video podcast with J-Rod of the Long Winters. The one with Mountain Goats' bassist Peter Hughes is really good, too. (Thus ends my barely restrained interweb crushing-out for the day.)
Sean Fennessey on Battles' drummer John Stanier: "Like John Bonham on oxycontin, Clyde Stubblefield on steroids, Buddy Rich on calculus."
Friday, March 30, 2007
In Other Pie-in-the-Sky News
Don't forget tickets for Bjork's Chicago show at the Auditorium Theater in May go on sale tonight at 5. Godspeed, kittens.
Update: I actually managed to snag one! Sososo excited.
Update: I actually managed to snag one! Sososo excited.
Neutral Milk News?
Update: Hahaha, motherfuckers. April Fools.
Um, WTF, is this for real? Is Neutral Milk Hotel really reuniting for a one-off festival gig this summer in Minneapolis sponsored by Tiny Mix Tapes? Or is TMT just fucking with us? Perhaps I should make a call to my peeps up north just in case. If it is true, damn, Pitchfork, you got treated!
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
LCD Hexagonsystem
Space boner alert! Have you guys heard about this hexagon thing the Cassini-Huygens mission has photographed on Saturn's North Pole? Peep dis (snip):
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region....
A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.
"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." "Whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack." Fucking rad, right?! Be sure to click through to the article itself to see the ridiculously cool pictures.
My music-listening habits can get so hermetic, what with the headphones and all, that sometimes it prohibits me from enjoying what I'm hearing. I'd been kind of knee-jerk with the meh about the new LCD Soundsystem, just because it's been so hyped lately (a full 90 on Metacritic; thx for the link, Richard). But then I heard "Get Innocuous!" out at the bar last night, and it was like someone had opened all the windows and doors and let a rush of cool spring night air in. It was just what my appreciation of the song needed. Revisiting it this morning, even with my headphones on the train, just confirmed the awesomeness. When those sharp, hard strings come in sounding like a traffic jam at the end and then get pulled way up in the mix to fully reveal themselves as a string section...wow. That's some of the most exciting stuff I've heard recently.
Chicagoans, have you been out to see the Bound Stems yet? I caught them opening for the Long Winters last weekend (OMG, another fucking mind-blower of a show), and they totally come off, in the best way possible, like Chicago's answer to the New Pornographers. They seem like a bunch of genuinely nice people having fun making music together, with an adorable, hooky tunefulness that's married to their own version of the stereotypical Chicago post-rock aesthetic. I'm just starting to spend some time with Appreciation Night, and I dig it so far. (Be sure to also check out the interview and free songs from their Daytrotter session last fall.)
Monday, March 19, 2007
Amy Winehouse and More
Not that the interweb needs another post of this nature right now, but Amy Winehouse's Back to Black is still very much making my head explode with its heavily righteous holy-fucking-shit amazingness. I mean, I liked the groovy throwback quality of "Ain't No Other Man" as much as the next person, but kittens, this is how an album's worth of blindingly white-hot retro-infused contemporary R&B/soul is done. Hell, she's even inspired me to revisit Ghostface's Fishscale, thanks to the ridiculously exciting verse he spits on the alternate take of "You Know I'm No Good" (which also appeared late last year on his More Fish). What kind of fuckery is this, indeed. Highly recommended.
Finally got around to checking out The Last King of Scotland this weekend; it's much better than I thought it would be. As my previous snarky remark about The Devil Wears Prada would indicate, I generally don't go in for descent-into-madness films, but this one worked for me for some reason. There's some infelicitous editing/imagery in one of the inevitable "oh god, what have I done??" sequences (voices and images literally swirling around a despondent and drunk James McAvoy's head), and I couldn't shake the creepy feeling at the end that, before I realized what had happened, I was suddenly watching just another action movie where the African men are scary and menacing and attemping, with great relish, to physically harm the anerable little white man who will inevitably escape to the bosom of freedom in the West after his little Dark Continental adventure. But, for the most part, it does some nice stuff with narrativizing the shifting dynamics of power plays between countries, cultures, sexes, political parties, families of origin vs. families of choice, and urban vs. rural lifestyles. And, not that all descent-into-madness films need be compared to Training Day, but as with Ethan Hawke in that movie, I think much of the reason Forest Whitaker ended up with the Oscar is because of the work McAvoy is doing opposite him, making him look good. He's much more than just a blank slate waiting to absorb the corruption around him; his own spiky little agenda locks into the jagged edges of power and hedonism that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by, and he deftly inhabits some of the more repugnant stereotypes of the Westerner visiting an African country in a way that they come off as both specific character traits and broader archetypes. I was definitely impressed.
Less impressive, though enjoyable in its own way, was The Namesake. I've never read the novel and don't know as much of Mira Nair's work as I wish I did, but the evocative preview totally suckered me in. The film, though, is strangely linear. It seems it would have been natural to play with time a bit, just to goose that sense of history repeating itself with significant variations along the way, as well as to give the narrative some extra (and much needed) dramatic heft. The plot (as such) meanders in a way that keeps it from achieving the coveted "the more specific, the more universal" quality that it was definitely aiming for. Like, the big reveal about why Nikolai Gogol was chosen as "the namesake" turns out to be...hold your breath...a train crash. Just a train crash. No Nazis aboard the train, no terrorists laying explosives down along the tracks, no cherubic urchins accidentally stumbling into the path of the engine's headlight. I kept waiting for the father's speech to crescendo loud enough that we could hear some subtext folded in there, but there was nothing. The accident wasn't doing any additional dramatic work in the context of the story. Sure sometimes a train crash really is just a train crash, but then it's just a sad thing that happened to somebody and not an intellectually or emotionally engaging inciting incident that's the supposed raison d'etre of a major novel or movie. Shrug. At any rate, Irfan Khan is subtly charistmatic and slyly, magnetically sexy as the Ganguli patriarch, and, though Kal Penn struggles a bit with the heavier emotions, he's still really cute and really fun to watch. His body language in the scenes while he's still a teenager totally gives away his background in broad physical comedy; he's effortlessly funny with just one exasperated roll of his eyes.
Oh, yeah, and Daydream Nation this summer, anyone?
Finally got around to checking out The Last King of Scotland this weekend; it's much better than I thought it would be. As my previous snarky remark about The Devil Wears Prada would indicate, I generally don't go in for descent-into-madness films, but this one worked for me for some reason. There's some infelicitous editing/imagery in one of the inevitable "oh god, what have I done??" sequences (voices and images literally swirling around a despondent and drunk James McAvoy's head), and I couldn't shake the creepy feeling at the end that, before I realized what had happened, I was suddenly watching just another action movie where the African men are scary and menacing and attemping, with great relish, to physically harm the anerable little white man who will inevitably escape to the bosom of freedom in the West after his little Dark Continental adventure. But, for the most part, it does some nice stuff with narrativizing the shifting dynamics of power plays between countries, cultures, sexes, political parties, families of origin vs. families of choice, and urban vs. rural lifestyles. And, not that all descent-into-madness films need be compared to Training Day, but as with Ethan Hawke in that movie, I think much of the reason Forest Whitaker ended up with the Oscar is because of the work McAvoy is doing opposite him, making him look good. He's much more than just a blank slate waiting to absorb the corruption around him; his own spiky little agenda locks into the jagged edges of power and hedonism that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by, and he deftly inhabits some of the more repugnant stereotypes of the Westerner visiting an African country in a way that they come off as both specific character traits and broader archetypes. I was definitely impressed.
Less impressive, though enjoyable in its own way, was The Namesake. I've never read the novel and don't know as much of Mira Nair's work as I wish I did, but the evocative preview totally suckered me in. The film, though, is strangely linear. It seems it would have been natural to play with time a bit, just to goose that sense of history repeating itself with significant variations along the way, as well as to give the narrative some extra (and much needed) dramatic heft. The plot (as such) meanders in a way that keeps it from achieving the coveted "the more specific, the more universal" quality that it was definitely aiming for. Like, the big reveal about why Nikolai Gogol was chosen as "the namesake" turns out to be...hold your breath...a train crash. Just a train crash. No Nazis aboard the train, no terrorists laying explosives down along the tracks, no cherubic urchins accidentally stumbling into the path of the engine's headlight. I kept waiting for the father's speech to crescendo loud enough that we could hear some subtext folded in there, but there was nothing. The accident wasn't doing any additional dramatic work in the context of the story. Sure sometimes a train crash really is just a train crash, but then it's just a sad thing that happened to somebody and not an intellectually or emotionally engaging inciting incident that's the supposed raison d'etre of a major novel or movie. Shrug. At any rate, Irfan Khan is subtly charistmatic and slyly, magnetically sexy as the Ganguli patriarch, and, though Kal Penn struggles a bit with the heavier emotions, he's still really cute and really fun to watch. His body language in the scenes while he's still a teenager totally gives away his background in broad physical comedy; he's effortlessly funny with just one exasperated roll of his eyes.
Oh, yeah, and Daydream Nation this summer, anyone?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Two Great Tastes, Etc.
Eagle-eyed (and -eared) FoWE (Friend of Wrestling Entropy) Benji Kelnardo recently alerted me to the fact that Beyonce and Shakira have collaborated on a song, and its attendant video, called "Beautiful Liar," which will appear on the forthcoming deluxe edition of B'Day.
As many of you know, I have deeply mixed feelings about both these artists, but may I hazard here a "holy shit"??? What perfectly crazy motherfucking genius came up with this idea? This is why we follow pop culture, kittens. I think I had five orgasms when I watched this for the first time:
People, we can achieve world peace with this video. Please spread the word.
As many of you know, I have deeply mixed feelings about both these artists, but may I hazard here a "holy shit"??? What perfectly crazy motherfucking genius came up with this idea? This is why we follow pop culture, kittens. I think I had five orgasms when I watched this for the first time:
People, we can achieve world peace with this video. Please spread the word.
Monday, March 12, 2007
RIP Richard Jeni
RIP Richard Jeni. Wow, that's a shitty thing to hear about first thing on a rainy Monday morning. One of my greatest pleasures during summer vacation as a smallish child and middle schooler was being able to stay up late on weeknights to watch A&E's Evening at the Improv. This was just as the art of American stand-up comedy was cresting the peak of its 1980s heyday and beginning its subsequent decline into endless "stand-up gets a lackluster sitcom loosely based around his/her material" territory. And, like any impressionable youngster in a foreign country, I subconsciously absorbed the cadences of their speech and the "what is the deal with [pop culture artifact of your choice]?" sensibility. (OMG, there's a reason the Saturday Night Live sketch "Stand Up and Win" is one of my favorite segments of television ever.) I fondly remember many of Jeni's routines, esp. the bit about the football referee abusing the power of his microphone to voice some personal concerns best left to his therapist's couch, and am saddened to know one of the mainstays of that comedy epoch is gone.
(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)
(Also, don't forget to buy your Pitchfork Music Festival tickets today, kittens.)
Friday, March 02, 2007
New Music Geekery
"The record collector/taper/blogger mentality is really close to Catholicism in many people. Collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography. Show me an altar boy and I'll show you a potential record geek."
OK, the fantastic three-part Fluxblog interview with Rob Sheffield from this week totally just made me order Love Is a Mix Tape from Amazon. I was kind of casually interested in checking it out before, but dude comes off as so smart and funny, now I'm actively looking forward to spending 240 pages with him.
Prepare ye the way of the Bjork: Medulla follow-up Volta finally comes out in May.
"I don't know how much we've evolved if we still freak out before and after every show. Some shows are great, and some shows suck. And it's usually all us; it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's a big or small crowd. Sometimes we have things click for us, and sometimes we kind of fall apart. But that's part of the excitement of it, too."
You guys are probably going to get sick of me linking to stuff hyping the release of the National's Boxer, but, oh well, get used to it. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, check out the P4K interview with Matt Berninger.
2007 is seriously going to rule for new music. We've got the two mentioned above, and news comes down through both Stereogum and the Fork this week that we've got new Laura Veirs to look forward to this spring too.
OK, the fantastic three-part Fluxblog interview with Rob Sheffield from this week totally just made me order Love Is a Mix Tape from Amazon. I was kind of casually interested in checking it out before, but dude comes off as so smart and funny, now I'm actively looking forward to spending 240 pages with him.
Prepare ye the way of the Bjork: Medulla follow-up Volta finally comes out in May.
"I don't know how much we've evolved if we still freak out before and after every show. Some shows are great, and some shows suck. And it's usually all us; it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's a big or small crowd. Sometimes we have things click for us, and sometimes we kind of fall apart. But that's part of the excitement of it, too."
You guys are probably going to get sick of me linking to stuff hyping the release of the National's Boxer, but, oh well, get used to it. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, check out the P4K interview with Matt Berninger.
2007 is seriously going to rule for new music. We've got the two mentioned above, and news comes down through both Stereogum and the Fork this week that we've got new Laura Veirs to look forward to this spring too.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
On the First of March, On the Holiday
I haven't listened to Illinois in ages, but for whatever reason decided put it on my Nano this morning and ended up listening to the first half of it on the train on the way home tonight. I was just stepping off the platform in my neighborhood when I had one of those moments iPods were made for: in the chilly twilight, Sufjan was whispering in my ear "on the first of March, on the holiday."
Casimir Pulaski Day.
I know it's very popular to hate on Soof these days, but I just live for moments of synchronicity like that. The delicate melacholy of the music brought me back to the day, and the (relative) relief of leaving the misery of February behind brought me back to the music I'd temporarily forgotten I loved. I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd found myself leading a parade of bunnies and friendly foxes down the street to my front door.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Dictionaries Are Our Friends
So, we're publishing the American edition of John Peel's autobiography, and the subtitle is "Margrave of the Marshes." We acquired the rights to the book maybe a year ago, and it never occurred to me to look up the word "margrave" until today. Because of its proximity to the word "marshes," for some reason I'd always assumed a margrave was a kind of bird. Boy, was I wrong.
Main Entry: mar·grave
Function: noun
Etymology: Dutch markgraaf, from Middle Dutch marcgrave; akin to Old High German marha boundary and to Old High German grAvo count -- more at MARK
1 : the military governor especially of a German border province
2 : a member of the German nobility corresponding in rank to a British marquess
I started laughing so hard at my desk when I realized how spectacularly wrong my assumption had been that I had no choice but to start doing bird calls. My exceedingly lame bird call, "kuh-KAW!", sounded suspiciously like a combination of Steve Martin in Three Amigos and Owen Wilson in Bottle Rocket.
Duuuuuuuuuude: New. National. Album. (Thanks for the scoop, P'fork!). Boxer is out May 22. Get excited, people.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Things
Ridiculous thing:
The Bjork/Diddy animated GIF conversation (via).
Wonderful thing:
A shit-ton of obscure Divine Comedy covers.
Revoking my hipster card thing:
The second coming of Arcade Fire? Yawn.
Does it make me an asshole? thing:
Didn't really like Pan's Labyrinth at all. Or (as expected) Babel. Or (if I'm being completely honest) The Queen.
Dead rock stars in the news thing:
Happy woulda-been 40th birthday, Kurt Cobain, and oh look, Chinese Democracy is leaking (via). Wait, y'mean Axl's not...? Nevermind. (Ha.)
The Bjork/Diddy animated GIF conversation (via).
Wonderful thing:
A shit-ton of obscure Divine Comedy covers.
Revoking my hipster card thing:
The second coming of Arcade Fire? Yawn.
Does it make me an asshole? thing:
Didn't really like Pan's Labyrinth at all. Or (as expected) Babel. Or (if I'm being completely honest) The Queen.
Dead rock stars in the news thing:
Happy woulda-been 40th birthday, Kurt Cobain, and oh look, Chinese Democracy is leaking (via). Wait, y'mean Axl's not...? Nevermind. (Ha.)
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
Cintra on Anna
I love Cintra Wilson for her sublime snark, but when she occasionally tamps it down just enough to reveal sympathy for the most maligned objects of pop culture obsession, she can take my breath away. Some of the best writing I've ever read on Michael Jackson is in the essay "Jacko, the No-Nosed Man from Motown (A Morality Fable)" in her collection A Massive Swelling, and she does it again today in Salon with her brief piece on Anna Nicole Smith's death.
Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:
Bristling at the numerous obits that refer to Smith as "famous for being famous," she chides them [snip]:
What needs saying -- what it seems nobody has yet said -- is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty.
Seriously, it's a really great piece with some really great writing. Please do check it out if all the other unavoidable, sour-tasting memorializing floating around in the ether today has left you feeling scummy.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Inland Empire and David Lynch at the Music Box
Not to be a snot about it or anything, but I feel fairly comfortable making the bold declaration that seeing Inland Empire at midnight in an old-fashioned movie palace with David Lynch in attendance is pretty much the only way to experience the film. OK, well, take all those factors and transpose them to L.A. and it would probably be even more mind-blowing (let me know if, as I suspect, it is, KP and DS). But still. I was really lucky to have had one of those experiences on Saturday night that didn’t just reaffirm my faith in movies, it reaffirmed my faith in moviegoing. And how appropriately ironic that at the center of the experience should be a virulently damning critique of the Hollywood moviemaking machine.
There was a long period spent waiting in line a block and a half away from the theater in the snowy, frigid January night air, but all was forgiven when the man took the stage to rapturous applause and a standing ovation. Now, I’m no big Lynch devotee; I haven’t really seen any of his stuff except Mulholland Drive and maybe the first five episodes of the first season of Twin Peaks (for shame, I know—all the more reason to take the rest of everything I have to say with a whole shaker full of salt grains). But still—I hooted. I hollered. The excitement was contagious. And the dude, for all his deceptively mild-mannered demeanor, is bad ass. With the decadent, blood-red curtain covering the screen behind him, his black and white, be-suited silhouette glowed with a sinister halo, turning him into the self-styled avenging demon of showbiz he’s evidently resigned himself to being at this point in his career. There just couldn’t have been a more fitting introduction to the film (even though his closing benediction from the Upanishads certainly was nice).
And what can I possibly say about the movie? It begins with a single light beam from a projector against the dark and eventually wends its way to a lighted match held by a homeless woman on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near where Laura Dern will soon vomit a puddle of blood. We go from the industrial technology of film back to stories being told around a fire. It seems to weep with tears of both mourning and fury for the degradations of whoring yourself as an artist to a movie studio. When one of Dern’s characters tries to explain the origins of her misery and downfall to a borderline catatonic man behind a desk (is he a private eye? a movie theater projectionist? her pimp?) and says, “it all goes back to when my little boy died; it was like I was watching it happen from the back of a dark theater,” it’s hard not to read that statement (with a little help from Jonathan Rosenbaum) as Lynch himself tracing his dissatisfaction with Hollywood back to the failure of Dune. It’s also hard not to read Dern’s other brilliant line “men don’t change; they just reveal more of what they are” as a similar, weary bon mot about the shoulda-seen-it-coming machinations of this business we call show.
Curiously, however, it’s also a pretty apt description of the peculiar internal logic of Lynch’s own film syntax—the 45 minutes or so of just barely coherent exposition that eventually begins to extract its most innocuous characters, situations, and images to fuck the charred mass of sludge where your brain used to be. And therein lies the thrill of seeing this at a midnight showing. Battling against the fatigue of the day (and the fatigue of a whiskey on the rocks, I will admit), I more than willingly rode the waves of the waking nightmare that was unfolding in front of me rather than attempting to fight the current in any attempt to piece together the plot. (And I am fairly confident there is, in fact, a plot; a coworker who’d seen it once before in New York and then again at Saturday’s 8 PM show did his best to give me his reconstruction of what was more or less happening—and I buy it.) But, the specific circumstances of the screening gave me the gift of feeling lost. Lost in the detritus of the cinema—the sets, the theaters, the people, the lifestyle, the mythology, the hackneyed old plots, the forgotten corners of the landscape, the technology—the way that Dern’s character is. And, I’d wager, the way that Lynch himself feels as a truly independent director these days.
Now, I’m not saying that, when you’re sitting at home watching the movie on DVD, the rabbit sitcom and the scenes of the naked tearful hooker in the hotel room watching television won’t make you feel like reality has just been pulled back in on itself like a tube sock. But, I am reiterating the fact that sitting in a grand old theater during those scenes when Dern walks into a grand old theater and sees herself on the screen walking into a grand old theater has a particular way of feeling, at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, like, maybe you’re dead, or the world is about to end. Seriously. It’s an existentially terrifying moment. (And don’t even get me started on the scene a few minutes later when she shoots the mean old Polish guy, who turns into the demon/deathmask version of herself—the fright-induced adrenaline of that moment is pretty much solely responsible for keeping me awake until the lights came back up and for getting me safely back home.) I think he’s implicating us in his beloved leading lady’s (ladies’?) pain here. He’s rubbing our noses in the fact that we haven’t shown up. We haven’t made the effort. We haven’t appeared where we’re needed most. And yet, we’re there. We’re fucking there in the middle of it; we’re the ghostly presence silently occupying the seemingly unforgiving absence. He’s counting on the fact that crowds will gather in grand old theaters to be taunted by our lack of a reflection, causing us to doubt the reality of our very bodies in the seats holding us up. His masterful control of the mindfuck of that moment made me feel profoundly privileged just to be there to experience it.
And, well, what of . . . most of the rest of everything else? His preoccupation with women and women’s issues seems affectionate, respectful, and genuine. Sure, he’s excoriating the way Hollywood tends to maintain a stable of kept starlets in tiny, tiny pens like veal ready for us to devour while they prance and vamp and flirt with each other (and, apparently, still groove to some Little Eva). But he also has deep, keen feeling for now-aging actresses like Dern and the shoulda-been-hugely-famous Julia Ormond, giving them the painful, bloody metaphor of the screwdriver in the gut, the artist’s abortion that cuts deep, bleeds you dry, and then kills. And, it’s not just today’s actresses that Lynch seems to want to stand up for. I may be overreaching here, but, considering his affection for Hollywood and Hollywood history, I couldn’t help but read the blonde Asian girl’s story about her friend with the hole in her vaginal wall as an allusion to one of the original Hollywood rumors/urban legends, that Fatty Arbuckle molested Virginia Rappe at a party with a Coke bottle. The movie business’s predatory tendencies as dramatized by the abuse heaped on the women who attempt to make a living working within it is a pretty goddamn heavy indictment. Whether or not Lynch is aligning or identifying himself with that level of exploitation is kind of beyond me at this point, after only having seen the movie once, but . . . if he is, that’s either unintentionally but slightly insulting to the women who really have been chewed up and spit out by the industry, without the opportunities to redeem their careers that Lynch has had, or it’s evidence that trying to work as a successful director in Hollywood has taken a far greater toll on him than anyone has probably realized.
So, yes, I think it's probably some kind of masterpiece. I generally hate the term "tour de force" to be used in film reviews, but, fuck me if Laura Dern's performance isn't a goddamn tour de force. I'd stand on a corner with a cow for her, too.
There was a long period spent waiting in line a block and a half away from the theater in the snowy, frigid January night air, but all was forgiven when the man took the stage to rapturous applause and a standing ovation. Now, I’m no big Lynch devotee; I haven’t really seen any of his stuff except Mulholland Drive and maybe the first five episodes of the first season of Twin Peaks (for shame, I know—all the more reason to take the rest of everything I have to say with a whole shaker full of salt grains). But still—I hooted. I hollered. The excitement was contagious. And the dude, for all his deceptively mild-mannered demeanor, is bad ass. With the decadent, blood-red curtain covering the screen behind him, his black and white, be-suited silhouette glowed with a sinister halo, turning him into the self-styled avenging demon of showbiz he’s evidently resigned himself to being at this point in his career. There just couldn’t have been a more fitting introduction to the film (even though his closing benediction from the Upanishads certainly was nice).
And what can I possibly say about the movie? It begins with a single light beam from a projector against the dark and eventually wends its way to a lighted match held by a homeless woman on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near where Laura Dern will soon vomit a puddle of blood. We go from the industrial technology of film back to stories being told around a fire. It seems to weep with tears of both mourning and fury for the degradations of whoring yourself as an artist to a movie studio. When one of Dern’s characters tries to explain the origins of her misery and downfall to a borderline catatonic man behind a desk (is he a private eye? a movie theater projectionist? her pimp?) and says, “it all goes back to when my little boy died; it was like I was watching it happen from the back of a dark theater,” it’s hard not to read that statement (with a little help from Jonathan Rosenbaum) as Lynch himself tracing his dissatisfaction with Hollywood back to the failure of Dune. It’s also hard not to read Dern’s other brilliant line “men don’t change; they just reveal more of what they are” as a similar, weary bon mot about the shoulda-seen-it-coming machinations of this business we call show.
Curiously, however, it’s also a pretty apt description of the peculiar internal logic of Lynch’s own film syntax—the 45 minutes or so of just barely coherent exposition that eventually begins to extract its most innocuous characters, situations, and images to fuck the charred mass of sludge where your brain used to be. And therein lies the thrill of seeing this at a midnight showing. Battling against the fatigue of the day (and the fatigue of a whiskey on the rocks, I will admit), I more than willingly rode the waves of the waking nightmare that was unfolding in front of me rather than attempting to fight the current in any attempt to piece together the plot. (And I am fairly confident there is, in fact, a plot; a coworker who’d seen it once before in New York and then again at Saturday’s 8 PM show did his best to give me his reconstruction of what was more or less happening—and I buy it.) But, the specific circumstances of the screening gave me the gift of feeling lost. Lost in the detritus of the cinema—the sets, the theaters, the people, the lifestyle, the mythology, the hackneyed old plots, the forgotten corners of the landscape, the technology—the way that Dern’s character is. And, I’d wager, the way that Lynch himself feels as a truly independent director these days.
Now, I’m not saying that, when you’re sitting at home watching the movie on DVD, the rabbit sitcom and the scenes of the naked tearful hooker in the hotel room watching television won’t make you feel like reality has just been pulled back in on itself like a tube sock. But, I am reiterating the fact that sitting in a grand old theater during those scenes when Dern walks into a grand old theater and sees herself on the screen walking into a grand old theater has a particular way of feeling, at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, like, maybe you’re dead, or the world is about to end. Seriously. It’s an existentially terrifying moment. (And don’t even get me started on the scene a few minutes later when she shoots the mean old Polish guy, who turns into the demon/deathmask version of herself—the fright-induced adrenaline of that moment is pretty much solely responsible for keeping me awake until the lights came back up and for getting me safely back home.) I think he’s implicating us in his beloved leading lady’s (ladies’?) pain here. He’s rubbing our noses in the fact that we haven’t shown up. We haven’t made the effort. We haven’t appeared where we’re needed most. And yet, we’re there. We’re fucking there in the middle of it; we’re the ghostly presence silently occupying the seemingly unforgiving absence. He’s counting on the fact that crowds will gather in grand old theaters to be taunted by our lack of a reflection, causing us to doubt the reality of our very bodies in the seats holding us up. His masterful control of the mindfuck of that moment made me feel profoundly privileged just to be there to experience it.
And, well, what of . . . most of the rest of everything else? His preoccupation with women and women’s issues seems affectionate, respectful, and genuine. Sure, he’s excoriating the way Hollywood tends to maintain a stable of kept starlets in tiny, tiny pens like veal ready for us to devour while they prance and vamp and flirt with each other (and, apparently, still groove to some Little Eva). But he also has deep, keen feeling for now-aging actresses like Dern and the shoulda-been-hugely-famous Julia Ormond, giving them the painful, bloody metaphor of the screwdriver in the gut, the artist’s abortion that cuts deep, bleeds you dry, and then kills. And, it’s not just today’s actresses that Lynch seems to want to stand up for. I may be overreaching here, but, considering his affection for Hollywood and Hollywood history, I couldn’t help but read the blonde Asian girl’s story about her friend with the hole in her vaginal wall as an allusion to one of the original Hollywood rumors/urban legends, that Fatty Arbuckle molested Virginia Rappe at a party with a Coke bottle. The movie business’s predatory tendencies as dramatized by the abuse heaped on the women who attempt to make a living working within it is a pretty goddamn heavy indictment. Whether or not Lynch is aligning or identifying himself with that level of exploitation is kind of beyond me at this point, after only having seen the movie once, but . . . if he is, that’s either unintentionally but slightly insulting to the women who really have been chewed up and spit out by the industry, without the opportunities to redeem their careers that Lynch has had, or it’s evidence that trying to work as a successful director in Hollywood has taken a far greater toll on him than anyone has probably realized.
So, yes, I think it's probably some kind of masterpiece. I generally hate the term "tour de force" to be used in film reviews, but, fuck me if Laura Dern's performance isn't a goddamn tour de force. I'd stand on a corner with a cow for her, too.
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