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Allison Felus
Maker of magic and singer of songs.
To
know me is to know my ever-evolving catalog of obsessions. While in the
past I’ve focused my attention on music, film, comedy, musical theater,
English grammar, conversational French and German, raw food,
photography, and Zen Buddhism, most recently I find myself adding
perfume and clairvoyance to that list. You’ll find me musing on all
these things and more at any of the links listed above.
My
writing on pop culture has appeared on Spiked Online, Popmatters,
Daytrotter, and my now-retired personal blog Wrestling Entropy. I’ve also
appeared on stage at such notable Chicago venues as the Empty Bottle, the Double Door, and Martyrs with my former band Tiny Magnets. These days I shift between
my day job in the publishing industry and my after-hours creative time
with three-piece rock group Pet Theories. I am also an
InVision-trained psychic reader and healer available for appointments in
person, on the phone, or via Skype or Facetime.
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Tweets
- Totally blown away by the joy, smarts, & generosity of everyone at @CAKEchicago this weekend. Beyond inspiring for this mere attendee.Jun 16, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Jun 13, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Did you guys know you can do Google Street View inside Stonehenge? I honestly got a little emotional earlier today when I discovered that.Jun 13, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @bwcremins Nice. I'm sure Dan Clowes would agree: http://t.co/xyLs5RanWE.
- Thank you, Anna! I *so* relate. MT @doorsixteen Goals? What goals? A few words for the realists and the dreamless: http://t.co/U2CPKcRjEF …
- @bwcremins I think @RadioFreeAlbion should interview you for his podcast based on this tweet alone. Everything about this is poetry.
- Not to judge! Just thought, wow, she could level up further with a Lutens or Frederic Malle or @NeelaVermeire on her to complete the effect.Jun 10, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Wished I had some extra vials of niche decants to discreetly hand to her, like, "it'll be OK. Just trust me."Jun 10, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- The devastatingly gorgeous 6+ ft tall woman in the sleek black dress on the train this morning broke my heart with her overly sweet perfume.Jun 10, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @bwcremins: My band Pet Theories plays tonight at Silvie's near Irving & Ashland in Chicago. Expect fuzz pedal mayhem on the guitar & on…
- @ChiCulturVultur The hell? We were just there too! But in the small theater.
- And don't forget, if you're in Chicago this weekend, my band is playing a show at Silvie's tomorrow around 10 pm! https://t.co/CFuyAekSacJun 07, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- SO excited to see the Ricky Jay doc @musicboxtheatre tonight. I've been a huge fangirl since I read this piece: http://t.co/KnK68EgAv8Jun 07, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @ChiCulturVultur I feel like I want to go ask Granddad deep, philosophical questions now, like he's an oracle.
- Just think about the fact that someone else's liver is INSIDE LOU REED right now.Jun 03, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Music for Catports. https://t.co/QXhGqFdRMk
- We finally have a showtime for my band's next gig: Pet Theories will play Silvie's in Chicago on 6/8 at 10 pm! https://t.co/CFuyAekSacMay 30, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @Fn0rdPrefect I'll have to check it out! Sounds nice.
- @Fn0rdPrefect Intentionally? What brand, if you don't mind my asking?
- RT @bwcremins: Excited to have my essay on Peter Laughner in this week's issue of @mauramagazine !
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Posts
The Cine-Files is an appealing project. In place of the recent focus on cinephilia , which has often encouraged self-absorbed pieces in which film-lovers ponder the nature of their own love of film, “Cine-Files” implies good, hard study, with research resulting in files full of data that can result in informative, meaningful history and analysis.
Kristin Thompson, Observations on film art : Good, old-fashioned love (i.e., close analysis) of film
LOL forever at “film-lovers ponder[ing] the nature of their own love of film.” Long live Bordwell and Thompson!
- I am the boss of you.
I am totally not qualified to give advice in any way but does that stop me from telling you what to do? No. Because I AM THE BOSS OF YOU.
Anyway here’s my life advice for the day: The 9 secrets I learned when I turned 40 on Oprah.com .
It includes the following topics:
Avoiding ex-boyfriends
Sex is awesome
I hate Indian food
Brunch is stupid
Mortality issuesBLESS. Especially re: brunch.
I’m finally getting around to reading The Middlesteins now, and it is as great as I’d hoped it would be. I felt sick to my stomach (in, like, the best way possible) for nearly a full day after reading the part where one of the characters slaps another one in the face.
I would like to tell you that, as a person who walks a lot in a city every day and is interested in but refuses to suffer for shoe-cuteness, Saltwater Sandals are the answer to everything. I bought two pairs early last month (one gold, one tan—from this very creatively-named website) and have basically lived in them every day since. They’re technically kids’ shoes but the biggest sizes convert to women’s sizes quite nicely (I wear an 8/8.5 usually so ordered a 6 and it’s pretty perfect).
Meanwhile, these guys are still going strong—I scuffed up the toe of one ‘cause I don’t walk right but all it took was a little krazy glue and things are back to good. They kinda turn into lil sweatboxes in the summer, though, so they’re out of daily rotation until, like, November, or whenever it decides to be less-than-90-degrees in Atlanta this year.
Now I’m feeling self-conscious because the photo of the sandals up there is maybe actually kind of not a great representation of them, and maybe they’re a little fugly/crunchy looking in real life too, but that’s also part of their charm, so if that’s not your thing, that’s fine, but if it is, FOLLOW YOUR HEART.
Is this where I tell you nobody’s paying me to say this stuff although if Salt Water Sandals would like to provide me with a lifetime supply of their great tough little shoes I’d gladly accept?
/shoereview
I bought a pair of these sandals in shiny purple at the end of last summer after I read this review, and I can’t even tell you how many compliments I get on them. I am very much also a person who “walks a lot in a city every day and is interested in but refuses to suffer for shoe-cuteness,” so this is a big, big win for me. Thanks for the tip, Rachael!
Squidge (1915)
Once more unto the breach, dear Squidge, once more
Squidge!!
Most of the novels my middle school teachers recommended that I read were about dogs—White Fang, The Call of the Wild. The Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, must be about a dog. Years before I read the novel, I imagined it: a young boy adopts a beautiful, spirited, bright-eyed retriever. They have adventures together. They follow the course of a major American river. They probably hop a train. Or they hitchhike. Later in the novel, the boy and the dog lose each other in a field of corn that sways in bright, clean, Midwestern sunlight. The sky is blue and cloudless as the boy observes his dog walking the field’s perimeter. I don’t know, I told my dad. I don’t think I want to read about a dog. They always die at the end. Or they get eaten by something.
Power Records, The Monster of Frankenstein, and The Great Gatsby | The Funny Book Project
My boyf wrote a very funny thing today about how he used to think that The Catcher in the Rye was about a dog and that The Great Gatsby was about a famous escape artist and magician.
He also has a piece about Peter Laughner in this week’s Maura Magazine.
For all you Grey Gardens fans, here’s a one-of-a-kind Little Edie Uglydoll custom made by Laura Granlund of In-timid-Nation. More details here.
The idea that women are all wallowing in a miserable pool of their own insecurity and desperately need a man to come save them by giving them compliments is really just a modern take on the Prince Charming fairytale. Yes, many women are insecure. Most of them are insecure not because no guy has ever expressed a desire to fuck them, but because of the dangerously unrealistic standards our society sets for women’s appearance and for the behaviors they must perform in order to maintain that appearance.
Miri Mogilevsky, Why You Shouldn’t Tell That Random Girl On The Street That She’s Hot<p>As someone who has chosen Chicago as an adopted city, I read Rachel Shteir’s review of a number of books about Chicago with great interest. I strongly disagree with the negative portrayal of a city I have come to love. As a European, I can confirm the deep respect that Chicago has throughout Europe as one of the great symbols of the United States.</p> <p>Chicago is a beautiful city with many resources, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of the best orchestras anywhere in the world.</p> <p>Chicago’s greatest resource is its wonderful people, who do not see music merely as an entertainment but also as cultural enrichment. This is a city rich in neighborhoods with great diversity that have been nothing but incredibly responsive to our attempts to bring music to those who may not or cannot come to us in the concert hall, whether because of cost or other barriers.</p> <p>In each case, these efforts to share our music widely have been received with tremendous openness and affection, an outpouring of feelings from the heart that is as profound as any I have experienced conducting the great orchestras of the world across many cities and countries. Chicagoans are proud of their city, as we all should be.</p> <p>RICCARDO MUTI</p>
Maestro Muti all day, every day. Love this letter to the editor regarding that now-infamous-in-Chicago piece by Rachel Shteir.
Let’s get one thing straight: women don’t develop eating disorders, self-harm and have other issues with our body image because we’re stupid. Beauty and body fascism aren’t just in our heads – they affect our lives every day, whatever our age, whatever we look like, and not just when we happen to open a glossy magazine.
Laurie Penny, “I don’t want to be told I’m pretty as I am - I want to live in a world where that’s irrelevant.”
(Via Jessica Stanley.)
With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.
Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.I was, like, legit choked-up watching this sweet, touching ridiculousness today. Commander Hadfield’s Twitter feed has been one of the most consistently satisfying things the Internet has brought to my eyeballs in a long time.
CAKE is looking for volunteers! If you a passionate, friendly, and want to get to see the inner workings of a comics festival, email cakexpo@gmail.com with Volunteer in the subject line. We can’t wait to meet’cha!
<p>Perhaps it is merely the exuberance of spring, the lushness of every shrub and flowerbed, that prompts another kind of sensuality. The colour of the peonies against the fence, echoing a Japanese print, a lace hydrangea in bloom behind them, is so screamingly beautiful that I am filled with intense love. Buzzing with love. Is this the same love I have for people?</p> <p>Can the love I have for an old black cat become part of this story? Do I need to draw a line between human, animal and vegetable and say: This is love, that is only affection, and the other is merely the trivial appreciation of beauty?</p> <p>Oh, but it’s all a great lust in my heart – a great out-flowing to otherness. A kind of detached and limitless affection. It’s one of the joys and privileges of age.</p>
I’m a sexually liberated woman, finally - at age 80 - The Globe and Mail
(Via Jessica Stanley, READ.LOOK.THINK.)
Performing and tattooing are both very much a combination of your own energy and other people’s…as is being alive! Acknowledging that is really important for me; it’s part of a multimedia social conversation. I think that staying part of the conversation is staying open to new ideas and methods and letting them adapt your own vocabulary. I’m not sure how else to talk about it except in these vague terms. Sharing what you do, as flexibly as possible, helps other people understand your ideas. Simultaneously, being as flexible as possible toward what other people are sharing with you expands how you understand the world….For as long as I’ve been an artist, I have felt part of communities where bartering and collaborating are critical parts of growth. Cross-pollinating is how ideas spread and get expanded upon. Sharing what we can is how we help each other thrive on this messed up planet. It creates networks, emotional bonds, kinship, thought, and physical resources. You can’t always give and you can’t always take. The balance is something I’m always working out.
Edie Fake, Art:21 blog<p>Michel Gondry: It’s easy to imagine being the Wright brothers. Because we take planes for granted. These are things that have been around for 100 years. But to be an inventor in the present, you have to be a very accomplished scientist.</p> <p>Esquire magazine: Imagination alone isn’t enough.</p> <p>MG: It’s not. So that’s why working in film is a very good place for me. I can use my imagination, but I don’t have to do math.</p>
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.
Lester Bangs, “Where Were You When Elvis Died?”<p>How can we understand a fragrance when we’ve barely gotten acquainted with it? We still barely understand it after living with it through full bottles and who knows how many years. Reading … reviews reinforces for me how difficult it is to speak about perfume in any way that penetrates too deeply beyond superficial, deductive or reductive impressions. That isn’t to knock bloggers. It’s the language we have, and for a long time I wasn’t writing about perfume much at all because that language can feel so inept compared to what it is perfume actually does - the verbiage becoming authoritative where it should be mystical, a little too concise where it should be expansive.</p> <p>We need that ineptitude, I think, and we need to struggle with it, to keep in touch with how powerful scent is, how above and beyond us. Fragrance is one of the last frontiers of the ineffable in my life, at a time where everything feels over explained, over exposed - over in general, before it’s properly begun.</p>
Brian Pera, “Radiant Ice: Andy Tauer’s Noontide Petals”
Some of the best perfume writing I’ve read recently.
Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, live at the Chicago Music Exchange (March 14, 2013).
I was there for this set and had basically fallen in love with every single player in the band by the end of the night. In this particular recording, though, for me, it’s all about Chris Thomas’s bass solo. It comes in around minute nine, and you might even be able to hear me shout “yeah!” as he’s winding it down.
Every summer when I was a small child—and for a number of years, perhaps decades, before that—the extended family branching out from my one, then-living great-grandmother and the rest of her sisters who had immigrated from Poland to the United States would gather together at a park somewhere in Northwest Indiana for what we unassumingly called The Family Picnic. Other than my first cousins and a handful of seconds, I felt like I didn’t know anyone, nor do I remember these distant factions, or the kids my age anyway, having much interest in mingling, thus sort of defeating the point of gathering at all, it seemed. But, the old men tossed horseshoes and played cards together while the old women talked in small half-circles amongst themselves and waited to be tended to by the younger mothers who tried as best they could to keep an eye on the children, their husbands, the food tables, the grills, the beer coolers, and the needs of the grand dames.
Eventually at some point in the afternoon, the whole troop would be gathered in a field for Games—three-legged races and water balloon tosses and other harmlessly fun relics of post-war Midwestern wholesomeness. The winners of these games would eventually be pointed in the direction of a picnic table covered in Prizes, which was usually little more than a glorified White Elephant exchange, weird tchotchkes and bargain bin purchases taken down from forgotten closet shelves and dusted off as good-enough contributions toward the general merriment.
One of these summers—I couldn’t have been more than nine or ten—I won one of the children’s games and was shepherded over to pick something from the table. Slow to choose, I lingered over the selection and, though there were more age-appropriate toys and other options available, I became fixated on a small, pink container of solid perfume. It was the kind that came in a tube that could be cranked up like lipstick, and it smelled, simply, of rose. Holding my treasure, I spun narratives and alternate realities—alternate autobiographies, really—in my mind, all of which hinged on the glamour of becoming known for and associated with this scent. Allison would smell of roses. It would become my signature. (Yes, even as a child I cherished the notion of a signature scent. Though perhaps the truly cherished notion here had less to do with the scent itself and stemmed more from the typical childhood hope, borne of fairy tales, that any one small change in circumstance would be enough to magically lift me out of the humdrum and restore me to my rightful magnificence, which would be known and acknowledged by all.) Yet even after I brought my prize home and stashed it in my jewelry box, my rose-scented fantasy persona remained just that—a fantasy.
In moments of boredom and solitude, I would take the tube out of my jewelry box and sit down at my oversized wooden desk with it and twist up the wax and smell it and maybe apply a few swipes to the underside of my wrist, and would feel nothing. No emotional response, no crystalization of a more refined or elevated sense of self. After sniffing and sniffing and sniffing, without any noticeable effect on my life or emotions or identity, I eventually chalked it up to the assumption that I just didn’t like the smell of roses. At least, not as perfume, or not as perfume on me.
And, that was that. I grew older and into the vanilla-scented ’90s, wearing variously, as a young teen, Vanilla Fields, Aspen, and a drugstore knockoff of Obsession before ultimately landing, later in high school, on a post-bath ritual of slathering myself in Victoria’s Secret Vanilla Lace body lotion. Sweetness became my signature, and I suppose I did merge with some semblance of an enhanced me I’d always believed I could find in scent.
So, imagine my surprise, so many years later, when I first sampled the triad of new Neela Vermeire Creations perfumes and, expecting to swoon for Trayee or Bombay Bling, found myself falling in love with Mohur instead.
It smelled of rose, yes, instantly identifiable as such, yet it didn’t feel alienating or unwelcoming or otherwise anathema to my vanilla-addicted sensibilities; it wasn’t stuffy and overpowering as roses so often can seem to me. It was regal, certainly, but also completely shot through with light. It sparkled and shimmered, not garishly, but with what I can best describe as love—love and wit and friendliness and gentleness and enthusiasm tempered with precisely judged refinement and pitch-perfect control. It felt like it was smiling at me. I was bowled over by the sheer intelligence of this fragrance, immediately convinced that it was indeed wearable art.
Wearable being the key word here. All of a sudden, after decades of casual perfume enjoyment began developing into a more intentional hobby, I found myself in possession of a rose scent that I not only appreciated but also genuinely looked forward to wearing. Each time I applied it, I felt a surge of butterflies-in-stomach excitement that recalled the juvenile longing for transcendence I’d once invested in a cheap tube of solid perfume.
Paco Rabanne, age 14: Lavender spice. Earthy and hot. Summer in the south. I’m standing in front of the mirror admiring my tan and mop of brown hair, almost a mullet, parted hard in the middle. “My name is Paco,” I say to myself in what I imagine to be a Spaniard’s accent. “My name is Paco. Paco… Raybon?” Maybe I’ll take Spanish next year. I pick up the bottle and study it. “Rabanny. Rayban. Rab-anne.” I settle for Ra-BON. “I am Paco Rabanne. I AM Paco Rabanne. My name… is Paco Rabanne. Have you met my friend, Paco Rabanne? Please, call me Paco. Paco Rabanne. Collect call from Paco Rabanne. Now checking into the game, number 23, Paco Rabanne. Hello, my name is Paco Rabanne. Have you seen Paco? Paco Rabanne? It’s Paco…” In the mirror, something has changed. A perspective shift. I turn and find her standing there, arms folded. “Your father wants you to mow the yard,” she says quietly, adding after a beat, “Paco,” the punchline. Barely an hour later, Paco Rabanne is wilting under the choking, gray, noxious exhaust spewing from a Lawn-Boy.
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All my favorite stones!" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8580887274/"> " data-title="So fabulous! What an inspiration to remain fashionable and whimsical as one gets older." data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8580149152/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8570837332/"> " data-title="Certainly the best graffito on that stretch of Irving Park." data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8570821854/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8544020200/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8544019468/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8544019272/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8542921179/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8542920993/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8542920855/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8542920631/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8526642940/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8526642436/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8525536663/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8496472652/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8490610276/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8486915189/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8486915059/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8463757274/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8454226034/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8453138527/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8453135929/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8412382858/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8411295051/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8411291173/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8411289271/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8411283613/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8411272723/"> " data-title="" data-link="http://www.flickr.com/57839392@N00/8374601926/">
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Photos" data-title="Someone was having a little fun on the newly paved street outside our office" data-link=""> " data-title="Not too far from Lake View High School..." data-link=""> " data-title="Wednesday night absinthe frappe realness." data-link=""> " data-title="Our gig money from Saturday has been ceremonially placed in this Captain Marvel planter so that it will grow! (Also so that we don't lose track of it.)" data-link=""> " data-title="A post-rock & roll situation." data-link=""> " data-title="I'm not really a tattoo person, but if I were, I certainly would have gotten these undapants inked on me by now. They've been benevolently watching over me for about 9 years now." data-link=""> " data-title="Someone is definitely not happy with the new construction on Irving Park!" data-link=""> " data-title="On vinyl at Reckless Records on Broadway." data-link=""> " data-title="Our violet is coming back to life!" data-link=""> " data-title="Hipster cat." data-link=""> " data-title="" data-link=""> " data-title="Elderflower lemonade!" data-link=""> " data-title="No big deal, just havin' dinner with Richard Hell." data-link=""> " data-title="Yesterday's taxi selfie superimposed over the text detailing the charge for their vomit clean-up fee." data-link=""> " data-title="Spring! Finally!" data-link=""> " data-title="An Edie Fake illustration on the cover of this week's New City!" data-link=""> " data-title="Sunday morning at the library at Dartmouth College." data-link=""> " data-title="This book is pretty much changing my life right now." data-link=""> " data-title="This bozo. (Photographed on his favorite perch, on top of the refrigerator.)" data-link=""> " data-title="A glass of "oh my god, is it only Tuesday?" cabernet." data-link="">
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Posts
- Jun 21, 10
Hello, my darlings.
You've noticed; I've noticed; we've all noticed. My heart's just not in this anymore.
I'm enormously proud of the writing I've done here and feel nothing but gratitude for the opportunities and connections this blog has afforded me over the past six years. But the energy has been on the wane for a while now, and I think it's best to take a final bow and draw the curtain on Wrestling Entropy at this point, formally, rather than just letting it linger untended into an indefinite future. There are few things worse than lack of closure.
While I take some time away to rest and rejuvenate my writing muscles and attend to other projects, the archives will stay up until our robot overlords cut Blogger off at the knees, and if and when I have something exciting to share, I may throw a new posting up here, just in case you keep this RSS feed active in your various online readers. Until such point as I do, though, you're welcome to visit me in my slightly less serious guises on Tumblr and Twitter; I also expect to keep posting on a highly erratic schedule over at my Divine Comedy oeuvreblog, Songs of Love, as I poke my way through Neil Hannon's gorgeous back catalog, and my Flickr photostream usually stays pretty fresh, too. IRL Allison can be found, among other times and places, on the third Thursday of every month at Lizard's Liquid Lounge with my band, Tiny Magnets. (For future reference, most of these same links are available in one bundle over at Flavors.me for one-stop shopping.)
Exuberant and heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been part of the extended family of commenters and lurkers here at Wrestling Entropy. Special thanks goes to giant-among-bloggers Matthew Perpetua for linking me in his esteemed FluxBlogroll; his seal of approval brought me much more attention among a much larger readership than I would have been capable of generating on my own.
Take care of yourselves, and each other, kittens. I'll be around. - Apr 02, 10
Whoa, somebody let the big dogs out of the gate. Wow. I hadn't seen King Sparrow live for longer than I'd realized, and watching them grow as a band in real time has been thrilling. Where, as a young band, their show started out tight and precise then relaxed into a sense of casual mastery, now they've turned yet another corner into an explosive, physical ferocity. I don't know if it's just that they've been cooped up in the studio for the past little while and were ready to reconnect with the energy of a club crowd again or what, but last night at the Empty Bottle they seemed hungrier, and thus more energetic, than I've maybe ever seen them. Old faves from the Derailer EP were present and accounted for ("Forest" just keeps opening up with secret byways and melodic turns every time I hear it), but goosed by the addition of the new tunes they've been working up for their debut long-player, even these familiar songs seemed to vibrate with new intensity.
Eric is steadily pushing his own boundaries as a vocalist, much to the songs' benefit. A few perfectly calibrated, well-placed howls here and there provided a nice little pinch of danger to offset their immaculate chops as musicians. He and Sean (the band's secret weapon) also seemed to be interacting more on stage than I've ever seen them. Watching the way musicians watch each other while they're playing is always one of my favorite things about seeing a band in concert. Then, of course, John's drumming always seems somewhere on the verge of full-scale detonation, in the best way possible. Even though he's one of my favorite local drummers, I always forget how ferocious he can be, the way I forget what the exciting warm springtime feels like after a winter full of ice and snow.
I know I'm not going to convince anyone that already hasn't been convinced at this point that they need to pay attention to these guys. It just makes me stupidly happy to live in a city where I can take the bus a few miles south on a random Thursday night and hear some soul-explodingly good music for less than I would pay for a sushi dinner. Go find 'em on MySpace or Twitter or Facebook (or in my frustratingly blurry pics), and revel in the joy of good, local, live music. - Mar 30, 10
Kittens! Spring is springing here in Chicago and there's so much fun to be had in the next few weeks. Get out yr calendars:
King Sparrow will be playing this Thursday, April 1, at the Empty Bottle. Eric tells me there will be new songs + old faves, so basically, what more could you ask for? I'm forgoing the Spoon show at the Aragon that night to support my hometown boys, so you know that means it's gonna be epic. (No pressure, guys.) Also, if you haven't watched the video tour of the studio where they've been recording their new album yet, check it out here and get ready for LOLs.
JT and the Clouds will be celebrating the release of their new album Caledonia on Friday, April 16, also at the Bottle. I'm so excited for this I could just burst. I've basically been looking forward to this show since early December. They've been touring the East Coast and Canada the past few weeks and will soon be heading out for a lengthy jaunt through Europe, so it'll be nice to remind them how much they're loved here at home while we have the chance.
Tiny Magnets will be back at Lizard's Liquid Lounge later this month, on Thursday, April 22. Seriously, if you haven't been out to the bar yet, you must. It's the perfect combination of cozy and cool. In other Tiny Magnets news, we've been busily recording and have some nicer sounding tracks up on our MySpace page. We also have a new presence on Facebook; we'd invite you to become a fan of ours there if you're so inclined! - Feb 22, 10
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, kittens: this is the best time of year. Oh sure, the weather is bullshit and the winter weight gain is in full effect, but: the early darkness! the implicit permission to avoid social engagements in favor of reading books on your couch and going out to movies alone! It's easy to bitch about the craptacular nature of February--and I do, often--but really, I'm having a blast. A quiet, sleepy, fat blast.
FILM
Again, it'd be all too easy to complain about how many shitty movies I've seen recently (my brain tends to hold on to the details and negative emotions elicited by the bad ones in far greater proportion than the good ones, skewing my internal control group), but, as I've often said, the simple act of watching a movie is just inherently pleasurable to me, so even a bad movie is preferable to no movie at all. A quick rundown of what I've caught recently.
Pineapple Express. It's obviously Franco's movie, of course, but when David Gordon Green recontextualizes the whole thing as a metaphor for Vietnam, I was like, ohhhh, well played, sir, well played. Kevin Corrigan was also extremely well used here.
In the Valley of Elah. Given Paul Haggis's involvement, I was a little dubious about the film, but it's way more artfully done than I thought it would be. We recently published a nonfiction book, Murder in Baker Company, about the true story that inspired the movie, and I had the opportunity to talk to Lanny Davis, the inspiration for the Tommy Lee Jones character, on the phone last year not long before he died. Unfailingly polite and eager to see us do his son's story justice, he called me ma'am once or twice during our short conversation. There's a scene in the movie when Jones's character does the same for a waitress in a bar, and I nearly crumpled. This isn't a feel-good movie by any stretch, but I'm surprised by how heartily I'd recommend it.
The Dreamers. Wait, wha--? I thought this movie was supposed to be sexy. Gawd, it was just pretentious and confusing and the worst example of a self-conscious, self-serious art film. Clearly a metaphor for American/European politics in the late '60s moreso than any kind of interesting or coherent story, this totally failed for me both as erotica and as the proverbial love letter to cinema.
The White Ribbon. Haneke, that magnificent bastard, nails it yet again. Tonally, it reminded me, in a weird way, of Cronenberg's Spider, in the way that Haneke, as a director, knows by now what his audiences are expecting out of a Haneke movie, so he deliberately rides that tension for all it's worth, until the audience is squirming for release, forcing us to acknowledge that seeing something really fucked up happen onscreen would actually make us more comfortable than being patient with all the ambiguity. Sure, there are some zingers that get revealed, but mostly what has stuck with me is the velvety black and white cinematography, the scene where the farmer sits with his wife's recently bathed corpse just out of frame for that nice long take, and the way that the voice-over provides a meta-commentary on the act of discussing the narrative slipperiness of a Haneke plotline when it describes the way the townsfolk attempted to impose some kind of logic on the disappearance of two of the main characters.
The Young Victoria. Total candy. Excellent scenery chewing from Mark Strong as Sir John Conroy (he's also the baddie in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes). I always forget, too, how much I like Paul Bettany.
Crazy Heart. There is no way that Jeff Bridges, talented and likable as he demonstrably is, gives anything other than a competent performance here. Also, I'm so mad at Maggie Gyllenhaal for perpetuating the older man/younger woman thing here, especially given that her performance is also fairly by-the-numbers. You know the movie is really all over the place when Colin Farrell gives the most interesting and memorable performance. (Jesus fuck, can we talk about that hair?)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In many ways, I sincerely hope somebody takes this movie to their bosom and reclaims its bat-shit-craziness, turning it into a so-bad-it's-good cult classic because there's something weirdly appealing about it. Tom Tykwer's direction maybe? Maybe something in the source material? Anyway, I basically rented it because of Ben Whishaw, and, while he's clearly throwing everything he's got as an actor at the wall, it was the wrong kind of effort and didn't really do anything to help the film. An exceedingly miscast Dustin Hoffman mercifully dies early on, and Alan Rickman does his Alan Rickman thing somewhere in the back half of the movie (not complaining about this in the least).
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. OK, unlike Perfume, this movie isn't even charmingly bad enough to be campy. Actually, I think it would love to consider itself campy, but it fails painfully, on just about every level. I really always try to find something redeeming about a movie, but this one made me so actively angry with its crappiness, I really can't think of a damn thing. (The scene when they go to the dominatrix's apartment, maybe? Robert Downey Jr.'s shoulders?) It's just a complete train wreck from the first frame--which explains, via painfully literal intertitle, what it means when it calls itself "an imaginary portrait"--to the last.
Fish Tank. Bleak as all hell, but really, really great. The creepy interplay of absent-daddy issues and a young girl's burgeoning sexuality is handled really nicely, helped of course by Michael Fassbender's exceedingly charming and manipulative (in a good way) performance.
The Piano Teacher. Obviously, The White Ribbon got me on a Haneke kick. This is basically a perfect encapsulation of everything I want out of a film: French and German subtitles, gorgeous music, a steely, inscrutable female protagonist, and horribly twisted sex. The Walter Klemmer character is a bit too unrealistically convenient/contrived to be believable, but I didn't mind too much because of where he allows the story to go and for what he allows Isabelle Huppert to reveal about her own character. Uncomfortable and mesmerizing.
MUSIC
I've basically had Spoon's Transference on constant repeat since its release in January. "The Mystery Zone" is instantly one of Britt Daniel's best-ever songs, but I find new things to love on the album every time I listen to it. This week I've got major love for "Trouble Comes Running."
When I feel the need to give Transference a break for a while, I've been having my mind unexpectedly blown by Chris Whitley's Dirt Floor. I'd never even heard of this dude before one of my Tiny Magnets bandmates mentioned that I'd probably like his stuff, and now I'm obsessed. Though a lot of his other songs get loud and rocked-out, Dirt Floor is firmly in the realm of one-man-with-an-acoustic-guitar gorgeousness, reminiscent of Pink Moon on one end of the spectrum and For Emma, Forever Ago on the other, though he's way more blues-influenced than either of those guys. Highly, highly recommended.
I anticipate that Jason Falkner's I'm OK, You're OK--now finally released in the US after several years of only being available as an import from Japan--will probably be giving both those albums a run for their money in coming weeks, though. It's vintage Falknery goodness--his voice is as strong as ever, and the hooks will insinuate themselves into your very soul. "Anondah" is utterly gorgeous, and "This Time" is basically a perfect album opener.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
Tiny Magnets (oh, hey, look: a MySpace page!) have a show coming up this Friday, 2-26, at the Horseshoe on Lincoln. (Guys, this is not to be confused with the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted.) We're set to go on around 9:30. Bring yr friends! - Feb 17, 10
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.Tiny Magnets will go on around 9:20. See you there, Chicago!
- Jan 29, 10
Tiny Magnets
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.Friends: it's my rock 'n' roll debut tonight. Come check us out! Featuring me on vocals, Brian Cremins (singer/songwriter/guitar player extraordinaire and impresario of Short Punks in Love), Kevin Henretta (of Plastics Hi-Fi and Ten Hundred on lead guitar filtered through enough pedals to rock your face directly off), and Michael Main (of St. Aviator on drums and bass).
- Dec 29, 09
It probably goes without saying that Inglourious Basterds was one of my favorite movies this year. I'm not sure that it beats out Kill Bill for my fave Tarantino of the '00s (I was just bowled over by what he accomplished with that film, esp. after revisiting it this summer), but it was unquestionably a highlight in the rather dull year that '09 was, for me, for movies.
It should also go without saying that this isn't QT's WWII movie--it's his WWII-movie movie. Huge difference. For all the intertextual trainspotting that the most obnoxious filmies were falling all over themselves to point out (Aldo Raine is a wink to Aldo Ray! etc.), I don't think this point was given enough attention. Dono very rightly and thoughtfully pointed out over on his blog that, among other things, reimagining Hitler's demise doesn't actually change the historical record, doesn't actually change the fact that all those people died in concentration camps, doesn't actually erase any of the atrocities that occurred and linger in our memories. Of course it doesn't. But after decades' worth of WWII movies that have more subtly attempted to redraw the shape of history in ways that are often way more odious in their piousness and self-righteousness (as Eddie Argos put it, Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now), QT's genius here is to be as fucking in-your-face about his historical revisionism as possible. If we're going to necessarily fictionalize WWII by making a movie about it, why not, at this point, just use every ounce of juice available in the medium and get our rocks off? As Mike Barthel put it, "No one, at this point, needs to be educated about the Nazis or the Holocaust; anyone who wouldn’t have sympathy for the Jews or antipathy for National Socialism is pretty much a lost cause, and it’s hard to imagine any piece of torture-porn or rigorous factual evidence convincing someone who’s not already in that camp. So why not, you know, have some fun with it?" To reiterate: this isn't a movie about WWII--it's a movie about WWII movies. Nobody is desecrating anything here, at least nothing that doesn't deserve to be desecrated a little bit. Don't all the Saving Private Ryans and Life Is Beautifuls need to have the piss taken out of them a little bit with pure punk rock cinema?
Because, as Sean T. Collins so brilliantly pointed out, that's exactly what this is: punk rock cinema. It's snotty and sneering and unapologetically going to leave anyone in the dust who doesn't get the joke. How the fuck else did you think QT would deal with the subject matter? As Archie Hicox, the English film critic-turned-solider-turned-spy, says right before the massacre in the basement tavern, "I hope you don't mind if I go down speaking the King's." In other words: when shit looks grim, you use the language available to you, and then you enjoy your Scotch.
And the language available to QT is movies, the intoxicatingly beautiful and ridiculous grammar of which underpins stuff like the Hugo Stiglitz intertitle and its accompanying power metal guitar riff before Aldo Raine busts into prison to tell him "we're big fans of your work"; Shosanna's face, enjoying the literal last laugh, projected onto the smoke rising from the movie theater-turned-gas-chamber that has been set ablaze using actual film stock; Frederick Zoller turning from a soldier into an actor; Goering fancying himself the Third Reich's David O. Selznick; Bridget von Hammersmark conflating spying with acting; Donny Donowitz and Private Ulmer's breathless action-movie-cliche exchange before busting into Hitler's opera box ("After I kill that guy, you have 30 feet to get to that guy. Can you do it?" "I have to!"); and, of course, the final, cheekily self-referential shot of Aldo Raine drawling "I think this just may be my masterpiece." Even the WWII-movie convention of everyone going around speaking accented English gets a nod during the impeccable opening sequence when Hans Landa shifts from French to English and back again.
Which reminds me--holy shit, this movie was subtitled in at least three different languages and one of the major plot points turns on being able to discern inconsistencies in another character's accent and use of idiomatic gestures. This, rather than the male-dominated cast of soldiers and its attendant tough-guy posturing, is the true hearkening back to the era of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: language, my people, language. All the sitting around and talking to kill time, all the ways that secrets are traded as precious commodities. Language divides just as sure as it brings pleasure; it's a weapon every bit as dangerous, in its own way, as Aldo Raine's knife. Nicknames and rumor (the trash genres of verbal communication, as it were) serve, elegantly, a kind of double function here, as destabilizing tactics among the governments and their martial emissaries (eg, Hitler's futile insistence that no one ever refer to Donowitz as "the Bear Jew" again) and as sly commentary on the world of film fandom (eg, the repeated question "have you heard of me?", Landa's pointed insult to Utivich about his height).
All of which, of course, would be bullshit if the movie wasn't so much fun and also so lovely. Much has been made of the final showdown at the premier of Nation's Pride, and for good reason. It has to be one of the most taut, thrilling sequences since...well, maybe since the House of Blue Leaves vignette in Kill Bill. The use of Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" was a brilliant, achronological touch that just catapults you into the excitement and anticipation of the moment. Sublime.
There's much, much more to be said about the film, and I'll probably get around to saying more eventually. I just felt like I needed to get some of my most salient impressions up here (four months after the fact, ahem; thanks for your patience, friends) before the end of the year. Viva QT!
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The few things I've seen since our last movie update right after Thanksgiving have been mostly lackluster. I fell asleep during the final climactic battle sequence of Avatar, and A Single Man is as dumb, shallow, and pretty a film as you'd expect a douchebag like Tom Ford to make. Up in the Air didn't do much for me other than prove, more than ten years after the release of Out of Sight, that America clings tightly to its favorite enduring fantasy of having nearly anonymous sex with George Clooney after getting picked up by him in a hotel bar. (JR Jones made me cackle when he referred to Clooney in his review in the Reader as "the most adored man in America after Barack Obama.") Also, Vera Farmiga is super pretty (though I still always momentarily think she's Claire Forlani). Sherlock Holmes is fluffy and fun, almost distractingly so--Robert Downey Jr., talented as he demonstrably is, pretty much doesn't even act anymore as much as he personifies a series of exclamation points bouncing around at 24 frames a second. In the plus column, I liked Broken Embraces quite a bit more than any Almodovar film in the past few years, especially when you realize it's not actually about the Penelope Cruz-centered love story, but actually about the improvised family structure created by and around Judit and her son. And though I missed it during the approximately five minutes it was out in theaters this summer, I finally just caught Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience on DVD and really loved it. I love that he's one of the few filmmakers willing to engage in any sort of conversation (reductionist as it necessarily must be) about the ways that people make and use money. The personal trainer character made me want to gag on my own tongue a couple times for the ways that he reminded me exactly of the trainer I was working with for six weeks this fall.
Otherwise...yeah. It's been a pretty boring year for movies. Whither the explosion of creativity and innovation we saw ten years ago in '99? Was it just a fin de siecle thing? Not much has really stuck with me this year. It's all the single word movies: Up, Moon, Taken, Humpday, Adventureland. More importantly, there was also Bright Star, Bad Lieutenant, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, as elaborated upon above, Inglourious Basterds. And, in their own weird ways, also The Soloist and Two Lovers. That's not even a movie per month! Hopefully you've had a luckier year than me, my darlings. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the new year and the new decade, shall we?
Bonus track: in chronological order, here are my top 20 favorite films of the '00s.
Almost Famous--2000 (I'm pretty sure I saw this movie the same day I had Ethiopean food for the first time--CTLA, be a good Boswell and correct my memory if I'm wrong about this)
The Anniversary Party--2001 (this is really of a piece with Rachel Getting Married, as far as their being real-time depictions of talented friends gifting each other with the extravagance of their talent; I have a real soft spot for that sort of thing)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch--2001
Moulin Rouge!--2001
The Royal Tenenbaums--2001 (although I seriously did debate citing The Life Aquatic; I've really come around on that film since I originally saw it in the theater, now that I think I better understand what it's doing)
Insomnia--2002 (Christopher Nolan's most underrated film)
The Pianist--2002 (Polanski, you fucker, I wish I knew how to quit you)
Signs--2002 (shut up, I don't even care--this is my favorite film about the experience of the day of 9/11)
All the Real Girls--2003
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead--2003 (it's Clive Owen in a neo-noir; why didn't more people see this?)
Lost in Translation--2003
Kill Bill, Vol. 1--2003--and Vol. 2--2004 (it's really unfair to think of them as separate movies)
Before Sunset--2004
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--2004
Cache--2005 (along with seeing Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, this is one of my favorite filmgoing experiences ever)
A History of Violence--2005
There Will Be Blood--2007
Man on Wire--2008
Rachel Getting Married--2008
Bright Star--2009 - Dec 23, 09
Previously: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.
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Though I'm going to go on and on in the following paragraphs about the minutiae of what I loved most in these individual songs and how they colored specific moments in my life this year, I'm struck oddly mute now that it's time to make a statement about the whole enchilada. At the root of it all, to be honest, after the overwhelming angst of '08, I basically just wanted to make you guys a kickass mix this time around. What else could I possibly say to top the simple truth of that aspiration?
Well, of course, in my attempt to eschew narrative as I was assembling this comp, I've only ended up more emphatically tracing the outline of the journey I've been on in the past 12 months: sugar-rush highs crash down into contemplative lows, everything swirling together into a general impression of '09 that I hope holds up beat by beat but will also end up being greater than the sum of its parts.
But, now that I've been doing this for a while, I feel like I"m finally getting the hang of how to make it work most effectively. Am I talking about the mix or the year? Take your pick. The whole point of these things has always been to blur that line a little bit, hopefully for the benefit of us both. Truthfully, there's almost nothing I look forward to more than the chance to design this little musical and emotional excursion for you at the end of each year.
But, enough with the boo-hooing! Screw the self-conscious navel gazing! Let's party like it's 1999, a decade after the fact.
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1. Quiet Dog--Mos Def
Mighty Mos returns! This simple, stunning track reminds us, in the era of auto-tune and overcooked soul samples, of hip-hop's barest essentials: voice and beat. It, of course, helps that both of the elements here are killer: handclaps that crunch like celery, drums that rumble like they're perched on a polar ice cap so that they can use the length of the planet to resonate, and Mos's endlessly appealing mischievous playfulness. Dude whispers his way out of this track--what a testament to his bottomless well of charisma!
2. Dull to Pause--Junior Boys
Any album that sets itself up to be an exploration of the place where the act of cinematic creation and the act of seduction share language and become momentarily synonymous was bound to interest me at least in passing, but I never expected to fall quite as hard as I did for Begone Dull Care. It's immaculately wrought from front to back, its cool cynicism coming on like our era's answer to Steely Dan in their heyday. The amoral licentiousness of Jeremy Greenspan's whispery croon is mottled with just enough pillowy charm that it fools me into believing that the creepy, Hitchcockian possessiveness of the lyric "I don't want to share you / so don't say good night" is actually kinda sexy.
3. Which Song--Max Tundra
I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release at the end of '08, which was probably for the best since it afforded me plenty of time in the usually musically barren beginning of the year to really drown myself in its pleasures. Even though it's arguably of a piece with the rest of the spazzypants stuff I got heavily addicted to this spring (which you'll read more about soon in re: Micachu), I hesitate to diminish the brilliance of what Max Tundra's done here by reducing its appeal to "hey, that shit's crazy!" I mean, it is crazy, but it's also funny and cutting and thoughtful and positively overflowing with hooks and deeply satisfying melodic invention. The always casually brilliant Mike Barthel compared this album to a Magic Eye image, noting that you have to wait for your brain to relax into it and assemble the different sonic chunks before you can hear the shape behind all the squiggles. But unlike a Magic Eye picture whose scribbles can be ignored or cast off as mere obfuscation of the thing you're really looking at, there's no there here--the scribbles turn out to be the essence of everything that's enjoyable about this music in the first place.
4. Not a Robot, but a Ghost--Andrew Bird
For as much as I love Andrew Bird, he's kind of like the musical equivalent of Michel Gondry--so intimidatingly brilliant and creative that his output can get a bit samey if he's not challenged by an equally brilliant collaborator. For my money, any time he lets Martin Dosh really pull out all the stops, the results always soar. (I'm sure this is why I prefer Armchair Apocrypha, which Dosh's fingerprints are all over, to Bird's other solo albums thus far.) The keening in his voice here is all the more potent with the beats bolstering the angst in such an sharply visceral way.
5. Temecula Sunrise--Dirty Projectors
My computer died for about a month right in the middle of this summer, and one of the last new releases I'd synched onto my iPod before it happened was Bitte Orca. Much like the experience of being isolated with DCFC's Narrow Stairs in the deserts of New Mexico last year, being forced to focus my attention on this album for an extended period of time was, in a sense, an amazing relief. Without the option of swapping in and out a bunch of other music, I enjoyed the luxury of really getting to know this one deeply. Sure didn't hurt that it's eminently deserving of sustained attention, full of all the intense drama and philosophy and catharsis I'm always looking for in an album. The angular and inventive guitar solo here floors me every time. Unlike most guitar solos plopped into your average indie rock song, it's not just a bracketed section of sound called [guitar solo]; it's something curious and rich and inviting and every bit as compelling as the vocals surrounding it. (Also, music theory nerds, please e-mail me if you can figure out the time signature this song is written in. It's had me stumped for months.)
6. Eat Your Heart--Micachu & the Shapes
For at least the first half of the year, I just surrendered to the fact that something in me wanted to listen to the spazziest music possible all the time. Call it the yang to last year's Bon Iver-dominated yin or whatever, but I wanted to feel assaulted by noise so abrasive it constantly courted pure annoyance. Dan Deacon's Bromst did a respectable job, but no album sugared me up as immediately or intensely as Micachu's Jewellry. The herky-jerky time signatures, broken toy instruments (and vacuum cleaners!), and her guttural drawl all hit this weird pleasure center somewhere in my occipital lobe and just blissed me out with totally overwhelming insanity.
7. Rudie Fails--White Rabbits
Considering how wholly uninterested I am in White Rabbits as a band, they sure have a way of writing songs that capture my imagination to the point of obsession. (I'll spare you the Alice in Wonderland free association here.) Of course, getting Britt Daniel to produce this recent batch of songs was a pretty surefire way of grabbing my attention and guaranteeing at least a modicum of affection. "Percussion Gun" was an early favorite from It's Frightening (o ye of the awesome front cover), but something about the balance of looseness and ferocity here gave "Rudie Fails" legs I wouldn't have necessarily expected. But dude--That piano! All that empty space! The vocal howl! Even if it's just Spoon Jr., I'm OK with that.
8. Middle Cyclone--Neko Case
Guys, this is the song she named her entire album after. Who else would have the balls to write something this emotionally naked and then so confidently direct everyone's attention to it? This song made me sad before I even got sad again this year. Neko sings truth.
9. The Sleeping Beauty--American Music Club
Consider this the equivalent of me waving my arms in the air, jumping up and down, and shooting off air horns to draw everyone's attention to the wonderful and unjustly slept-on American Music Club album The Golden Age. Though it was released early in '08, it came to my attention this summer and sank its hooks into me immediately with its West Coast-gothic vibe. There were long stretches of time when it was really the only album I could stand to listen to. I could extol the virtues of pretty much any of its songs--though my special faves would include "All My Love," "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco," and "The Dance"--but the autumnal regret and muted fatalism of "The Sleeping Beauty" just fit like a glass slipper (to mix my fairy tale metaphors) here. If there's any album cited on this mix that I would go out of my way to advise you to check out in full, it's this one.
10. While You Wait for the Others--Grizzly Bear, feat. Michael McDonald
Did you not believe me last year? Do you remain unconvinced of the stratospheric excellence of this song? I believe Mr. Michael McDonald might have a thing or two to say about the matter. Guys, I'm sorry, I know it's kind of obnoxious to run the same song two years in a row, but when Grizzly Bear released this B-side, it was like they were daring me to do it. I couldn't not take the bait. This song's still fresher than fresh a year and a half after I first heard the live recording of it. I would wear the essence of those cymbal crashes as a perfume if I could find a way to bottle it.
11. Hard to Find a Friend--Baby Teeth
There are plenty of great bands working in Chicago right now, but Abraham Levitan is in an altogether more rarified group--dude is a straight-up great songwriter. He's got a seemingly effortless way with with melodies that are easy-on-the-ears yet deceptively complex and with vivid lyrics that trip pleasantly off the tongue while telling poignantly humorous (and humorously poignant) Everyman stories. Add to that potent mix the band's utterly winning on-stage charisma and stealth chops (Peter Andreadis--subtlest drummer I've heard in ages and the band's secret weapon), and they're like a time bomb of rock just waiting to explode out of the Midwest. Don't say you weren't warned.
12. The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)--The Decemberists
It's Tuesday, so that must mean it's time to hate on the Decemberists. Or, wait--is it backlash-to-the-backlash day? I can't keep that shit straight anymore. Lucky for everyone who's turned a blind eye to the hype cycle, Colin Meloy just keeps on writing impeccable songs like this one. Though I initially dismissed it as a mere pretender to "Wicked Little Town"'s throne, I eventually opened my ears enough to hear the actual song I was listening to, instead of just my perception of it. And when I finally heard it, it became one of those tracks I almost couldn't listen to on the train for fear of bursting into tears any time it so much as came up on shuffle. The romantic complexity laced with foreboding in the lyrics coupled with the featherweight bombast of the arrangement makes this one of the roundest songs I've heard all year.
13. Save Me from What I Want--St. Vincent
Though I ultimately found Actor too wearying an album to garner much repeat play, this track immediately jumped out at me. It keeps Annie Clark's more outre instrumental affectations in check while letting her extremely nuanced vocals shine with subtle shades of humor, exasperation, and ennui. Plus, the transition from the Decemberists to this is secretly my favorite segue on the comp, both sonically and thematically.
14. Crazy/Forever--Japandroids
Japandroids' Post-Nothing was definitely, surprisingly, one of my favorite albums this year, thanks to its perfect combination of heart-on-sleeviness and go-for-broke sonic force. I love any band that can make me feel like I'm 16 again (except with actual good taste in cool music this time). They get extra bonus points for being stereotypically dorkily polite Canadians live in concert.
15. 1901--Phoenix
Though I loved Alphabetical when it came out in '04, I kind of lost track of Phoenix for a while there. In my brain, I tend to file them in the same drawer as Sloan: un-show-offy professionals who have a way with a killer hook, whose recorded output is so consistent that their albums sometimes, weirdly, seem redundant. Put it another way--they're like a well-made TV show like House or 30 Rock that you can just pop into and out of, episode by episode, without getting lost in the season's major narrative arc. A piece of easily accessible art that didn't make me work to crack it open, "1901" goes down smooth every time, like a bourbon vanilla milkshake.
16. Brother Sport--Animal Collective
Perhaps the apotheosis of this year's obsession with all things annoying-but-catchy. There were a few weeks during that hideous late February/early March time of year when I would blast this song straight into my ears first thing in the morning as I let my light therapy box sear my retinas from its perch next to the bed. (What, do you have a better suggestion for not turning homicidal at the end of a grueling Chicago winter?) The counterpoint between the Saturday morning cartoon sonics and Panda Bear's harmonies stacked as wide as the Lake Michigan shoreline is somehow so stupid, so fucking funny, that it's perfect--transcendent even. Likewise his spur to "OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your, OH-pen up your throat a luttul" shifts from being phonemic soup at first to then resonating as a spiritually valid mantra for creative self-agency. I loved "My Girls" and "Summertime Clothes" as much as anyone, but the pinata-like explosion of Muppetty affability and wisdom here at the end of the album will always mark "Brother Sport" as the defining track of Merriweather Post Pavilion for me.
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Honorable mentions this year go to Short Punks in Love's "Olivia," Metric's "Help I'm Alive," A.C. Newman's "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer," the xx's "Basic Space," the Clientele's "Harvest Time," Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Franz Ferdinand's "No You Girls," Anni Rossi's "Machine," Passion Pit's "The Reeling," Arctic Monkeys' "Cornerstone," and the Duckworth Lewis Method's "Jiggery Pokery."
Thanks as always to anyone who recommended anything to me this year, indulged my enthusiasms, came out to a concert or festival with me, or made any kind of joyful noise that touched my life. Special thanks to JH for working with me again on the beautiful packaging that will come with the actual burned copies of the CDs. - Nov 29, 09
Hello, my kittens. Are you ready for your now-regular monthly dispatch from the land of Wrestling Entropy? In all honesty, I'm not even sure I am. I started an insane workout regimen about six weeks ago, and just about the only thing I've gotten out of it is a deeper understanding of the fact that meatheads and gym rats aren't necessarily dumb as a matter of course--they're just fucking exhausted all the time. All the blood that would normally be helping their brains compose lovely and thoughtful sentiments has been rerouted to their muscles, leaving them dim and ineloquent masses of crabbiness and fatigue. OK, well, maybe that really is just me, but man--this shit's been brutal. Anyway. To the extent that I've been able to scrape myself together enough to do anything remotely of interest this month, here's what I've been up to:
Max Tundra, Live at Schubas. I was just talking to Eric and Annie about how it's become impossible to tell what shows are going to sell out immediately and what shows you're going to be able to waltz right into at the last minute. I found out about the November 5th Max Tundra show a day or two ahead of time and utterly panicked. I figured there'd be no way I would be able to get a ticket. Well, not only was I able to buy one, I could have brought along about 50 of my closest friends. I was soooo bummed at what a small turnout there was for the show. Granted, he didn't go on until about 11 pm on a Thursday night, the Mountain Goats/Final Fantasy (bandonyms ahoy!) double-header was scheduled the same night just up the street at the Metro, and Schubas is a terrible venue for dancypants genres--but still. It's Max Tundra! I missed Parallax Error Beheads You upon its official release in late '08, but after finally grabbing it earlier this year, it's absolutely been my personal #1 album of '09. I tried to tell him as much while folks were congregating around the merch table at the end of the night, and it was a supremely, comically awkward interaction. I just kept gushing and he just kept running out of ways to say "thanks, I appreciate it," and the whole thing escalated with an embarrassing-for-us-both high five. (Initiated by him--allow me to spare myself a little dignity by making that fact perfectly clear.) Anyway, the album is still unimpeachable and you should check it out if you haven't had the pleasure yet.
After nearly a year of fits and starts, I finally finished reading American Prometheus a few weeks ago. It was astonishingly good. I have no idea how a book of this scope gets researched and written (not to mention edited), but it's seriously gorgeous. I lived with the book for so many months, and it contained so much heartwrenching emotion, I was literally in tears as I finished the last page. Highly, but not lightly, recommended.
As something of a palate cleanser (ahem), I also read Toni Bentley's butt sex book The Surrender pretty much immediately thereafter. It was really quite great. It's less prurient than it could have been and she's a surprisingly lovely writer. It was also interesting to see how structurally similar it was to Eat, Pray, Love. Is there some sort of "contemporary woman's memoir" script that necessitates a tripartite structure, a post-divorce journey of soul-searching, feats of physical endurance invented to mirror and in many ways overcome emotional blockages, culminating in greater self-awareness and inner peace? Will someone who's not been working out six days a week please write this essay for me? KTHX.
I saw more movies this month than I realized I did, mostly thanks to the time afforded me over four-day holiday weekend. In brief:
The Men Who Stare at Goats. Completely ridiculous and demonstrably not very well written, but somehow amusing in spite of itself. I'm sure this is mostly thanks to the effortless charisma of most of its cast. I just wish they weren't working so hard to save a movie that didn't necessarily deserve to be saved.
Tropic Thunder. Obvy, I'm way behind the times here, and, even after seeing the whole thing, I felt like I didn't really need to thanks to the best jokes being given away in last year's omnipresent trailer. But it was still pretty enjoyable anyway. The fake gay priest movie preview at the beginning probably got the biggest laugh out of me, but Jay Baruchel's film nerd monologue about Renny Harlin was a pretty close second. That kid prob should also have been in The Men Who Stare at Goats in re: effortless charisma.
Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, I am 100% the target demographic here, but there's no sense in tip-toeing around the fact that I loved every fucking minute of it. Seriously, it's just delight upon delight, while also remaining deeply, deeply weird. The bit with the wolf near the end? No exaggeration: I was weeping with laughter. I saw it on Thanksgiving night and the audience fucking applauded when the credits began to roll. I always love the extravagance of the gesture when that happens at the end of a movie. No one involved with its creation or performance is going to hear it; it's just a pure, spontaneous expression of happiness and fellow-feeling and aesthetic satisfaction.
Coco Before Chanel. This was a bit more of a snooze than I was hoping/expecting, but it was ultimately redeemed for me by how much of an unconventional hero Coco is presented as here. She's not particularly charming or likable, but she's still this gutsy dame who gets shit done and befriends all kinds of powerful and influential people and builds her own empire from scratch. I was glad to see a small group of young-looking girls in the theater on the afternoon I caught this; what an awesomely feminist message for them to be exposed to: it's OK to be bitchy and difficult! The world won't fall apart and you'll have more self-respect and you'll probably get a lot more things of genuine value accomplished that way!
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Holy shit. So awesome. Ridiculous and dark and hilarious and foul. I know this is a totally obnoxious thing to say, but it strikes me as the kind of thing I would have absolutely gone apeshit-level bonkers for when I was about 19. Not that I enjoyed it any less at 30, but I could just imagine adopting this as a kind of secret-handshake movie back then, my love for it becoming a place that would feel like an exclusive club inside my own brain, a place to meet up with other like-minded friends to discuss its many hideous pleasures. There's no way to overstate how fucking fantastic Nicolas Cage is here--because he's already gone ahead and embedded the overstatement in his own performance. There's also, of course, the subtextual level where the character's story becomes the story of the post-Katrina plight of the city, which realization had me racing to my bookshelf to start reading my gratis copy of Ned Sublette's The Year Before the Flood immediately after the movie to help understand contemporary New Orleans a bit better. Do not sleep on this one, fellow lovers of neo-noir and all things bat-shit insane.
I'm sure you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, be sure to pop over to Pitchfork News and check out Elvis Costello playing "High Fidelity" with the Roots. I just...there are no words. Does shit get any cooler than this? It's inspired me to rock out to Get Happy!! the past few days. Every time I let my love for Elvis slip a little bit from my immediate consciousness, something like this comes along to remind me why dude will forever be one of my faves.
Also, hey, Animal Collective, where do you find the time/energy/creativity to fart out another superlative set of songs in the same calendar year as Merriweather Post Pavilion? The new Fall Be Kind EP is a stunner, totally worth it for the first two tracks alone, though the entire moody journey is incredibly rewarding. Embarrassing admission: when I first heard Avey Tare sing that line in "On a Highway" about "Noah's dreaming," I was totally trying to figure out the Biblical allusion until I read the Pitchfork review, which reminded me that that's Panda Bear's real name. Oh. Right. Duh.
Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend, my darlings! - Oct 31, 09
Happy Halloween, my kittens! What kind of treats do I have to share with you today?
Bright Star. It's probably already come and gone from your local theater, so a fat lot of good this recommendation will do you until the DVD comes out, but I have to go on record as saying this film was wonderful. I was absolutely rapt the entire running time. When the lights came up, the first thing I said to Benji (who gave it a lovely review here in his awesomely fun new weekly column over at The New Gay) was: "all those little Twilight girls should be forced to watch this as a corrective." This is how to deal elegantly and passionately with young love and unrequited physical longing. Campion and her lead actress Abbie Cornish did an extraordinary job of respecting the intensity of the emotions while still allowing them to be completely youthful and wild. Cornish's breakdown when Fanny finds out Keats has died is totally earned and totally heartbreaking. It's not just the love story that's compelling here, though--the quiet way that her family embroiders the edges of the scenes gave the whole thing a warmth and intimacy that occasionally bordered on claustrophobia (as real families often do), and Paul Schneider (yes, that Paul Schneider) continues to be one of those MVP, will-watch-in-anything-he-does kind of actors. Also inspired: hearing Ben Whishaw as Keats reading one of his poems over the closing credits instead of going straight to music.
An Education. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I think Nick Hornby's one-dimensional script just kind of hamstrung it before the movie even had a chance. It reminded me of the problems I had with State of Play--all these awesome actors borderline wasting their talents working extra hard to redeem the shitty dialogue and flat character types. Rosamund Pike especially (known to the romantics among us as Jane Bennet from the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice) did a heroic job overcoming the on-page limitations of her "I'm dumb and pretty" broken record, giving her some real sadness and charm where none were naturally occurring. Dominic Cooper, too, as her boyfriend Danny showed enough spark and charm and glamor to make his scenes memorable, and I nearly cheered when Sally Hawkins showed up for a brief, heartbreaking moment near the end. The usually unimpeachable Alfred Molina and Peter Sarsgaard weren't served nearly as well, unfortunately--though Molina's monologue to his daughter, apologizing to her through her closed bedroom door, was tragically tender and regretful in all the right ways. But, to the film's credit, as with Bright Star, there was an enormous amount of sensitivity in portraying the lead character Jenny as quite bright while also allowing her to also be petty and vain and rash, which kept her well outside the bounds of annoying movie precociousness. You can check out the meat of Lynn Barber's true story and a little bit about the making of the film here at The Guardian.
I don't know who Daisy Chapman is, but her cover of "Our Mutual Friend" was linked recently at the Divine Comedy's Twitter page. I wanted to love it, both because that's one of the best songs Neil has written in the '00s and because DC songs should always be covered more often than they currently are, but unfortunately she sucks all the life and nuance out of it by singing the surface of the song instead of the subtext. The original version that appears on Absent Friends (and, ahem, my best of 2004 mix) is nearly inexhaustible, thanks to the way that Neil's interp reveals, in a paradoxically complex way, the essential shallowness of these characters--all the vapid conversation about how it's hard to hear your own voice at the nightclub or how the old 45s "are like the soundtrack to our lives." He also leaves enough ambiguity in the storyline to doubt whether the girl was intentionally leading the narrator on or if he just drunkenly misconstrued her level of interest in him. No such nuance in Daisy's version! Though, yes, she has a lovely voice and comes up with an inventive solo piano arrangement to reconfigure the chamber music affectations of the DC original, she goes straight for the jugular in the most uninteresting way possible. She oversings and oversells the first person narrator's heartbreak, leaving no possible interpretation aside from her conviction that she's been betrayed. Which also, of course, opens up an ugly sort of girl-on-girl catfighty misogyny now that the genders are reversed--blame the other girl for "stealing" the guy, rather than holding the dude accountable for being fickle and sneaky. Sigh. I hate to be overly critical because, like I say, I think the DC's back catalog is ripe for people to reinvent, but singers have to be able to match all the intelligence that Neil has built into these songs for the covers to actually be worth a damn.
Patton Oswalt's My Weakness Is Strong. I have nothing critically interesting to say about this, only that I LOVE IT. It's not as 100% solid from front to back as Werewolves and Lollipops, but it doesn't have to be. Some of the pro-Obama stuff will probably make you wistfully sad/nostalgic for early '09, the way it captures the time before things got all kinds of ugly with health care and whatnot, but even with that--hell, especially with that--there is so much pure joy and silliness throughout. Dude is very clearly operating at the top of his game here. Hopefully you've also read Pitchfork's very sharp review of the album and Patton's AV Club interview.
Japandrooooooooooooids! Caught these guys at a freaking 3 pm show, of all things, at Schubas earlier this month, and it just reminded me why Post-Nothing has been one of my surprise favorite albums of '09. The songs are loud and fun and dumb in the right ways, and I just wish I had a car and a stretch of open road so I could blast this stuff into the warm night air. I also totally didn't realize that they're Canadian, so there's an extra layer of delight when, after you've been pummeled with all that meaty guitar and electrifying drum work, Brian King starts gushing uber-politely about how grateful they are that we've showed up to support them. Adorable. I snapped a few pictures that you can check out here.
Be safe out there, tonight, my darlings, if you are getting dressed up and partying. - Sep 23, 09
Hello, my darlings. It's been a busy month, mostly for personal reasons (all good, don't you worry!), but I suppose it's time to do another quick roundup here to keep you abreast of the pop cultural goings-on in my world.
Yes, I have seen Inglourious Basterds. No, I'm not ready to write about it yet. For both your sake and mine, I want to get this one right, so you're going to have to continue to have patience with me. KTHX.
I did go on a bit of a documentary binge, though (perhaps in response to all the intellectual heavy lifting required by the Tarantino project--just needed to cleanse my palate a bit from all the intertextual references and whatnot). Over the course of three days, I saw It Might Get Loud, Paper Heart, and The September Issue. Contrary to what even I would have expected, I think The September Issue was my favorite of the bunch.
It Might Get Loud was fun but flimsy. Jimmy Page looks like this wonderful old lion, and I actually didn't realize how long he'd been a professional guitar player before the Zeppelin juggernaut, so that was super interesting to learn about. The Edge was totally the odd man out in the threesome, and he kept getting lost in his own logical contradictions as he was describing his philosophy of guitar playing--he'd start to espouse all the beauties of simplicity (modifying chords to ring more purely and openly with fewer notes), but then you'd see him hooked up this his huge rig of computerized effects pedals or standing onstage at one of U2's bloated stadium shows, both of which couldn't be more complex and elaborate. His heart is in the right place, though, I guess. His musical reference points were also fairly divergent from the blues idiom that continues to inform the playing style of both Page and Jack White, which left his contributions a bit in the cold as well. Jack White was an interesting addition to the mix, not least of which was due to the fact that there are no other comparable guitar players of his age and level of fame/success/stature who could have fit the bill (srsly, who else would you have put in there? Josh Homme? Doug Martsch? Stephen Malkmus? I love those guys, but there's not a chance in hell). He also came in with enough hunger and ego blazing to keep those elder statesmen on their toes. There's no way I'd ever want to be friends with that guy, because he just seems like such an impossible dick, but I really respect the hell out of him as a musician and pop cultural figure. I also kind of wish that the movie had gotten even wankier, though. I wanted to hear more about specific chord tunings, songwriting techniques, recording tricks, all that trainspotting nerdery. There's something always slightly hypnotic and wonderful about listening to incredibly skilled people talking about things that I have utterly no frame of reference for. For some strange reason, my dad used to subscribe to Guitar Player magazine when I was still living at home, and I grew curiously addicted to flipping through it--though all the talk about pedals and amps and whatnot could get a bit tedious, there was something incredibly fascinating about that level of detail that goes into your garden variety rock song. I suppose I'm in the minority here, and the director probably didn't want to alienate the already small target demographic for this movie, but I could have used fewer rhapsodic monologues on the theme of "when I was a young boy, the guitar just called to me..." and more hardcore information about what they're actually doing when they're playing guitar. By the end of the movie, though, I kind of started to hate white men and longed for somebody to do a ladies' rock version of the same--Joni Mitchell, Carrie Brownstein, and Annie Clark, maybe? Can somebody make that happen?
My girl crush on Charlyne Yi continues unabated. The nice thing that Paper Heart does is that it sucks you in with the idea that you get to watch her fall in love (or playact a simulacrum of what happened when she once upon a time purportedly fell in love) with Michael Cera, but it actually turns out to be a love story about friendship. The most interesting relationship in the whole movie was between her and the "director" (Nicholas Jasenovec, played onscreen by the totes adorbs Jake M. Johnson). It felt like they had the most screen time together, and it's beautiful to watch their relationship unfold as they tease each other, give each other nicknames (he endearingly calls her Chuck throughout), confess to each other their fears and ambitions in everything from life and love to their careers in Hollywood, and bicker and make up as their realize the true importance of their friendship. How can a garden variety romance with the indie-heartthrob-of-the-moment possibly stand up to something genuinely sweet like that? Luckily, the movie doesn't try too hard to force it and pretty much lets both of these "love stories" do their own thing, on their own time, with their own weight. Sure, much of it is cutesy and if stuff of this nature is inclined to bug you, there's no way anything I'm going to say will change your mind. But, there's a sweetness and a gentleness to it that I found plenty appealing.
Even though I'm not a remotely fashionable girl, I've always secretly kind of been fascinated by clothes and models and the fashion industry, almost in a scientific way, so Benji didn't have to do much convincing to get me to see The September Issue with him. And I loved it, loved it, loved it, largely due to the amazing onscreen presence of Grace Coddington. I can't even begin to summarize her list of achievements and accomplishments here, but she's the perfect complement to Anna Wintour at Vogue. The two women balance each others' strengths and idiosyncrasies so well, neither of them would probably be able to do her job as effectively without the other. It's a beautiful partnership, and of course it's hugely inspiring to see two women of such power and influence rocking their professions at the absolute top of their game. Even if you don't dig fashion, per se, it's a fascinating entry into the broadly defined "putting on a show" genre, as a bunch of creative people come together to make something beautiful out of thin air before the clock runs out. Highly recommended.
I also had the delightful opportunity to see Sondre Lerche play a solo set at Schubas last weekend. I hadn't seen him live in concert since April '07 at the Double Door, but it's always a treat to see him when he rolls through town. I haven't picked up his new album yet, but I plan on doing so soon. As I observed the first time I saw him play a solo show way back in November '04, hearing his songs with nothing but his own guitar accompaniment only emphasizes how cunningly wrought and durable they are. The jazz chord voicings and sweetly twisty melodies can reveal themselves more fully when you're not distracted by the noise and excitement of a full rock band set up. I suppose it's only natural that he'd keep getting better as a singer, songwriter, and guitar player as he matures, but it's almost shocking to watch someone already so laden with so much pure talent continue to grow as a musician, basically in real time. (And the fucker's still only in his mid-20s!!) After opening with a song I'm assuming came from Heartbeat Radio, he ripped into an insanely rocked out and amped up version of "Faces Down" that, in all honesty, the rest of the set almost didn't recover from--it was that good. It was really almost too much too soon in its utter brilliance. He was unfortunately beset by some technical difficulties with his guitar mic, but that just gave him a chance to unplug and give us a totally acoustic version of "Say It All." It was one of those totally unplanned moments that takes a show up a level from enjoyable to special; the room was nearly glowing with warmth. His talent really brings out the best in his audiences, too. Maybe it's just because it was the 7 pm show and, as such, was filled with folks too old (and/or too young) to want to stay up for the 10:30 pm set, but everyone stayed respectfully quiet while he was playing--until he invited us to sing along, at which point everyone busted out not only perfect recall on the lyrics, but also on the harmonies, too. Like with the Juana Molina show back in February, I left the club wanting to be a better, more creative person. It's some next level shit when a show is inspiring like that. The photoset from the evening is posted to my Flickr page here.
In other music news, I already Twittered about it here, but, man, is that American Music Club album The Golden Age good. It's been on nearly constant repeat on my iPod for the past few weeks. It's not flashy or show-offy in the slightest; it just does everything right. There are so many turns of phrase that leave me utterly breathless ("I'll be the match that holds your fire / I'll be the note that sings from your wire / if I can give you all my love" in "All My Love" and "Years ago my soul went missin' / lookin' for a life no one would mourn" from "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" come immediately to mind but there are dozens of others scattered throughout), and "The Dance" has to be one of the most devastating songs (outside John Darnielle's oeuvre) that I've heard in ages. I suspect the album's only going to continue to grow on me.
As far as reading material, I've been absolutely devouring And Here's the Kicker. You can find out more about the interviewees at the book's nice and simple website here; take a look at the list there and maybe you'll understand why I've been forcing myself not to rush through it in an attempt to prolong its pleasures. I probably could have dog-eared every other page, it's so full of interesting insights, but George Meyer's interview is sticking in my brain most at the moment. For instance, in talking about cultivating the state of flow in comedy writing (specifically referencing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work!), I thought this was brilliant:The work you do in this state has grace and ease and resonance. It's the opposite of what Michael O'Donoghue used to call "sweaty" comedy, when you've laboriously squeezed out something tedious, and the effort shows. When you're "in the zone," a joke will just land on you like a butterfly, and only if you scrutinize it later do you see how it came together from disparate elements. . . .
[In other to cultivate this elusive state] You have to be prepared. You need basic writing skills, of course, but you also want to have lots of raw ingredients rattling around in your skull: vivid words, strange song lyrics, irritating euphemisms, disastrous experiences that have been bothering you for years. To feed this stockpile, you need to expose yourself to the real world and all its hailstones.
The other essential is humility. You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and stale and derivative. If you don't take yourself too seriously, you'll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the muse's next visit. . . .
I used to berate myself if I couldn't think of a killer joke for every spot, but I gradually eased up on that. You can't keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it'll run away and find a new pimp.
Seriously, guys, the whole book is chockful of stuff like that. It's been an unremitting delight for me as a comedy nerd. Definitely recommended for those of you with similar interests and obsessions.
On quite the other end of the spectrum, the interview with Philip Zimbardo, the professor behind the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, in this month's issue of The Believer is not to be missed. Apparently it's an excerpt from a lengthier interview that will appear in the forthcoming McSweeney's title A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, but the full text of The Believer's version is available online here. It's horrifying stuff, but really important reading.
So what about you, my darlings? What's been keeping you busy and fascinated this month? - Aug 26, 09
Even though, intellectually, I see and to some extent understand that QT's films aren't for everyone, that they're problematic for some thematically and in their treatment of violence, etc., emotionally it's unfathomable to me. I get such a jolt of pure joy out of these movies--both in the sense that they bring me joy personally and in the sense I get that they bring him joy as well--that when people talk about disliking his oeuvre, it's like when I hear someone say they don't like chocolate. It's just like, what? How can you not love this?
It makes sense that Death Proof would be one of QT's most meta/intertextual films, as it's his installment of a "double feature" made in homage to both a style of cinema as well as the whole experience of consuming these kinds of films, made in concert with his best filmmaking buddy. But revisiting it this past week, I found myself more deeply delighted than I'd remembered by the formal elegance on display here--probably because I was initially distracted by all the trash trappings he was playing with (intentional scratches on the print, sleazy mise-en-scene, sudden shifts from black and white to color, the vintage "feature presentation" and "restricted" animations before the movie actually begins). Not only, obviously, is Grindhouse bifurcated, so is Death Proof, and, it's clear to me now, so too is the second half of Death Proof. The movie seems to be constantly splitting itself in half as it moves farther and farther away from any sort of gesture toward "realism" as it becomes more and more purely about cinematic conventions, so that by the time the girls kill Stuntman Mike, it's not really about whether or not these characters would "actually" behave this way--it's more about the symbolic death of the exploitative male gaze. I mean, obviously, right?
The two casts of women in this film are fairly obvious doubles/recursions of themselves, down to their character "types"/looks, haircuts, hierarchies, conversations, etc. I read this as not just indicative of Stuntman Mike's pathology as a stalker looking to endlessly recreate a pattern in his victims but as a comment on Hollywood's deeply boring tendency to do the same. There's always going to be the naive sweetheart, the sassy New Yorker, the kick-ass black "bitch," and the tough girl somewhere in the movies, right? In a way, it reminded me of those scenes in Inland Empire where all those pretty girls were hanging out in a small room, like veal in a pen, seemingly just waiting to be "killed" by the camera for their youth and beauty. The crucial difference between the two sets of women in Death Proof, though--the difference that the power of the story basically hinges on--is that the second group, the group uniquely capable of defending themselves and exacting revenge, is the group of movie people. I think this is QT's rebuke on the prevailing notion that movie nerdery is strictly a boys' club. It's like he's saying, "women are just as familiar with these tropes as dudes are--and not just familiar with them, but when given the space to do so, uniquely capable of using that familiarity to transform and subvert them."
That's why Rosario Dawson's coup de grace drop kick to the head is absolutely crucial, no matter how uncomfortable it's made some (ahem, male) critics. QT sets it up with the kind of subtlety that his detractors seem pathologically incapable of seeing in his work: in the earlier surveillance scene when Stuntman Mike is taking pictures of the second group of women at the airport, we see Abernathy and Lee vamping around for their own amusement, doing cheerleader-esque high kicks. Filmed through Stuntman Mike's spy-cam, their behavior becomes fetishized, and we're meant to get a voyeuristic thrill out of it--their legs are long and tan, their physical familiarity and affection with each other becoming subtly homoerotic (the key reasons that cheerleader movies ever get made in the first place, right?). But then the same action, the high kick in the air, is transformed into one of power, and, yes, table-turning violence. The message here is that the strength and beauty of her body cuts both ways, and she knows it, and all women should know it.
This is not meant to bag on the characters in the first half of the movie, of course. The sequence in Austin is filled with delights of its own, chief among which comes right before the real violence begins, when Kurt Russell extinguishes his cigarette and then looks directly into the camera. For me, for pure meta-thrill in acknowledging and challenging our gaze, it's got to rival the moment in Y Tu Mama Tambien when in the dive bar, right before the infamous threesome scene, Ana Lopez Mercado similarly breaks the fourth wall as she dances toward the camera. Mike's slight smile and glance back at us makes us 100% complicit in everything that's about to happen, and, just like Rose McGowan locked into the passenger seat (where, as he just explained, the camera would be if the car were being used in the filming of a movie), there's nothing we can do to change or stop it. What a thrown gauntlet.
Speaking of Rose McGowan, I also love her delivery of the line "That pituitary case? Mighta kicked my ass a couple of times--sorry, I'm built like a girl, not a black man--but I'd die before I ever gave Julia Lucai my chocolate milk." I'm generally indifferent to her as an actress, but, shit, she nails that interp so well, with so much humor and musicality, that I want to program it as my phone's ring tone.
I also love the fact that Tarantino casts himself as Warren the bartender in the first half of the movie. Momentarily setting aside the endless debate about his skills as an actor (I will remain respectfully neutral on the point for now), it's such a playful way of heightening the metanarrative here, of reminding us that this movie is unapologetically about movies. The linguistic doubling might be superficially facile, but it's clever: "I love that philosophy: 'Warren says it, we do it!'...Shots first, questions later. Here we go. Post time!" I mean, "shots first, questions later"? Come on. It's cheeky and it's silly, but I love it. He's directing the drunken craziness of the night, like...well, like a director. This bar scene is also where we get those endless shots of frames within frames within frames, the camera constantly set up behind random panes of glass, partitions, doorways, windows, and, of course, windshields. Everything here is mediated; we're always being reminded that we're looking through.
So, there you have it, kittens! My trip through Tarantino's old work is complete, and I'm sooo looking forward to finally checking out Inglourious Basterds. It might take me a while to write something up here, though, since I feel it takes at least three viewings of a well-made movie before I'm able to sufficiently wrap my head around it. Catch you back here soon. - Aug 19, 09
This film is way too big to be dealt with in a mere blog post. It deserves comprehensive, book-length analysis of the kind that I'm in no way equal to. So, at the risk of tragically oversimplifying its brilliance, I'll just say that it strikes me that Kill Bill is pure opera: it's too big, too much, too wide-ranging, and all intentionally so, to make the point that this is what relationships feel like. Those who dismiss or belittle Tarantino as doing nothing more than playing stylistically clever headgames aren't watching with their hearts open. If there's anything "clever" about the moment when Beatrix rounds the corner and lays eyes on her four-year-old daughter for the first time, I'll eat my shoe. Likewise, have these critics who deride him for formal trickery never been in a situation when a conversation with a former lover takes on the emotional tenor of being armed to the teeth in a zero-sum contest that absolutely has to end in bloodshed? The stakes are almost comically high, sure, but dude--the stakes of life are comically high, no?
Anyway, I'm getting grandiose and defensive and testy, mostly on account of the fact that I just read the first few paragraphs of Entertainment Weekly's review of Inglourious Basterds, where Lisa Schwartzbaum writes, "But Tarantino's gleefully assembled spectacles are inextricable from his frustrating emotional limitations: Everything is a game." Bluh. I mean, I guess if you've only paid attention to his films long enough to parse their intertextual references, maybe they'll read as games. But, one of the biggest sources of pleasure for me in rewatching his films these past few weeks has been feeling the warmth of his heart. Dude loves movies and he loves language and he loves his actors and he loves this act of cinematic creation. It's kind of unfathomable to me that anyone could miss that, if they're truly paying attention.
Which sort of leads me back into the primary question that I have about Kill Bill: I'm having a hard time remembering how it was received upon its initial theatrical release. I have a vague feeling that it's considered one of his lesser efforts, which seems absurd given both its cinematic and emotional scope. I think it's going to be a while before we see its like again, and that's emphatically including Uma Thurman's performance. If the film as a whole reads like a shuffle-version of trash genres, her performance likewise is downright encyclopedic in terms of the range and depth of feeling she conveys about the Experience of Being a Woman. She has certainly never looked better onscreen; as blogger Kasia Xavier so accurately observed [link NSFW], "I think Tarantino knew exactly what he was doing. You take a born-pretty girl and you dress her up in pretty things, curl her pretty hair and she becomes empty. Vacuous. The only thing she can claim as a self identity is her one dimensional beauty. But take a pretty girl and throw some shit on her, and make her fight her way out of it and she'll grow to be other-worldly radiant and a force to be reckoned with."
It also made more sense to me upon this re-viewing than it ever has before why, duh, of course, O-Ren Ishii's childhood backstory had to be told in animation. Sure, it's homage to yet another beloved Asian cinematic genre, and sure, the subject matter was way too disturbing to film with an actual child actor, but it was also a tonal doorway through which we have to pass to transition into the "cartoony" violence of the big House of Blue Leaves fight sequence. It seems so obvious to me now, but realizing this was kind of profound in its formal, functional elegance.
I sat down to watch this the other night, telling myself I only needed to watch Volume I, but as soon as it ended, I thought, "there's no fucking way I'm not going to finish the whole thing tonight." It's just that absorbing and engaging, despite the length (which really isn't that bad, all things considered). I mean, even when you get into those loooong monologues at the end delivered by David Carradine (God rest his soul), they're every bit as thrilling as that first, manic showdown between Thurman and Vivica A. Fox. Not to mention that I was fresh off a two-day silent meditation retreat at the Zen Buddhist Temple I attend here in Chicago, so those scenes of Beatrix using the power of her brain to reanimate her own limbs or persevere through that intense martial arts training or focus intensely enough to dig herself out of her own grave all hit me with a unique resonance.
I mean, I know I'm a crazy, unapologetic Tarantino fangirl and all, but this film is so much more rewarding than I think most people give it credit for being. It honestly contains multitudes. I'm not even scratching the surface. - Aug 17, 09
OK, I was totally in tears within the first three minutes of rewatching Jackie Brown. That opening sequence at the airport has to be one of my favorite sequences in film ever. It just keeps expanding: it starts off as a clear homage to The Graduate, but then you see that, rather than being super-emo about a twenty-two-year-old white man's sense of spiritual stasis, it's updating the reference to make a comment on an aging black woman's inability to gain much traction against her life. But then the pace evolves, as she starts walking briskly, eventually breaking into a run. At that point I realized that her journey through the airport is also a metaphor for the journey of her life. First it's an unhurried glide when everything seems easy and progress happens without much exertion; then it's a strutting, confident stride on her own steam; then it's a panicked dash to the finish line, trying not to be late for her sense of responsibility to herself, for her outside commitments, and perhaps even for some perceived appointment with her own destiny--that rush to get it all in before it's too late. It's also one of Tarantino's few purely cinematic moments so far in his oeuvre. It's like watching him finally learn to really be a director, to trust his visual instincts without the snappy dialogue to back it up. He's reveling in film history here--again, with the fairly explicit bite from The Graduate, but also with the look and feel of '70s credit sequences via the typography and color palette, but I also even see California-style Altman here in those lengthy tracking shots and the way the sunshine gets all blown out as she runs past the window in silhouette. And, of course he's also reveling in the deliciousness of that fact that he has unfettered access to photograph a woman as stunningly beautiful as Pam Grier for as long as he wants to--a deliciousness that's thoughtfully tempered with clear respect and affection. You can almost hear him thinking, "let me shoot you like this so that I can make everyone feel about you the same way that I feel about you, so that everyone will remember how amazing you can be." As I watched all this unfolding, revisiting this much loved film, I started laughing at its brilliant audacity, its multivalence, its perfection, then crying because it was all kind of too much--then laughing at my crying, then crying some more for good measure. It's beautiful. (Check it out here on YouTube if you haven't seen it for a while yourself.)
Jackie Brown is probably the Tarantino film I've seen the most and am consequently most familiar with (and, depending on the day, it's probably the film I'd call my favorite of his), so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me on the order of what I experienced in the past few weeks with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Watching it this week brought more a sense of pure joy to be revisiting this old friend. I was struck, though, with how much everyone in this film is aging with varying degrees of discomfort about it. The whole notion of taking these nearly forgotten '70s movie stars like Grier and Robert Forster is right there in front of your face, and it obviously comprised many of the talking points surrounding the movie when it first came out. But I don't think I'd ever really noticed the anguished enormity of the line that Ordell speaks to Louis right before he shoots him: "what the fuck happen to you? You used to be beautiful, man." Wow. It had never occurred to me to read their friendship in light of their past history together, but of course it makes sense. They've seen each other age through time wasted in prison and "career" changes, all leading up to this last proverbial chance to make one big score. Of course, there's also the meta-level commentary on DeNiro's own aging from skinny young punk lighting the world on fire with his Method ferocity into a portly, avuncular character actor taking roles that were more and more beneath him. "You used to be beautiful, man." This is the movie's battle cry. And not in a shitty, judgmental way--just in the way that taking a moment to observe the passage of time can be profoundly philosophically flummoxing.
This is also, of course, the film where Tarantino starts to transition more decisively away from men's stories and into women's, becoming, if not a feminist filmmaker per se, then at least one who keeps a deep and abiding love for all manner of female kick-assery close to his heart. And, pound for pound, give me this soundtrack any day of the week over Reservoir Dogs' or Pulp Fiction's!
In other news, I was delighted to have been asked back as a guest blogger over on eat!drink!snack! this week. I contributed to Shawn's newly launched "the musical fruit" column, where he's pairing songs with fresh produce. You can find my post on the Long Winters' "Blue Diamonds" and a lovely pint of blueberries here. - Aug 07, 09
OK, despite the fact that, intellectually, I know that no good can come of being ashamed of one's musical tastes and that the notion of "guilty pleasures" in music is terribly fraught, I still often have a hard time publicly copping to some of the shit that I love. A perfect example is Duncan Sheik. I can't think of anyone more hideously uncool, but, guys, I secretly looooooove Duncan Sheik! I'm not even kidding. It's been really hard for me to get up the nerve to admit it in this forum, but I have to: I own all his albums (except for the one that came out early this year; just haven't gotten around to it yet), and, what's more, I still actively listen to them. It's not like they're moldering in the back of my closet--I tend to take Phantom Moon with me when I travel on airplanes (makes a nice pairing with Elliott Smith's Either/Or--somehow all the acoustic guitar soothes me when I'm in midair) and his self-titled debut remains one of my favorite things to listen to in the dead heat of summer. I downloaded the soundtrack to Spring Awakening when it came out, and, even though I didn't listen to it all that much, I was still pleased as punch that he gained so much recognition for it. So, you best believe that I was super-psyched to have a chance to actually see the show now that the touring production is playing here in Chicago for a few weeks. Coming of age stories? Florid Broadway storytelling and emotions? Duncan Sheik's delicate Nick Drake-esque melodies and arrangements? Sign. Me. Up.
Benji and I went on Wednesday night, and I really enjoyed it. I didn't go apeshit-level bonkers or anything, but I really enjoyed it. Mostly, though, I was delighted by the fact that it, with all its relative perversity intact, has achieved such great success in the current Broadway landscape that seems to be otherwise dominated by jukebox musicals and retreads of marginally successful Hollywood movies. The second act is a bit weak--it gets kinda punitive toward the characters and then tries to make up for it by becoming more stereotypically "Broadway" with bites from Les Miserables (ghosts singing inspiration from beyond the grave!) and Into the Woods (children will liiiiiiiiiisten!). But the first act is amazing. The lights came up for intermission and the first thing I said was, "I can't believe all that just happened in the first act. There's a lot going on there."
The one major drawback to this performance was seeing it at the Oriental Theater, rather than in a more intimate black box. The actors all have youth and beauty on their sides, but they don't quite yet have the chops to fill a room that big with their voices or their presence. Nor should they necessarily need to. Though the emotions and topics in this play are huge, to retain their power, they should still end up feeling like whispered secrets, and there's nothing whispered or secretive about a venue that big. Wouldn't it have been awesome if they could have figured out a way to book a stint for the show at, like, the Empty Bottle or the Vic? But, as Benji pointed out, if you can sell out the Oriental Theater, why wouldn't you sell out the Oriental Theater?
Despite all that, once I figured out how the songs were functioning, rhetorically, in the context of the plot, I fell totally in love with the piece. When I first listened to the soundtrack in isolation, I felt frustrated that I couldn't quite follow the storyline. But seeing it on stage, it all becomes clear: they're updating the notion of a rock musical by using the songs as external expressions of internal teenage sexual frustration, confusion, torment, and longing rather than as ways to advance the plot or for characters to relate to each other. It's so simple and so smart; I don't know why no one's ever really done it before (at least on such a large scale). I mean, much of my own internal monologue really still is flashing lights and dance sequences and bits of songs, so it felt easy and natural to slide into this world where that level of drama needs musical accompaniment to fully embody all that emotion. What was even nicer for me, though, is, since I'm so secretive about my Duncan Sheik fandom anyway, hearing those familiar chord voicings and melodic intervals in the context of a narrative all about unspoken pleasures gave the experience of the play a nice little meta-twist. Like I wrote in my post about false musical memories, there's a sweet warmth in being waved to by your past in this unexpected way.
Don't forget, kittens: King Sparrow (who've been getting all kinds of big love from big places this week) plays TONIGHT at the Subterranean. Come rock out and take refuge from the rain and all the collateral Lolla madness. - Aug 04, 09
A coworker very kindly alerted me yesterday to the existence of a Bollywood reimagining of Breaking Away called Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. The fact that I haven't known about this film until just now seems slightly incredible to me, and I very nearly refused to give the DVD back to him after he showed it to me. I am obviously the first in line to borrow it after he's watched it himself.
My recreational reading habits are extremely erratic for a variety of reasons, and, true to form, I've been slowly picking my way through the mammoth, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer basically for this entire calendar year. But, I got a good chunk of reading done this weekend, and I have to say, the fact that no one has made a big, sexy biopic about Jean Tatlock yet seems wrong, wrong, wrong. (I would accept a Decemberists song as a viable alternative.) She was a former lover of Oppenheimer's, by all accounts both extremely brilliant and extremely troubled. She was also extremely committed to Communist ideals, and at the time it was believed that she may have been passing scientific secrets to the Russians--so much so that there's speculation as to whether her suicide in early 1944 was actually an assassination. She was also probably a closeted lesbian, who, as a student of Freudian psychology in the '30s and '40s would have been indoctrinated with the belief that homosexuality should be "cured," a pressure that surely only contributed to her already notoriously dark mood swings. She and Oppenheimer remained extremely close after he married his wife Kitty, but the demands--intellectually, energetically, and in matters of national security--of his work on the bomb eventually caused him to have to cut ties with her completely. As the authors of American Prometheus write: "From this perspective, he had acted reasonably. But in Jean's eyes, it may have seemed as if ambition had trumped love. In this sense, Jean Tatlock might be considered the first casualty of Oppenheimer's directorship of Los Alamos." A passionately interesting woman. - Aug 17, 09
Oh man, you guys, this mini-Tarantino film festival I've programmed for myself is turning out to be the best idea I've had in months. Like that horrible old joke about memory loss allowing you to hide your own Easter eggs, it's awesome to rewatch your favorite movies when you've not seen them in so long that you've forgotten most of the major themes and plot points.
Pulp Fiction is so good it's kind of unreal. No, seriously. I know it's common knowledge, the most basic of basic received wisdom, at this point that it's a game-changer, a modern classic, etc., etc. But, straight up--do you actively remember how good this movie is? It's that good. Probably even better. I think I probably feel the same way about Tarantino that certain other people around my age feel about Stephen Malkmus: he was the right guy making the right art in the right medium at the right time in my life, and I'm kind of never going to get over it.
Watching Pulp Fiction again the other night for the first time in about ten years (seriously, I think it's been since Naremore's film noir class my sophomore year at IU), I was struck by how much this movie is really about secrets--about the usually accidental things that happen to people that remain unspeakable to anyone other than the person the experience has been shared with. There's the big ones, of course: Mia's overdose, Marsellus's anal rape, Vincent's shooting that kid in the face. But there's so many other little ones embedded throughout: the story about the foot massage that Tony Rocky Horror may or may not have given Mia, the admission that Butch makes to Esmerelda Villalobos in the cab about what it feels like to kill a man, the confidences shared between Butch's father and Christopher Walken's character in the POW camp; even the "royale with cheese" trivia is a bit of unlocked knowledge decoded by Vincent and shared with Jules. All of which makes Jules's final "I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd" monologue so powerful and so important--in publicly interpreting the verse from Ezekiel for Pumpkin/Ringo, he's made a decision that he can't keep the wisdom he's been granted via the "miracle" he witnessed to himself. He has to share it; he has to talk about it; he can't keep it a secret. Aside from the brain-tickling fun of the achronological narrative, this is the big reason why the story has to be told out of order--so it can culminate with that gesture of openness, with that revelation.
It blows my mind that I saw this in the theater when I was 15. I mean, I'm so, so thankful for being exposed to a movie this awesome at such a formative stage in my intellectual and aesthetic development, but, seriously...how fucking inappropriate! Did I even know what anal rape was at that point? I know for certain that the subtleties of Vincent and Mia's drugs of choice went way over my head. But, the very literal dance between the spaced-out haze of his heroin stupor and her coked-up frenzy as they try to come to some common ground at dinner is now so much more hilarious to me, but also painfully, poetically truthful in the way it shows how hard it can be to connect with another person because of all the bullshit racing around in our systems.
And those are just the big things. I was free to notice so many other little things now that I didn't need to worry about parsing the narrative timeline and wasn't overly distracted by the violence and the language. Like, how totally cheeky it was to open the movie with Tim Roth in such a diametrically opposed character to the one he played in Reservoir Dogs. Or how Bruce Willis is perfection in his role (and also way more alarmingly attractive than I ever realized--but that's maybe just because I'm getting older and my tastes are changing). Also, the fact that Butch's choice of weapon in the pawn shop scene is a samurai sword makes way more sense now in the context of Tarantino's oeuvre than it did in '94. Pre-Kill Bill, it just seemed like a super-over-the-top gesture played for laughs, but now it's so clearly a reference to Tarantino's love for chop-socky epics.
Kittens, my brain is still whirring days after watching it. But, mostly, I'm just happy to have reconnected with the film itself, both for what I remember it being to me at 15 and for the realization that it still has new things to offer me as many years later. Take a moment, if you can, to revisit something similarly important from your own past. I hope it likewise brings you no small measure of joy. - Jul 31, 09
Well, 500 Days of Summer was pretty much a piece of crap. I am EXACTLY the target audience for this movie, and yet somehow it made me want to punch puppies the entire time I was sitting in the theater. It's clear that the writer and director have much the same taste in "anti-" romantic comedy romantic comedies that I do, but they didn't do enough to spackle over the seams where they'd stitched together the bits they'd stolen from these other (better) films. The most obvious touchstone is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--tonally, organizationally, and character-wise (diehard-romantic leading man with "issues" vs. a headstrong, ultimately unknowable female love interest with a bulldozer's worth of charm), but there were also huge lifts from High Fidelity (the notion that pop songs will corrupt your ideas about love) and even Bottle Rocket (wise-beyond-her-years sage advice from a little sister). Zooey Deschanel's shtick is starting to get grating (um, ha), and for as wonderful as he is, and for as excited as I was about the idea of Joseph Gordon-Levitt making somewhat of a rom-com debut, he was sorely miscast. The role needed much more of a sadsack, and he's just too smart and strong an actor to believably play such a lovelorn wuss. Lloyd Dobler he is not. The best moment in the whole thing comes near the beginning when Zooey's character flat-out asks him if he likes her; he pauses a beat before saying "yeah" with as many shades of meaning as that word could possibly convey--longing and anticipation and doubt and shyness and truth and bet-hedging and coolness and dorkiness and desire and relief all at once. Aside from that, though, if you value your time, your money, and YOUR SOUL, skip eet.
Humpday, on quite the other hand, is graaaaaaand. I loved it! So, so much! It is ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny but also filled with so much beautiful truth that my cheeks hurt from grinning by the end of it. And not just truth about sexuality--though it has that to the degree that one would hope/expect--but truth about relationships and aging and the ultimate tenuousness of the ways we attempt to define ourselves and our loved ones. It's also totally refreshing to watch a movie with utterly normal-looking people in it--that is, utterly normal-looking people who, much like the people you know in your own life, become more and more beautiful as you get to know them. I can't say too much more about it without starting to give stuff away--and this is a movie that deserves not to be spoiled before one sees it. If it makes its way to your city, please do consider checking it out if you have the chance.
Also, how is this movie not going to be exactly the same as As Good as It Gets (which I detest)? Oh, Lauren Graham, you deserve so much better!
Also, also, also: Chicagoans, it's never too early to start planning for the weekend.Catch King Sparrow for free (free! zero bones! just because they love you!) on Friday night at the Empty Bottle, and thenbe sure to rest up for the Baby Teeth album release spectacular at Schubas on Saturday. If you've not had a chance to check out Hustle Beach yet, let me assure you that it's 42 minutes of pure happiness, one of those albums that goes down so smooth, you don't even realize how quickly it's whizzing by. "Big Schools" is so smart and so sly on so many levels; "I Hope She Won't Let Me" still absolutely kills me; and "Hard to Find a Friend" is the kind of stellar Billy Joel piano ballad that Billy Joel forgot how to write about 25 years ago. See you out on the town, kittens.
[Ed. note: Ha, so I posted this on Tuesday night, then Wednesday morning there was a huge spread in Chicago's Red Eye all about Baby Teeth, and in the interview, Abraham Levitan totally calls Billy Joel a hack. "He's just a poor man's Paul McCartney. Elton John, I would say, had a distinctive artistic personality, and I don't think Billy Joel has ever been more than a tribute band." Glad to know I totally got my '70s piano men references backward!]
[UPDATE: OK, this is officially the most appended entry in the history of this blog. The 7/31 King Sparrow show at the Empty Bottle was canceled. Come see them at the Subterranean on August 7, though! I know none of you are shelling out the clams to go to Lolla or to see Arctic Monkeys at the Metro, so you officially have no excuse to miss it.] - Jul 25, 09Haters Gotta Hate Edition
It's not like I didn't have a good time last weekend. Any excuse to spend two and a half days bopping from performance to performance to performance in the company of (mostly) like-minded strangers is generally OK by me. But this was the first year that the festival struck me as straining against itself. At first, it was the little, mostly organizational things: the long line to gain entry to the park on Friday night. The fact that the porta-potties were tucked into weird locations that weren't well laid out for folks to form lines that went much deeper than about four people. The fact that the stages weren't adorned with the Jay Ryan-designed banners like in previous years. Maybe this stuff just slipped through the cracks for one reason or another? But then as the weekend hurtled headlong toward its big Flaming Lipsian climax, I realized that this is no longer the little indie festival that could. (I know, I know: I'm just realizing this now? But hear me out.) There was so much less room allowed for the pleasure of surprise this year, as they've started to recycle bands from previous years' rosters (Yo La Tengo, the National, Grizzly Bear, the Walkmen) and as they're hewing with Mafia-like protectiveness to acts they've saddled with the dubious honor of being best new music despite well-documented evidence that maybe they're not quite ready for that level of exposure yet (Wavves, Vivian Girls, etc.). There seemed to be a certain kind of vague cynicism permeating everything--a weird combination of "we're just giving the people what they want"/"we're just doing what's expected of us"--that fell way short of the former "holy crap, guys, let's organize a big old show with all our favorite musicians!" vibe that was evident in spades in previous years. Let's hope this was an anomalous year and that 2010 will find the fest back in joyous, celebratory form. But for now, a quick rundown of 2009:
It's not entirely clear to me why they chose to schedule four bands on Friday night, instead of three as in previous years, and to start at 5 pm. I'm sure there were folks who traveled in from out of town and could arrive at the festival grounds early in the afternoon if they wanted to, but the rest of us schlubs worked a full day then had to contend with public transportation and the aforementioned lines at the gate before we could commence with the rocking. Which means I totally missed Tortoise's set. It's not the end of the world, I know, since they're from here and all, but I've still never seen them live and probably wouldn't be inclined to buy a ticket for one of their regular gigs since I don't know their stuff that well to begin with. I thought this would be a good, low-pressure way to check them out. No dice.
Even though this is technically the third time I've seen Yo La Tengo live, I still wouldn't call myself much of a fan (not because I dislike them; only because I still haven't devoted the time to exploring their catalog), so I guess I wasn't too broken up about the fact that they were basically just providing the soundtrack to the beer line. They sounded pretty good, from what I could tell.
I was all kinds of meh about Jesus Lizard. With my documented lack of '90s reference points, this reunion show didn't mean anything to me, and their songs all sounded pretty samey after a while. But, I always gotta give props to old dudes who can still rock out with total fuck-you attitude.
Built to Spill, though, I was legitimately excited to see. Even though I don't have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of their stuff, there's something in me at what feels like a subatomic level that really responds to Doug Martsch's guitar playing. Their set was the first moment of the fest when everything seemed to really click for me; it became more than just standing in an open field listening to some music with hundreds of other people. It became a rock show, with its own unique language and landscape, an energetic exchange both joyously bigger than any of its disparate elements and sublimely simpler than any of its attendant hassles or limitations. They closed out with a triumphant, cascading take on "Carry the Zero," their one song that I was really, really, really hoping to hear. I left the park on a high.
I rolled in kinda late on Saturday, just as Fucked Up was finishing their much talked-about set. I kind of wish I'd caught more of it, for spectacle's sake if nothing else, but...obviously not so much that I, y'know, made the effort to arrive on time for it or anything.
The first set I caught was the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They sounded exactly like their album--which is to say, cute but not particularly deep or memorable. It seemed like they played a few of their songs more than once, but that's just because they all sound the same. They seemed to be genuinely gracious about playing to such a large crowd, which is always nice to see, but I had my fill after about half the set.
Bowerbirds back on the smaller B stage were nearly drowned out by Pains' bass until you were pretty much right on top of them. They're still doing their smart, gentle folk, and they sound as lovely as ever. They played "In Our Talons," of course, which is, I guess, their version of a big fat crowd-pleasing jam.
Final Fantasy = the cutest. I haven't listened to He Poos Clouds in ages, and don't necessarily even have a craving to do so now (I find it's not an easy album to listen to as I'm just running errands around town), but I feel a real affinity for Pallett and his intelligent, artsy, melodramatic, super-queer sensibility. A girl in front of me gushed to her friend "this is the most impressive show I've seen so far at Pitchfork." Granted, it was still early in the weekend, but I couldn't resist somewhat snarkily scribbling in my notes that's because he's a real musician. I don't at all believe that the simple fact of being classically trained automatically makes you a superior musician--there's lots of wankery that can happen if you're too technically proficient and don't have genuinely creative instincts to supplement the skills that can more or less be beaten into your muscle memory--but in the case of someone like Pallett, the training has obviously significantly expanded the, ahem, palette he's able to put in service of his creative vision. The crowd was cheering for every flourish and epic melodic run. It was all really refreshing.
As we were all gathering across the field before Yeasayer, two dudes near me who were trying to decide how far to push toward the stage had the following conversation:
#1: Just wait til everybody mellows out.
#2: Is this going to be mellow music?
#1: It's like...intense mellow.
Awesome.
It had been threatening to rain all morning and finally started sprinkling in the middle of their set. It actually made everyone get really happy and surrender to the experience, and Yeasayer was kind of the perfect band to soundtrack the moment. That being said, they were the first of a handful of bands on the roster (more on which soon) that still kind of make me wonder, incredulously, "so...people actually like this?" Their world musicy dream-catcher aesthetic seems so deeply uncool that, were it not for Pitchfork's imprimatur, I gotta believe most folks would derisively mock it if they were given an unlabeled MP3 or CD of the stuff. Despite my incredulity, I stuck around for their whole set, and enjoyed it. Sinkane is touring with them on percussion now apparently (dude is everywhere!), so their rhythm section was especially impressive. Of course, the crowd went bonkers when they played "2080."
I have to say, the more I think about them, the more I find I can pretty confidently say that I actively dislike Beirut. I'm still not entirely sure why, but, similar to my wonder about why people like Yeasayer's brand of fusiony world beat, I'm always mildly offended by the way Beirut makes people believe they like Eastern European-style brass band music. You probably couldn't get 80% of that audience out to a neighborhood music festival to see a bunch of actual Balkan dudes play their horns and sing, and yet when Zach Condon's on stage, everybody's cheering for trumpet solos and all but throwing their arms around strangers' shoulders with this kind of false nostalgia for some vague notion of a motherland. I know that criticizing Condon for cultural appropriation is kind of a fool's errand at this point, and I know there can be a legitimate kind of beauty that can transcend notions of authenticity when it comes to these kinds of really well done, fictionalized, dream-state interpretations of a genre (sort of a la Kubrick's impulse to re-create New York on a sound stage rather than filming on location for Eyes Wide Shut), and it's not like I have any kind of chanson or Fado bonafides to defend against interlopers, and, believe it or not, I really can hear the sweetness in his melodies. But, I still found myself frowning more and more deeply as the set progressed. Part of this is probably because I get the sense that Condon is inordinately pleased with himself, yet masking it with a kind of false humility. I mean, he kept whispering "merci," all cute and knowingly, between songs, so much so that a couple girls behind me were actually discussing his "accent." Sigh. Even the horn tattoo on his wrist was bugging me. I'm surprised not to find more criticism of this nature anywhere at all online. Save for a delightfully harsh review of March of the Zapotec in Toronto's NOW magazine, everything else I was able to Google up in an admittedly quick search was mostly fawning praise. I wish I were willing to believe that this is just my issue, but somehow I think the definitive Beirut takedown has yet to be written. It's OK to come out of the closet, fellow Beirut apostates, wherever you may be!
At some point early the week before the fest, I was listening to Boxer on my iPod and then realized "holy shit, I get to see the National play live in a few days!" And then I got way excited. As with Animal Collective last year, there's really nowhere else the National would ever be considered a headlining act, which just made me so damn proud of 'em. I don't necessarily think their set would have made new fans out of anybody who didn't already dig what they're doing--I heard plenty of kvetching from various sources about how slow and dour their songs are; as if even their rabid fans would argue that fact!--but as far as I was concerned, they put on a rock solid, if not transcendent, show. Matt looked great and was flat-out funnier than I've ever seen him. He crawled off the stage and into the photo pit during the big climax of "Mr. November"--a gesture that song always calls for--but then immediately proceeded to make fun of himself as soon as the song ended: "I was gonna do something cool, but then when I got to the garbage can, I thought, 'this isn't as cool as I thought it would be.' But then I got over there and thought, 'no, this is pretty cool.'" They played a few new songs that sounded great, if predictably Nationalistic (this isn't a criticism). Looking forward to whatever their next album yields.
Rolled in on Sunday in time to catch Frightened Rabbit. It seems like every new year yields at least one token Scottish rock band that everybody's gotta lose their shit over, and as soon as they started playing, I snarked, "how are these guys not the Twilight Sad?" But then they won me over in spite of myself with their infectious energy and clear affection for the Chicago crowd: "I think we've played here more in the past 12 months than we've played in Glasgow!" Plus the lead singer has one of those great, wild, keening voices that you can really only get from Irish or Scottish rock frontmen--a little unhinged, a lot passionate, implicitly acknowledging that it's "just" rock 'n' roll while reminding us that that doesn't mean it's not the most important thing in the world at that particular moment. I'm curious to check their stuff out now.
I had sooo much fun seeing Blitzen Trapper in Austin last Thanksgiving that I couldn't wait to catch them live again, especially considering that I've been living with, and loving, Furr since then. Luckily, they were every bit as delightful as I remember them being. No lie: the title track from that album's as good a song as has been written this decade. Eric Earley was touched by something holy when he pulled that shit out of his guitar. Portland boyfriends!
After a bit of wandering, I caught a good chunk of the Thermals' set. People! I thought we had an understanding here! I thought that when it turns out I've been an ignorant moron who's slept on a band this awesome for far too long you'd have the friendly decency to publicly scold me about it or something. But noooo, I've just been going along with my daily life like it's no big deal that I've never listened to these guys. Clearly, this is a major oversight on my part. They tore the place up with a combination of ferocious punk rock energy and an extremely smart sense of fun. They covered a whole mess of classic '90s "alternative rock" bangers, which somehow, through the sheer force of their chops and goodwill, came off as a successful way to play to the crowd in this specific setting rather than cynically pandering to it. Smiles all around. I've clearly got some musical homework to do now.
Every time I get excited about seeing the Walkmen, I always kinda figure it's a nostalgia thing for me, since I so associate their music with my early days in the city: living in the apartment at 1945 W. Chicago Ave., stealing all Giddy's CDs, drinking too much, making friends with the Grinnellians. But then when I actually see them, I'm always bowled over anew with how fucking solid they are. As my life has progressed over the intervening years, theirs as a band has too--they've grown warmer and richer and deeper (pick the fine wine/Scotch whiskey metaphor of your choice). And, not to make an unfortunate pun on their most well-known song (which they did play, right near the top of the set--to get it over with, I presume), there's something almost Rat Packish about their self-presentation these days. And I mean this in a good way! The jazz inflections in the material from You & Me especially seem to come out a little more emphatically when you see them all casually dressed in nice button-down shirts and when Ham does a little chat to the audience over a song's instrumental introduction. It suits them well. Rather than becoming stale or a parody of themselves, they've truly found a way to continue growing as musicians and performers while still being instantly recognizable as the Walkmen. No small feat, that. Don't write these guys off, y'all, just because you feel like you got the hang of them in 2003. I would strongly encourage you to catch them live the next time they roll through your town.
I like dancey, rhythmic music a lot more than I typically let on, but, holy shit, was I ever unimpressed with M83. I actually laid down in the grass along the periphery of the park, staring up at the sky, too bored to even move. If you can let me know what the big deal about this group is, please do. But as far as I could tell, it wasn't much more than an endlessly recombinant collection of tacky and uninspired tropes--breathy female vocals over gated drum sounds, etc., etc.--somehow apparently legitimized/elevated in the minds of the crowd due to their French pedigree.
I started getting really squirrely at this point, out of relative boredom with the bigger acts that had been scheduled on Sunday evening to feel like some sort of culmination of awesomeness, out of physical fatigue from having been on my feet, drinking booze, and eating crap for two days, and out of emotional fatigue from navigating the sheer quantity of douchebaggery when you get that many people gathered in the same space at the same time. After a quick jaunt to get some soy ice cream (see above re: eating crap), I tried to make my way back over to see part of Grizzly Bear's set and ended up unintentionally wedging my way in front of two meatheads who were actually--I couldn't believe my ears--spitting all kinds of vitriol about the "faggots" and their autoharps on stage. Really, guys? Really? I quickly darted away into another spot but was so keyed up I couldn't soak in the band's sound at all. I suppose it didn't help my ability to pay attention that they were kind of indulging their own worst sonic tics at that moment, too, doing those trademark pummeling explorations of sustained crescendos that I find the least interesting thing about them, even when I'm feeling generous. They did segue into "While You Wait for the Others" soon thereafter, which helped redeem their excesses a bit for me, but I fear the damage had already been done.
I caught maybe two of Mew's songs back on the B stage and quipped that there was probably a high likelihood that a portion of the stoners in the crowd thought they were actually watching Passion Pit, what with the stratospheric tenor vocals and hella bass. Speaking of bass, that stage always seems to struggle with a too-muddy mix; it was actually so intense that I could only handle a few minutes before I had to wander elsewhere.
And thus began the wait for the Flaming Lips. The park was packed by that point, and I had absolutely no desire to fight forward closer to the stage. But, since so much of the effectiveness of their show relies on making the audience feel surrounded and overwhelmed--by love and joy and beauty, ostensibly; with stuff and noise and spectacle, if you're cynical about it--it ended up feeling like I was sitting on a beach, watching a storm far out at sea. It was epic and magnificent, but untouchable and unknowable, a lovely, distant curiosity. And then at a certain point after they all took to the stage, I kind of chuckled to myself as I realized, "oh wait--when you go to a Flaming Lips show to witness the circus, that means you have to listen to their music, too." Ouch. Look, I respect the hell out of Wayne Coyne, but, much like I feel about Will Sheff and Okkervil River, I'd vastly prefer to read his interviews and his wise, warm, witty quotable quotes than listen to virtually any of the songs he's ever written. The tunes simply don't do that much for me.
After standing on tippy-toes, trying to see as much as I could of what was happening on stage, I bailed out, to check in on The Very Best over at the B stage. Best decision of the weekend, by far. There wasn't much of a crowd back there, but the folks who were there were totally feeling the groove and having a balls-out fun time. My mood shifted for the better immediately and I couldn't help but start dancing. The vast difference that I felt between the two stages seemed like the most glaring example of the way that the Pitchfork fest seems to be buckling under its own weight at this point. Every inch of the Flaming Lips show felt rote and coldly calculated, despite its patina of "OMG, we're just a bunch of crazy guys who dig bright colors and wacky shit!" while everything about The Very Best felt organic and vividly human. That latter feeling is why I make the effort not just to attend the Pitchfork festival year after year, but why I go out to shows at all when I can usually think of a million other reasons--too tired, too broke, too far to travel, too late on a school night, etc.--why I should skip 'em. And, as I said above, that feeling was somewhat in limited supply this year, which made it feel all the more precious at the moment. The group left the stage, and we all cheered wildly for an encore. They came back and said, "you want one more song? Well, we're gonna play two!" the second of which was some kind of remix of Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There." Everybody took their lighters out and generally lost their shit. Since I don't really watch much TV or listen to the radio anymore, I totally missed the onslaught of MJ jams that everyone was revisiting after his death, so this was actually the first time this month that I'd even heard his voice. I got instantly choked up. The whole surprising combination of events was the festival highlight for me, for sure.
Which made going back over to the Flaming Lips for their big finish feel even more lame. After the truly moving musical embrace of that moment, hearing Wayne warbling through "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" felt really shallow...and that's one of their few songs that I actually like! I sort of tolerated the subsequent self-satisfied performances of "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Do You Realize??" and then made my escape from the park in what felt like a really anticlimactic way. In fact, Wayne was still demanding "do you realize??" as I made my way out of the gates and over to the Green Line. I do realize, Wayne, really, I do.
Big thanks to Parowpyro for being a game-for-anything festivalgoing companion for the weekend; you should check out his own entertaining take on the weekend's activities here. The rest of my pictures are posted on Flickr, but for some more professional shots, I would recommend looking through Robert Loerzel's (start here) and, as always, Kirstiecat's, which should continue rolling out over the next few days, weeks, and even months as she perfects them. - Aug 17, 09Moon--Let me chime in and say that this film is wonderful. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that it got made at all. It's so quiet and so patient and so taut and so mature. Sam Rockwell is fabulous; when that guy's good, he's superlative. It's also one of the most audaciously anti-capitalist things I've seen in recent memory, literalizing the plight of how a person can be wholly exploited by a system that depends on the service s/he can provide yet doesn't reciprocate in any meaningful way, until the person is spent and discarded. Don't sleep on this one, guys.
Reservoir Dogs--OK, ready to feel old? Do you realize that this film came out in 1992? A full 17 years ago? What the hell! Anyway, when's the last time you've watched this, kittens? It holds up sooo well. I've decided that in anticipation of the release of Inglourious Basterds I'm going to work my way through Tarantino's directorial output in chronological order, so last weekend I settled in for a total dude night of pizza and beer and bloodshed. But for all the violence that often clouds people's impressions and interpretations of this film, I was shocked to realize that this movie is basically a love letter to restraint, to patience. Patience and language. After the jewel heist goes wrong, everything that happens happens while they're waiting for the gang boss to show up and tell them what to do. And, of course, Tim Roth's undercover cop character is secretly waiting for the boss to show up so he can bust him. That's it. That's the whole movie! The sheer perversity of it tickles my brain. And, that's why the ear-slicing scene is actually so crucial. It's upping the stakes beyond the beyond, asking how long do you wait? how long can you stand it while everything is going to hell around you? how much of a professional can you possibly be in the most extreme circumstances? And, of course, other than that grizzliness, what else fills the time while you're waiting? Language. Talking, idle chatter, storytelling, jokes, debates, random bits of remembered pop culture detritus, ribaldry, reminiscences--in other words, all the stuff that Tarantino is (rightly) most remembered and renowned for as a writer/auteur. It's delicious to listen to, but also, at bottom, it's really kind of delightfully old-fashioned. That he was able to fool everybody into thinking he's this rock-'em, sock-'em bad boy when he really just wants to put people in a room and get them talking is the ultimate credit to his talent.
Micachu and the Shapes, Live at Schubas--I was really thrilled to see how good Micachu was live. Her songs' charms rely way less on Matthew Herbert's production than, say, Pitchfork would have you believe. The music is a bit cracked, to be sure, but to paraphrase that great Leonard Cohen line, it's only so the light can get through. Mica Levi herself is completely adorable, a born performer and bandleader, a fact made all the more apparent because it doesn't feel like she's trying at all. Her drummer and keyboard player support her ably, taking every left turn in these songs with ultimate grace and ease. Local viola virtuoso Anni Rossi opened. After seeing string players like Owen Pallett and Andrew Bird process their instruments through an arsenal of looping pedals, it's nice to hear someone just play for a change. She's a bit like a less affected Regina Spektor--quirky without wearing the quirk like a badge of honor. Plus, she's got a lovely, lilty voice. Look for more good things to come from her. Pictures from the show here.
Baby Teeth, Hustle Beach--It's the moment we've been waiting for, kittens: Hustle Beach has finally been unleashed on the world. Yay! I couldn't be happier for the guys. I've only had a chance to listen to it once through so far, but most of the songs are familiar from their recent live sets, various Daytrotter sessions, and Abraham's 52 Teeth song blog. It all sounds great. I'm glad to see many of the reviews that have been posted so far are dealing so directly with the humor in their sound and songs, as that's one of the things I cherish most about them and feel truly sets them apart. Although, the somewhat tortured response that "Big Schools" has received as an album opener is a bit curious. I know he's not the coolest reference point these days, but this kind of epic narrative of mute, unacknowledged suburban discontent and myopia seems straight out of Ben Folds's playbook (in a good way--think "Army" or even "You to Thank"). Anyway, check their MySpace page for upcoming tour dates; I would strongly advise you to check out their live show if they're going to be anywhere in your vicinity (New Yorkers especially: August 7 at Cake Shop). - Jun 24, 09
So, if you've been following my Twitter updates since the beginning of the month, you know that I've really fallen in love with the new Dirty Projectors album. Aside from the fact that it's just, y'know, good, I think part of the reason why it's hit me so hard is that it's poised right in the center of the Venn diagram where my garden-variety indie rock tastes meet my recent penchant for annoyingly spazzypants stuff meets my ever-present regard for highly trained/highly skilled musicianship. I find myself listening to it through to the end of "Fluorescent Half Dome," then immediately scrolling back up to "Cannibal Resource" to start the journey again. It's astonishingly good.
And yet, as the calendar was inching closer to their free show at the Pritzker Pavilion, I found my enthusiasm and anticipation constantly tempered by the memory of how lackluster I'd found their set at the Pitchfork Music Festival last year. Gorgeous to behold and impressive to contemplate, but nothing that moved me viscerally. Well, I don't know if it's a function of my liking Bitte Orca more than Rise Above or if another year of touring and a brand new set of songs has kicked their stage show to a new level or what, but, as I hash-tagged from my after-set Tweet: #mind=blown.
It goes without saying that these guys are brilliant musicians, but what I saw Monday night was, perhaps more importantly, a brilliant band. I had an unexpectedly good seat way down in front, rather than out on the lawn, so I was able to soak everything up with a minimum of distraction (which probably helped my feelings of goodwill). Their trademark technical virtuosity was definitely on full display, but they were also overflowing with all the expansiveness and vitality that I'd missed in them last year. Of course, the increased prominence of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman helps this enormously, but Longstreth himself seems to be coming into his own in much the same way that Kevin Barnes was on those first tours behind Hissing Fauna; it's clear that he's finally, truly comfortable with his idiosyncrasies as a musician and performer, which has allowed him to relax into his talent much more fully, trusting that it's going to do the work for him rather than him having to do the work on behalf of his talent. There's just this abundance of warmth emanating from him now. It's beautiful.
They played through all the highest highs of Bitte Orca ("Useful Chamber," of course, along with my current personal fave "Temecula Sunrise," as well as "Remade Horizon" with its insanely intricate harmonies that got the place going bonkers early on in the set and "Stillness Is the Move," aka this summer's unbeatable jam) and a short suite from Rise Above. I think the song they closed out with may have been a cover, but I couldn't tell you of what.
[Apparently the band was in a nasty car accident on their way from Detroit to Toronto in the subsequent days, but Pitchfork reports that everybody's doing OK.]
Theirs was a ridiculously tough act to follow, and true to form, the Sea and Cake didn't really try. Which isn't to say S&C put on a bad show; not at all. It's just that they're such consummate professionals that it really doesn't seem like anything would phase them. The scenester audience started its mass exodus as soon as the DPs were off stage, which I found tacky but not unexpected, but, personally, I felt like it was such a treat to just get to kick back and let their sound wash over me on such a perfect summer night. (Also, J. Hop's term "buttery sambas" has been making me giggle nonstop for the past two days. It's the kind of rock crit description that CTLA and I probably would have made fun of a few years ago, but now I just kind of am delighted by how right on but simultaneously affectionate and silly it is.)
I'm currently having computer troubles, so I can't get my few photos off my camera and onto my at-home laptop for uploading to Flickr, so I'm going to post a link to awesome local photographer Robert Loerzel's photoset from the show instead. They're much better than my shots anyway.
Afterward, I hightailed it up to Schubas for a King Sparrow show that had some awesome hype machine muscle behind it: a write-up from Chicago's own DeRo a few days prior and some prime-time love from Metromix in that morning's Red Eye. There was an impressively sizable crowd in attendance (esp. for a 10 pm show on a Monday night), and the guys definitely delivered. Though "Sightseers" will probably never not be my favorite song, I kept hearing other little things that I'd forgotten how much I loved: that cascading instrumental bridge in "Forest," the bouncy little pre-verse turnarounds in "Bones and Skin," and of course the overall sexy ferocity of "All's Cinnamon." I also love how their general collaborative kickassery prevents me from isolating any one element of their sound to the exclusion of the others; they work as such a seamless unit that a gush that starts out about John's drumming inevitably starts to transform in my brain into a gush about Sean's bass lines, which always leads back around to Eric's guitar and vocals. In short, these guys are the real deal. The Monday night rock show, triumphant once again. - Jun 15, 09
To use Dono's helpful and apt term, now it's time for another omnibus edition of Wrestling Entropy.
First off: Up, you guys! Of course, it's utterly delightful. The sublime image of the house floating over the cityscape, held aloft by that riot of candy-colored balloons brought tears to my eyes, and the simple but golden "chipmunk voice" gag with the dog collar made me laugh so hard that some lady in the theater turned around to glare at me. But, as with WALL-E, perhaps what left me most breathless was the filmmakers' obvious familiarity with and affection for film history: did anyone else catch the Eadweard Muybridge reference over the closing credits? I laughed hard, sharply, once, then sat there stunned as the image disappeared--did that really just get tossed off like that? 'Cause damn. Not to mention several of those loooong "wait for it" sight gags (Carl descending the staircase on the chairlift, Russell being dragged across the dirigible window) felt clearly influenced by Jacques Tati's sensibility (especially Playtime).
But more than any of that, I was deeply touched by the emotional poetry of the thing. For those of you who know a little about my family, the story reminded me a hell of a lot of my dad (only without the redemption [ouch]): crotchety old bastard can't let go of either his memories of the past or his stuff, which prevents him from engaging in the life that's right in front of his eyes in any sort of psychologically honest or present way. I sat there violently shaking my head yes, yes, yes, yes during the scene when Carl realizes that in order to get the house airborne again he has to divest himself of all the material possessions he'd been clinging to that were weighing him down. Somebody over at Pixar clearly understands the mechanics of grief, and healing.
Unlike Away We Go, which I was totally prepared to give a pass to...until they decide to go live in Verona's childhood home. Eurgh. I ran into my friend Ray at the theater, and we were both fairly disgusted with the ending. Why would this couple, who claims to place such a high priority on community, choose to go live in isolation among the ghosts of her dead parents? Especially when Burt's brother and niece were clearly in need of some help of their own? Pixar would have gotten it right: Up ends with the old man's house disappearing into the clouds (because you gotta let that shit go) and the formation of a newly configured, slightly improvised family unit. That's the right ending. Away We Go ends with a retreat into childhood and away from genuine engagement with other people under the guise of "making peace with the past" or some bullshit. This is not the right ending. Don't get me wrong--there's much more to commend Away We Go than I thought there would be (particularly the Montreal vignette and, as ever, Paul Schneider in general), but fuck that ending, man.
Elsewise: I caught the Man Man/Gogol Bordello show a few weeks back (pics here). I tell ya: there is almost no band working today that I trust as much as I implicitly trust Man Man. It doesn't even bother me that they don't banter with the audience. (I usually like a little banter.) They're just too busy creating a whole new world during the 30-45 minutes they have to give us. What more could banter possibly add to the experience? What an astonishing group of musicians.
As for Gogol Bordello, it's good to get recharged with that immigrant punk energy every once in a while. Plus, I couldn't help but marvel at their graphic design all night. Whoever designed their slingshot logo is totally firing on all cylinders: there's David and Goliath iconography combined with a sort of Marxist/populist ideology and a super juvenile punk rock sneer. Yes, please.
St. Vincent live at the Metro (pics) was a delightful way to spend a Sunday evening. For whatever reason, I haven't fully warmed to Actor yet, but I really enjoyed hearing all the songs live. (It definitely didn't hurt that she claimed it was the best night of the tour so far.) When she started really blasting on some of those apocalyptic guitar freak-outs, I just couldn't help grinning and thinking, "this is truly feminist music. This is the sound my fucking ovaries would make if amplified."
If each era gets the metanarrative about show folk and storytelling that it deserves, what does it say that the '70s got The Killing of a Chinese Bookie while we get The Brothers Bloom? Sigh. I don't mean to be a dick about it, and it's obviously unfair to put a young guy like Rian Johnson up against Cassavetes, but also--come the fuck on. "Live the story until it comes true," etc., etc. It's clearly a young person's movie--both from within and without. At the same time, though, I don't want to begrudge Johnson his apprenticeship because he's got a lot of raw talent and I want him to be able to continue to have a career. But, the wide-eyed naivete and quirk qua quirk really exhausted me. And I have a fairly high tolerance for that sort of thing.
Popular opinion seems to be that Zach Galifianakis makes/steals The Hangover, but I was rather partial to Ed Helms's performance. There's something quietly commanding about him here that I wasn't really expecting (Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I don't often agree, noticed this too). Of course the movie is outrageously offensive and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but I've long had an inexplicable affection for this "shit goes down in Vegas" subgenre of movies, so I knew I couldn't miss it. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed. - May 20, 09
My darlings! I have to catch you up on all the fabulous goings-on around these parts lately. Usually when this blog is quiet, it's just because I'm being a lazy-pants, but this time it's actually because I've been too damn busy to sit down and write (in addition to being a lazy-pants). We gotta get through this briefly or we'll be here all day:
The Flight of the Conchords, Live at the Arie Crown Theater
I'm not a huge fan of the Flight of the Conchords or anything--I've only ever seen the first season of the TV show and don't own the CD--but someone offered me a free ticket, so hell if I was going to turn that down. The show was at, of all places, the cavernous Arie Crown Theater. As soon as I walked in, I thought, surely the size of this room will be death to whatever charms there may be in this show. But, damned if those guys didn't prove me wrong. Though the show would probably have been much better in a smaller venue, they have soooo much stage presence that they managed to keep the place humming with laughter and energy for their entire (surprisingly lengthy) set. Of course, it helps that they let a good chunk of their real-life charisma seep into the songs, rather than playing up their helpless sadsack shtick from the show--these guys are pretty fucking funny and pretty fucking talented, and you know they know it, and that's not a bad thing. By the end of the night, it was feeling a bit like sugar overload, but overall, I'm supremely pleased I had the chance to catch the show. Pictures here.
Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, Live at the Lakeshore Theater
When I visited my brother in San Francisco last year, he scored us some last-minute tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Mary Lynn Rajskub do some stand-up comedy. It was an incredible night, and I stole a ridiculous amount of material from Janeane's set (the most notable being her bit about "the gravy boat"--I'm sure most of you who spend any time with me in real life are infinitely annoyed by my constant reuse of the term by now). When I saw that she was going to be coming to the Lakeshore Theater with Marc Maron (from whom I've also stolen a ridiculous amount of material over the years), I couldn't wait to have the chance to catch her again. I went with some gay boyfriends, and we had a delightful time. She's such an amazing talent. I almost got a little choked up after the show was over thinking about how big a part of my adult consciousness she's been. I'd always been a stand-up comedy nerd, even when I was probably too young to be watching much of what I was watching, but I feel like seeing her stand-up specials on Comedy Central when I was in high school was this amazing shift. She looked like me and was angry like me and was just ranting on this amazing tear, rather than delivering punchlines with the more typical stand-up comedy rhythms like (as much as I adore them) Judy Gold or Joy Behar or Rita Rudner. And for her still to be around, and still to be operating at this ridiculously smooth, high level feels like such an amazing gift.
Aleks and the Drummer, Live at the Empty Bottle
It was hard for me to believe that I'd still never seen Aleks and the Drummer play live in a proper venue (last year's brief set at the Wicker Park Street Festival barely counts), so I made the effort to catch their show at the Empty Bottle earlier this month. They're really a fabulous band, towering over the current proliferation of other boy/girl drums/keyboards groups. I think this is due mainly to their appealing weirdness--Aleks is just about as bat-shit crazy as they come (in a good way--that voice! those clothes!), and Deric, in his spasmodic ferocity, absolutely stands as one of the best rock drummers around town (and I'm seriously not just saying that because he's a pal). Catch 'em while you can, Chicagoans. Pictures here.
Leonard Cohen, Live at the Chicago Theater
Leonard Cohen's always been one of those guys I knew I should be into, but just never took the time. Oh sure, I'd heard him sing some of his songs here and there, as well as all the covers, of course ("My penis is like a Leonard Cohen song: everyone likes it better when it's covered"), and just kind of figured "OK, I got it. Deep voice, poetic lyrics, female back-up singers. Done." Well, what I never took the time to properly realize is that fandom is the aggregate of letting Leonard Cohen work on you--you can't just listen to one song and leave it at that. You have to be willing to absolutely drown in Leonard Cohen for a while, and then you'll be baptized as a hysterical drooling fan. Which is exactly what happened to me at the Chicago Theater. Benji--who's been a fan ever since he heard a DJ playing Cohen Live as he was packing up at the end of the night at the bar in Bloomington--offered me one of his two tickets, and I'm infinitely grateful that he did. It was an absolutely magical night. First and foremost, of course, were the songs. And when I say songs, I don't just mean "bits of music and lyrics written and played by a singer and his band"--I mean, these are songs. There's just no denying the craft at work there. There's a reason why people cover his stuff all the time; it must feel like putting on a really well-tailored set of trousers or expensive pair of shoes. They're just that well done. But the man himself was absolutely oozing with energy and joie de vivre. He played for something like two and a half hours, literally skipping on and off the stage between sets and encores. His reverence for both the act of performing and for the other musicians on stage with him was deeply touching. He would step back and hold his fedora to his heart whenever anyone was taking a solo, and the two times he went around the stage introducing everyone individually, he bowed to them all with true respect, humility, and affection. And as all this was unfolding, it was hard also not to be reminded of his age, how this might be one of the last times any of us might ever see him perform live on stage. It didn't feel like a victory lap in the lazy or self-congratulatory sense--it felt like a man preemptively saying farewell on his own terms. Needless to say, I was a teary-eyed wreck by the end of the show. You can be sure I'm a huge Leonard Cohen fan now. Pictures here.
State of Play
If you're gonna go in for an elegy-to-newspaper-journalism movie, you'd be far better off with The Soloist. State of Play isn't bad, necessarily, it's just a bit...thin. (Unlike Russell Crowe, amiright? Hey-oh!) The cast is full of amazing actors (oh, Helen Mirren, cradle me to your bosom and insult me, please), but the script felt incredibly flat. It's hard to imagine what would have attracted so much talent to the project, other than maybe working with director Kevin Macdonald hot off his success with The Last King of Scotland.
Baby Teeth, Live at the Empty Bottle, with My Dear Disco
What the hell--springtime on a random Thursday: might as well go check out a Baby Teeth gig. They're getting ready to release their next LP this summer, and they brought a shitload of new jams to the Bottle last week. It really made them step up their game a bit, too. They played with an almost nervous intensity I've rarely seen in them before--and it suited them well. Perhaps they were also encouraged by the shit-hot opening set from Ann Arbor's My Dear Disco (between them and Nomo, what the FUCK is in the water up there?!). Imagine a version of Maroon 5 populated by a bunch of dorky yet adorable college-age dudes and a set of uilleann pipes, and you can kind of envision what they're up to. Apparently they usually work with a female singer, too, but her voice was blown out, so she wasn't on stage that night. I can't even imagine how much more over-the-top awesome that would make the group, though. They had incredible energy and incredible musicianship. I'll look forward to seeing them again soon. Pictures here.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Despite having been obsessed with the movie since its release in 2001, I'd never had the opportunity to see the show live on stage. The American Theater Company has been putting it on this month, though, and I knew I had to jump at the chance for tickets. Ohhhh, kittens, let me tell you how hard I sobbed. Going in, I pretty much knew I'd be a goner by the end at least, but I wasn't anticipating how much just hearing the songs themselves would kill me. I forget what an emotional attachment I have to them. All it took was the opening notes of "The Origin of Love" and I was like, "oh. Right. This music" and the waterworks just started flowing. I don't know that the production itself was necessarily exceptional--though the wardrobe person wins major points for putting Hedwig in a punked-out Obama "CHANGE" t-shirt dress for her entrance--but there's just something incredibly special about the show itself. Even though it's been a number of years since I've actually sat down and watched the movie, it was fascinating to see the emphasis the two media put on different aspects of the story. When you're not distracted by the physical presence of Tommy Gnosis, the relationship between Hedwig and Yitzhak gains so much more resonance and importance. Giving her back her power at the end of the show and ending with her on stage while Hedwig walks off, almost stripped bare, becomes such a beautiful gesture after you've spent an hour and a half watching her sit there, seething quietly, literally on the periphery of the stage and our awareness. And because we haven't been distracted by the actual sight of Tommy and Hedwig's love affair and we're not craving the sugar rush of that "first love" narrative, the D/s dynamic is allowed to flourish in a much more organic way here, whereas it always felt like kind of an afterthought to me in the movie. Anyway, I'm super, super glad I finally had a chance to see it live. (I snapped a quick picture of the awesome set design.)
Angels & Demons
Sublimely hideous. This thing was so talky it should have been a radio play, while also being gratuitously, graphically violent (to compensate?). Tom Hanks does a game job of trying to keep the thing afloat, but it's really Ewan McGregor's movie. The choice that he makes to play his character as perpetually soft-spoken was kind of brilliant. And the plot twist involving the helicopter totally sucked me in; I jumped right to the assumption they wanted me to make and loved them for playing on my gullibility. I found the overall logistical simplicity of the movie amusing, though. It seems that an easy attack that people often make on faith and Western religions especially is that they're reductive and binary--good/evil, right/wrong, eye for an eye, etc. But this movie was doing the same thing with "knowledge"/"research." It was never a matter of truly interpreting anything; it was just "here is a symbol; do you know what the symbol means? If yes, then proceed to the next plot point."
Destroyer (solo), Live at the Empty Bottle
Dan Bejar is becoming one of those musicians that I will immediately, reflexively go see if he's playing in town. It just feels like a compulsion, like I need to be in his presence if he's here, maybe as some sort of energetic exchange for all the pleasure that his music brings me. He played a solo set at the Bottle on Sunday night, and it, appropriately, felt like something holy. He reached deep into the Destroyer back catalog, thrilling the fanboys clustered around the edge of the stage, while also hitting us with some Swan Lake and New Pornos ("Streets of Fire"). I will also stand by my assertion that not nearly enough people give this guy credit for being as funny as he is. His ability to perform a meta-narrative of Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert at the same time that he's giving us a legitimately gorgeous Sunday-night-intimate-club-concert was just brain-ticklingly awesome. "Did I play anything from Your Blues?" he mumbled into the mic at one point about halfway in to the set. The place went bonkers with people shouting out song requests. "Forget it. That album's too hard," he mumbled back, not so much shooting down the idea as making it clear he never meant it in the first place. A lot of times that night I found myself laughing like I laugh at Wes Anderson movies--alone, in the odd corners around the jokes, not even so much at anything funny that's happening. He's really such a singular talent. Pictures here.
Less germane to the usual pop cultural subject matter of this blog, but no less time-consuming and significant in my life recently: I did another 30-day juice fast, lost ten pounds, cut off all my hair, and spent a weekend helping out around the Zen Buddhist temple that I attend during the celebration of the Buddha's birthday (kinda like Buddhist Christmas). So, yeah. It's been a busy few weeks. How about you, my darlings? What's going on in your corner of the world? - Apr 27, 09
Well, count me in with the rest of the filmies who are saying The Soloist is so much better than you think it is. Yeah, it’s a tortured musical genius movie, but it’s also way more stylistically ambitious than it needed to be. I mean, the sound editing on this thing, you guys—I saw the movie at the Davis, which I love having accessible within walking distance from my apartment, but now I wish that I’d seen it down at the River East or somewhere with better acoustics. Their use of voice over and the rest of the stuff on the soundtrack is really a fairly brilliant way to deal with the inherently uncinematic nature of both movies about writing and movies about music. It swings for the fences in a lot of places, and misses, sure (I reeeeally could have done without that final shot of all the mentally ill people dancing at the end, and the ranging, impressionistic shots of LA’s homeless communities with Jamie Foxx reciting the Lord’s Prayer in voice over was a bit much as well), but it also gets a hell of a lot right. The 2001-esque (yeah, that 2001) sequence of dancing lights when the two lead characters go to a symphony rehearsal was so unexpected and so nice, and the shots of those two birds flying over LA while the cello music swells on the soundtrack was so overwrought that it curved the circle all the way back around to incredibly moving. Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx’s performances are likely to win all kinds of plaudits this year, so, whatever, I don’t need to pile on here, but I absolutely adored the moment when Downey Jr. is hanging around at the community center interviewing that old lady, and he throws his head back with this narcissistic glee and laughs, “you’re so awesome!” It was such a wonderfully honest moment of writerly enthusiasm—he was totally not in the moment with this other human being but was already busy mentally constructing a probably condescending anecdote about her. I’ve totally been that kind of asshole, and it was both bracing and weirdly comforting to see on screen. Don’t let the sappy trailer fool you on this one, y’all. It’s worth a look.
Whereas last year I was busy boo-hooing into that Bon Iver album for months on end because it was all gentle and full of pain, and stomping around the neighborhood listening to the Dodos strum their acoustic guitars and bang their drums, this year all I want to listen to so far is the spazziest, most annoying music I can find. I mean, the Neko Case album is gorgeous and all, and I know I’m going to really like it a lot more when I’m in a better headspace for it, but I just can’t pay attention to it right now because I’m busy jonesing for anything that’s full of harsh, electronic sounds and beats that are so aggressively irritating that they’re like ohrwurms on Viagra. There’s Animal Collective, of course (“My Girls” is a given, but OMG, you guys, “Brother Sport” has been killing me lately: “OH-pen up your OH-pen up your OH-pen up your throat a luh-tel”). Per Dono’s recommendation, I’ve given a few listens to Dan Deacon’s Bromst (still letting it grow on me, but I dig what it’s doing). Like everybody and their Tumblr crush, the Micachu and the Shapes album is making me ridiculously happy (right now I have five tracks starred in the smart playlist I call “songs to watch out for”—and there could be five more by the end of the week the rate things are going). And the granddaddy of ’em all: Max Tundra’s Parallax Error Beheads You. The explosive brilliance of that album makes my teeth chatter. There’s so much going on in it, and it seems so overwhelming (ahem), but then once you start to learn it, you realize that he’s in complete control of every vintage keyboard blip and drum machine stutter. Plus he’s funny as all hell, dopily insecure, and laser-focused on pointing out really subtle instances of a certain kind of hipster bullshit (fashion, wanky film students who’ve read a bit too much theory). It's an astonishing achievement, and I'm sooo glad I didn't let it slip by just because it kind of flew under my radar upon its release at the end of last year. - Apr 15, 09
I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute to this month's "snack away" series over on eat!drink!snack! My post is up today.
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- Feb 02, 10
As I said in my introductory essay to Casanova, this is an extraordinarily long-feeling album because of the way it’s organized into mini-suites, and with “A Woman of the World” we come to the third song of the middle suite, the section I characterize as most representative of classic DC (“Songs of Love” –> “The Frog Princess” –> “A Woman of the World”).
The song also showcases one of my favorite vocal performances of Neil’s. He uses every part of his range here, like a Plains Indian resourcefully making use of every part of a buffalo: there’s the straight-ahead narrator, the conversational/spoken-word chattiness, the heavily affected faux-crooner, and, of course, the shredded belt. It’s such a casual tour de force, which is, in some ways, all the more unexpected coming in this often overlooked song in the DC catalog.
Also, the arrangement shows Neil’s genius in this period for undermining his own orchestral impulses. The song is obviously built to resemble a big, brassy, Broadway showstopper, but the sonic balance is always kept in check with some little oddball touch. It starts off with the watery phasing of the electric piano on the introduction (which makes a subtly witty segue out of “The Frog Princess”). Then, when the baritone sax is bopping along, it’s equalized like crazy so that it’s as trebly as possible. When Neil’s vocals are affected and arch in the bridge section, the strings are rich and warm. When the brass is swinging, it’s processed to feel canned and tinny. The overall effect is ingeniously two-dimensional–it’s like aural art deco, like the musical equivalent of the classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s cover or an early New Yorker. There’s a sense of humor to it, but this aesthetic choice also reflects the tawdry glamor of the Holly Golightly character. It’s 100% the right impulse.
There’s also a fascinating mingling of violence (“maybe I’ll kill her, just trying to thrill her / if she don’t kill me first”) with half-entertained notions of performing femininity (“I’m jealous of her–she’s a woman of the world,” “maybe I need her because I want to be her–baby, can I be your girl?”). It’s easiest to categorize these lyrics as a general nod to Truman Capote’s homosexuality (as well as the unspoken gayness of the novella’s unnamed narrator), but I’ve always preferred to take it one step further and hear it as a more undefinable exploration of gender fluidity. (Nothing sexier than an otherwise hetero guy asking, “baby, can I be your girl?”) This is courageous but necessary, as it allows Casanova to continue cataloging as many different iterations of late-20th century sexual expression as possible, which Neil continues to expand in “Through a Long and Sleepless Night.”
And, as a sauce to how wonderful this song is on its own merits, it’s always made more wonderful when I think of listening to it while driving down Route 41 with Casey, on our way to a family friends’ lake house, in late summer 2000 after my return from London. I was so excited to share this new music with my besties, hoping they’d hear all the same intelligence and exuberance that I heard in it.
Filed under: casanova - Feb 01, 10
This is one of those great pop songs that does exactly what pop songs do best–it makes very little literal sense, but feels exactly right. I always sort of mentally glossed over this song in my younger days when I wasn’t actively dating all that much, but now that I find myself going out a lot and going through break-ups of varying degrees of seriousness once every three to four months, I swoon at how accurately Neil has captured the awful ambivalence of courtship and casual relationships. In our most vulnerable moments, when we want nothing more than to love and be loved, it becomes a matter of emotional survival to guard our hearts with overly indifferent statements like “you don’t really love me and I don’t really mind / ’cause I don’t love anybody, that stuff is just a waste of time” which, paradoxically, embolden us to ask the question we’ve secretly been leading up to all along anyway: “your place or mine?”
I also love that the song seamlessly manages to have it both ways, sonically, too. It starts off with a dopey, farty/froggy bassline that underscores the ridiculous comedy of these dating/mating rituals when both parties are feigning excessive casualness before swelling and cresting into a lush, pulsating, string-laden heartbreaker, just aching with suppressed longing for genuine affection, for even a momentary cessation of all the socially sanctioned posturing. The nautical trumpet figure unites the two sections of the song, as it goes from a cheeky quotation bringing to mind horny sailors on leave to a lonely, keening howl at the moon, silhouetting all these tragic single figures adrift on the ocean of their own loneliness.
The first time I saw the DC play live, on March 14, 2001, at the University of Southampton, on the Regeneration tour, Neil played this song solo on his acoustic guitar as one of his encores. The crowd went bonkers for this fan-favorite, whistling along to mimic the beloved orchestration that was dancing through all our heads, and even providing the whooshing guillotine sound effect, which you could tell utterly delighted him.
Filed under: casanova - Jan 31, 10
Ah. Leave it to Neil to break all the tension he’s been building over the course of the last three songs with a sweet little ditty about boners. “Run around / with trousers on fire / and signs of desire / they cannot deny” is such a wonderful, funny, compassionate, and heartbreaking line. It’s always been funny to me, but somehow it’s extra funny now, considering it more deeply in the context of Casanova as a whole. The plinky, pastoral gentleness of the vocal round is masking, like cheap perfume, the musky hormonal desire of these kids the narrator is describing, heightening the ridiculousness of the fool’s errand the songwriter is on: putting a romantic face on the messiness of private emotions so that they’re sanitized enough for public consumption. After all the rancor aimed at the War Between the Sexes in the previous songs, it seems only fitting for Neil to take the piss out of himself a little bit here.
He’s also taking exquisite care to continue building the narrative arc of the album as a whole. After all the down and dirty lust and rutting of the first half of the album, it was only natural to continue the cataloging of human sexual impulse by focusing on pubescent hormones. Similar to the way that the line “everybody knows that no means yes” still always mildly shocks me in “Becoming More Like Alfie,” I love the quiet deviousness of the lines “fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice / fortune depends on the tone of your voice”–a sly bit of advice that is equally appropriate to a singer/songwriter aspiring toward commercial success by writing sappy love songs as well as for young Casanovas probably looking more for some skin-on-skin action rather than eternal love.
But Neil is also keeps subtly weaving in the intimations of mortality that are driving us toward the grave at the end of the album: “so let’s sing while we still can / while the sun hangs high up above / wonderful songs of love.” In other words, in the summer of our lives, let’s take advantage of all the pleasures–both physical and aesthetic–that are abundantly available to us.
Of course, this is also one of his simplest and loveliest songs, which also yielded one of his highest profile covers when Ben Folds included a very faithful version on his Sunny 16 EP. Featuring two of Neil’s most notable sonic signatures, the round-style vocal overdubs and tinny harpsichord, it’s an undeniable stone-classic of the DC catalog.
Speaking of that harpsichord, when I last saw the DC perform live in fall of 2004, his keyboard player threw a couple of tiny improvised flourishes into the solo. “I didn’t write that,” Neil chastised him, deadpan but utterly serious, after the applause died down. His type may hibernate in bedrooms above, but that doesn’t mean they’re not watching shit like a hawk.
Filed under: casanova - Jul 08, 09
Neil wrote this song about ten years too soon. If it had come out in the late ’00s during the full blossoming of hyper-pop epitomized by of Montreal in the Hissing Fauna/Skeletal Lamping era, it probably would have been heralded as a brilliant mini-suite exploring the war between the sexes via hilariously apt slices of pop music and pop culture. But, as it came out in ’96, buried in the middle of a set of otherwise immaculately wrought traditional pop songs, it just kind of comes off as an oddball way station between the two halves of Casanova. Which is too bad because, for all that I said in the previous entry about this being the skippable part of the album, I want to make it clear that I’ve come around to understanding how brilliant it actually is. Would I put this song on a mix CD? Probably not. Is it something I crave listening to if I’m in the mood for some DC? Erm, no. But really studying how it operates in the context of what Neil’s doing thematically here makes me appreciate it now more than I probably ever have.
After the cynical and occasionally disturbing examinations of female and then male sexual appetites in “Middle-Class Heroes” and “In and Out in Paris and London” respectively, of course the next logical step in the sequence would be to musically literalize the War Between the Sexes. The lyrics in “Charge” are dark, twisted, and brilliant, the ridiculous double entendres spat with something approaching pure contempt. Where “In and Out” is suffused with a kind of pleading douchiness that undercuts its horndog fixation on conquest, “Charge” doesn’t even pretend to dress up its engorged rage with a sentiment like “I fall in love with someone new practically every day”–it’s just “bang, bang, bang all night.”
And yet despite all this, the song also manages to be laugh out loud funny. The Barry White-esque spoken breakdown might be one of the most genuinely hilarious moments in the entire DC catalog. The line “I have in my hand a piece of paper that says ‘let’s make love not this phony war thang‘” is truly inspired. I listened to a lot of goofy doo-wop with my family while I was growing up, and we learned to cherish all the wacky (and sometimes overly simplistic and on-the-nose) metaphors and imagery in their inevitable mid-song monologues, and this little section always recalls the sense of delight we took in affectionately mocking them. I mean, the specificity of the wording of the phrase “I have in my hand a piece of paper” just tickles me to no end. I love that he doesn’t just have a piece of paper; he has it in his hand. Also, every time I hear the song, I’m always kind of waiting for him to have in his hand a bottle of Moet or a long-stemmed rose, but nope–he has in his hand a piece of paper. This is all just too awesome. Add to that the totally tongue-in-cheek loverman baritone rumble with which he delivers this bit of patter and I just couldn’t ask for a funnier few seconds of music.
Not content to stop with one slow jam sonic cliche, though, he pushes it one step further with the instant segue into a Prince falsetto. The lyrics start getting even more florid, bringing back more prominently the sex/war metaphors: roamin’ around No Man’s Land? Ahem? Gonna set your village on fire? I love that it’s almost impossible at this point for him to push these double entendres too far. Each one keeps getting worse, but they work together absolutely beautifully as a sort of seven-car pile-up of disturbing associations. To escalate this section of the song so far only to pull it back to a sudden pianissimo is the ultimate in thwarted expectations, a war tactic in and of itself that totally catches us off guard and destabilizes us: the bottom drops out and the volume drops down and some sort of creepy molester/ Hannibal Lechter-esque character moistly beckons us to make ourselves at home. Ew.
But for a proper ending, of course, we have to transition back into a final chorus. The big sforzando hits, and you hear one of the few places in all the DC catalog where Neil is legitimately straining his voice. That shredded “charge!” is so pained, so indicative of a character committed to his own insane bloodlust, it perfectly evokes both pity and fear, in a kind of Kubrickian illustration of a man breaking down under the slow, suffocating pressure of outside forces colluding with his own inner demons. Being a Divine Comedy song, though, of course these inner demons take the shape of some truly random (and, yes, funny) melodic interpolations: a bit of Tchaikovsky and Sound of Music in between thrusts.
Again, none of this is particularly easy to listen to, but it’s absolutely necessary, both providing a logical conclusion to this sequence of songs as well as foreshadowing the intermingling of sex and death that will continue to tip toward the grave in the back half of the album.
Posted in casanova - Jun 29, 09
And here we enter fully into what I view as the big problem section of Casanova. “In and Out in Paris and London” provides a bridge between “Middle-Class Heroes” and “Charge,” and though, as stated previously, I used to feel a certain affinity for “Middle-Class Heroes” in my early 20s, I’ve always mentally classified the one-two punch of “In and Out”/”Charge” as this album’s skippable section. It pains me to admit that both as a Divine Comedy fan and as someone who respects the sanctity of the front-to-back album experience, but this song’s facile condemnation of an inveterate womanizer doesn’t seem to be saying anything terribly interesting about masculine sexuality, despite how cunning and well-crafted it actually is formally.
With its thrusting quarter-note rhythm and Neil’s extremely heavy, arch vocal performance, the song’s essential shallowness is designed to provide meta-commentary on the first-person narrator, his exhausting pursuit of empty sexual conquest represented by the exhausting, repetitive simplicity of the tune itself. Viewed in this way, it links neatly with “Middle-Class Heroes,” which similarly uses a high-flown sonic tackiness to critique a certain kind of garish hausfrau, while they also complement each other as a kind of yin and yang of what Neil apparently wishes to categorize as equal opportunity examples of opposite poles of icky, unreflective lust. But, maybe these songs succeed a little too well in being insufferable. Contrasted with “Something for the Weekend,” which through its easy playfulness works as a straight-up song even if you surgically remove the “when he woke she was gone with his car and all of his money” punchline, these songs are really missing the multidimensional sweep and charm of the DC’s best material.
And, to what end? To make the point that some guys think only with their dicks and want to fuck everything that moves? Well, OK. Thematically, a song like this certainly has its place in the encyclopedic catalog of late 20th-century sexual mores that Casanova as an album aims to be; I just wish I liked listening to it more as a song, rather than merely respecting it as an objet d’art.
Though, I’m being too harsh again. As ever, there are glimmers of delight here. Trainspotters will of course note the way Neil mangles the George Orwell and Charles Dickens allusions in order to turn them into the most intentionally over-the-top double entendres imaginable, the way this song’s clueless lothario would no doubt say anything he viewed as pseudo-intellectual to get into a girl’s pants. There’s also something dorkily amusing about his use of the old-fashioned phrase “slap and tickle,” and I can never resist chortling at the over-eager delivery of “way-hey, yeah!” And, even though it’s kind of the opposite of what I think Neil intended, I really adore the line “I fall in love with someone new practically every day” because, well, frankly, so do I. It’s just too bad that, in the world of the song, this can only be viewed as a liability (and a male liability at that) and not an impulse to be harnessed, channeled properly, and celebrated.
Posted in casanova - Jun 26, 09
If this song were a movie, it would star Brenda Blethyn.
You’ve seen her play a variation on this character dozens of times before: vulgar and clueless, betraying an undercurrent of pathos and mute despair. And, unless Mike Leigh is at the helm, despite her best efforts, all this usually comes along with a big, steaming pile of condescension.
Looking back at the journal I kept during my summer studying abroad in London between my junior and senior years in college, the first reference to the Divine Comedy that appears there is my mention of buying Casanova and Fin de Siecle at the record shop, followed quickly by a transcription of the spoken section from this song:
I see unspeakable vulgarity,
Institutionalized mediocrity.
Rise up, little souls; join the doomed army.
Fight the good fight; wage the unwinnable war:
Elegance against ignorance,
Difference against indifference,
Wit against shit.Ugh. I cringe at that now.
This is one of the very few DC songs that has not aged well, mostly because of its lyrical pomposity. (The sonic pomposity is actually kind of charming, the heavy brass and sickly sweet strings undercut as they are by that plinking marimba line.) In his young man’s attempt to stand up for wit and elegance, Neil kind of just ends up sounding like a dick. Which, while I may sigh and shake my head over, I actually can’t begrudge him, all things considered. When I was younger and feeling trapped by middle-class suburban mores, the sentiment in this song definitely resonated with me. I knew I wanted to run far away from anything remotely resembling the scene painted here. But, now that I have some distance from it all, I can really only reiterate the essence of what I said in my review of Revolutionary Road: it’s my fundamental belief that, at the core, everybody’s doing the best they can with what they have, wherever they are. Even the kind of tacky, frowsy housewife being excoriated here. (And, not to get too sensitive about it, but of course this song is about a woman. Can you imagine if it were about a sad-sack David Brent-esque character instead…? Ooh, yeah, classism and misogyny.) So who is it actually serving to get so snotty about the scent of their candles, the design of their tablecloths, or even their mating habits?
It’s also worth noting that Neil manages to misquote Hamlet at the end of the bridge. The lines from Act III, scene III are actually
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.Obviously he needed to fit the words to the time signature of the song, but gilding the lily by specifying his thoughts flying up to heaven is really a bit much (not to mention effecting a redundant non-rhyme between heaven/heaven), and there’s a world of difference between one’s thoughts and one’s feelings.
Anyway, the one thing I can say in the song’s favor, even now, is that it’s certainly vivid and well-drawn. The introductory line about “oriental paper globes hangin’ like decomposing cocoons” is absolutely gorgeous, as both an evocative description of a specific kind of living space and an aurally pleasing collection of sounds and syllables. Neil’s vocal performance, while a bit over the top, highlights the newfound smoothness of his baritone and reconfirms his status as a vocalist strong and charismatic enough not to get lost in the middle of this song. Even with the many, many issues brought up by the lyrics and narrative and “message” and the wide-ranging sonic palette at play, there’s no way to ignore that this is a Neil Hannon performance of a Neil Hannon song.
Posted in casanova - Jun 22, 09
The fact that this song is just under three minutes long seems impossible. It’s like some high class art thieves have snuck into the middle of it and somehow spirited away an extra minute and a half without anyone noticing. Not because the song feels long, but because it feels too short for the amount of pure stuff going on here.
Neil’s vocal delivery in the first verse starts off cool, measured, almost scientific. He’s charting his/the narrator’s sexual and romantic development: “once, there was a time…” / “and once…” His nonsense syllables are restrained, conversational, analytic: “but now, hmm, w’l, now I find…” Even the language being used is exaggeratedly pragmatic: “it saves time to say what you mean.”
But then the shackles come loose and he shakes off his restraint, the sound and feeling of the song perfectly mirroring the sexual liberation/frustration in the narrative: the coy fluegelhorn figure disappears, his voice scoops into a crescendo and a growl, and the chorus chugs along like a good Britrock chorus should (well, at least Neil’s version of a Britrock chorus circa 1996). There’s a winkiness, an audacity, and a deep cynicism in the line “everybody knows that no means yes” that always sort of shocks me. The effect is somewhat softened by the subsequent dorky lyrics about the NHS and the elaborate intertextual reference to Michael Caine’s famous mid-’60s black frame glasses, but for a generation raised with explicit sex-ed admonitions that “no means no,” there’s still more power in this reversal than there seems there ought to be.
The second verse brings back the fluegelhorn, but he manages to modulate his vocals somewhere halfway between the politesse of the first verse and the raw emotional purge of the chorus. It’s visceral without feeling like lashing out; there’s blood pumping here. Take, for example, all that moisture in the final “F” sound of the word “enough,” or the sexy little melodic embellishment on the word “time.” It goes even further, though, as he fully inhabits the part, imbuing the word “love” with absolute rancor and calls back the spoken “hmm” from the first verse with the bile-filled “ha” that he nearly chokes on. He uses a classic DC trope up next, the spoken delivery of a line instead of singing it, for “but not now,” three little words that convey volumes about repression and denial…and about being a bookish dude in his mid- to late 20s trying to come to grips with his views on love, romance, and sex. Much like “everybody knows that no means yes” from the chorus, the final lines of this verse — “now I’m resigned to the kind of life I’d reserved / for other guys less smart than I / y’know, the kind who will always end up with the girls” — always kind of catch me off guard, no matter how often I hear them. Even if they’re not strictly autobiographical, it seems like such an unexpectedly truthful window into the kind of sexually nihilistic “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” sentiment that must ring uncomfortably true for a lot of similarly smart, conflicted guys around that age.
After another spin through the chorus and a shouted “oh, come on!” that brilliantly manages to be both a rock and roll frontman’s exhortation as well as one more expression of the narrator’s emotional agitation, we get a stinging little go-go dancing guitar solo. It twirls around with a sort of forced joie de vivre–the melodic improvisation is sweet, but the guitar tone is ever so slightly pinched, and the rhythmic pattern, while not tapping out 32nd notes or anything, gives a sense that it’s rushing toward the finish line, as if trying to prove “see, I’m having fun!!” Which just makes his final, exhausted sigh “I’m becoming more like Alfie” feel all the more hollow and sad.
Posted in casanova - Apr 14, 09
This song just sounds like the beginning of something, doesn’t it?
Any other band probably would have started this album with “Becoming More Like Alfie”–with that great Michael Caine soundbite, with the swinging, sexy bossa nova groove, with the first-person narrator that’s pretty squarely on the side of male desire. But Neil Hannon knew better. He knew that Casanova needed to start here–with the sound of a woman (two women? I can never tell) giggling, with the signature Divine Comedy horse’s gallop rhythm, with the coy little mystery narrative that totally destabilizes the male/female power dynamic. It’s such a deft move, and it shoots the album into orbit.
It seems doubtful that Neil could have gotten away with making his sex album without it. To tackle all the lechy subject matter without completely abandoning or negating the DC’s charms–and, it bears repeating, this album is full of exemplary DC moments–I think it was crucial for him to take the piss out of himself a little bit right at the outset with that cluelessly faux-suave spoken “helehhhhre.” It simultaneously over- and undercuts his own sexuality, blasting open this whole expanse where he can now play between two poles on the rest of the album, safely, without sounding too much like a dick or a whiner.
The other expanse that’s blasted open here is purely sonic. This song just sounds huge. The production is so sharp and clean and when that little trumpet flourish announces itself, it’s so audacious as to almost be funny. It feels very much like Neil is saying, “OK, the apprenticeship is over.” (Or, as Alfie himself says next, “Right, then we can begin.”) It’s the introduction to Casanova, yes, but also to the mid-to-late ’90s DC style: lush, orchestral, slightly bombastic, passionate, ambitious. (And, it’s worth noting, my personal favorite DC era.)
Posted in casanova - Apr 09, 09
Much as I’m intentionally choosing to begin with Casanova as the first official album here on this oeuvreblog (and then continuing to proceed autobiographically–how High Fidelity of me), I remember likewise very intentionally choosing it from the bin at HMV in London as my first Divine Comedy CD. Maybe I was overwhelmed by all the choices–most of the rest of the catalog was readily available there–and wanted to play it safe in purchasing an album that I at least knew at little bit about, but, more likely, I was choosing it symbolically. It was a trophy moment–not only had I triumphed in finally finding this elusive music (ah, remember when music used to be elusive? how quaint), but I had also succeeded in doing so in London.
As I mentioned in my write-up for Jamie Lidell’s “Green Light” on my best of 2008 mix, the idea of giving myself permission to do something, giving myself a green light, has a powerful resonance for me. And realizing at some point after my best friend Mary spent the summer of 1999 studying in Dublin “oh wait, that’s something I could do too” was a hugely powerful and important instance of this principle. Giving myself permission to explore the idea of studying abroad–to do something a little bit glamorous, a little bit out of my perceived comfort zone, something that hadn’t been suggested or recommended to me by someone else–was my late-bloomer’s way of gaining some sense of agency over my own life. Yes, I was finally learning to make choices that weren’t necessarily what I felt were expected of me, following through with dreams that resonated with some ineffable part of myself simply because of the pleasure the choice gave me, not because they were part of a script I felt I was supposed to be following. I was also learning more about my instinctive love for cities, for their constant sense of surprise and possibility and for their unique and invigorating energy (energy both in the sense of vibrancy and bustle as well as a signature style/character that hangs in the air and permeates and animates its people and scenery and goings-on). So to be there on the streets of London, to have made it there, and then to be creating my own musical map on top of it–away from the ’90s radio that I hated so much at the time, away from the jazz and show tunes that I’d inherited from my family–was the culmination of all these different strands of growth in my life, turning it into a much more intense moment than picking out a CD at the record store usually is. Or has been since then, really. I didn’t consciously realize any of this subtext at the time, of course, but there was still a deliberateness, a self-serious momentousness in the action. Never let it be said that I lack the taste for grand theatrical gestures.
Funny thing is–Casanova has ended up being far from my favorite DC album. But, much like any first love affair, it established a template for what I most want out of the DC: literate, self-referential lyrics, lush orchestrations, a narrative through-line, a bridge song leading to the next album, and, of course, Neil Hannon’s witty, intelligent, romantic baritone.
Even though the album is thematically cohesive, it’s almost set up in suites, musically and emotionally. It opens with a very ’60s lounge pop/Burt Bacharach feel, then passes through a bumpy section that strains its own limits of cleverness and pastiche before introducing a string of absolute classic DC gems and fading into something much darker and more melancholy that would eventually pave the way for Fin de Siecle. I think it’s because of all this internal movement that Casanova has always felt like a long album. It does run 51:52, which isn’t short by any means, but also isn’t, say, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
Looking at it now, though, one of the more amazing things about the album is how radically different it is from Promenade, how it represents this huge jump from a sweet little Michael Nyman homage to a lusty, even slightly unhinged declaration of Scott Walker-ish passion. I almost can’t imagine what it would have been like to have been a fan of the band upon its release in ’96 and suddenly be confronted with all this growth. In some ways, it’s just a blossoming (or, if one were to be cynical, trading one set of reference points for another). But still–the sound is so much cleaner, the arrangements are so much more ambitious, and Neil’s voice is leagues warmer and stronger and more mature.
It’s also funny that, in the pantheon of albums about sex, this is the shape that Neil’s took. Funny, dorky, charming, pretentious, anguished, uneven, oddly paced, and ultimately about death–for my 21 year old self, with my penchant for grand theatrical gestures and finding myself recently released onto the streets of a foreign city far from home, this was, really, all things considered, the perfect soundtrack at the perfect time.
Posted in casanova - Mar 24, 09
As indicated previously, “Too Young to Die” is a pretty blatant Divine Comedy bridge song: between the 90s and 00s, between indie label and major, between bespoke suits and jeans, and, perhaps most crucially, between a fictionalized first-person I and one that seems to be more closely aligned with Neil Hannon himself. In regard to that last point, that’s one of the things that’s always bugged me about this song. Not that he’s singing from what appears to be his own perspective but that he’s doing so with a song that, in a lot of ways, denigrates the rest of his work to date. An odd choice for this privileged “closing credits” spot on a best-of comp, eh?
Perhaps “denigrates” is too harsh a word, but lyrics like “I’ve lived a lie from the day I arrived” and “I must break free / from that part of me / that values the art over the humanity” are fairly withering ways to categorize a bunch of songs that are ostensibly being celebrated here on A Secret History. It seems unfair to his fans and oddly unperceptive about his own strengths as songwriter. OK, so maybe he’s not Bob Dylan circa 1963, but the power of something like Fin de Siecle‘s “Sunrise” comes from the fact that its lyrics aren’t overly strident, that the sentiment is coming from someone who typically is apolitical. Besides, being apolitical isn’t necessarily the same as being bloodless or apathetic; there’s no way that the warmth of “The Summerhouse” or the frustration and passion of “Through a Long and Sleepless Night” could have been written by someone who values art over humanity. And, sure, the jokiness of “Something for the Weekend” or “A Drinking Song” might be a bit dorky, and I can appreciate his want to grow as a lyricist beyond the arch cleverness he’d begun to get pigeonholed into, but to claim, as he does here, that “the tune is OK but the words are all wrong” does a gross disservice to the sincerely brilliant lyrics of “Tonight We Fly” and even “National Express.”
The Leonard Cohen-esque low range he uses on the verses has always seemed overly affected to me (and not the good kind of affected, like his Noel Coward homage), again misunderstanding what makes his own baritone such a singular instrument. It’s just not terribly well suited for whiskey and regret. But when he opens up and lets it soar on the chorus, it’s easier to be sympathetic to what he’s trying to say, in part because he allows the slightest bit of melodrama to creep back in. C’mon–that flying-V guitar line? Those super-emo falsetto ooh-oohs? He’s clearly gilding the lily a bit, but the extravagance is an infinitely better frame to put around the message I want to be better at what I do. Don’t hold it against me if I try to do something a little different, a little more grown-up, than what you may have come to expect from me. Don’t freeze me in amber.
In that sense, the key line here is really “I thought that I was doin’ fine / but now I changed my mind.” Fair enough, Neil. A person is allowed to change his mind. Before/after. Point A/point B. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?
Posted in a secret history
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- 6 tracks (27:50)"Daughters of the Frontier" (2010) is the self-released debut EP from Chicago-based band Tiny Magnets.
- 8 tracks (29:23)"Time to Try" (2011) is the self-released debut LP from Chicago-based band Tiny Magnets.
