Infinite Philistinism

Re: Dan Kois/Vegetables

2011-05-01T23:51:00.000-07:00

This is intended in no malicious spirit, rather as an instantly piqued riposte to Dan Kois' article "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables" — not so much for the article as for the general tone, which seems pretty emblematic of a lot of cultural memes at the moment. The brief nub is that Kois is an "aspirational viewer": one who aspires to admire the slow-ass, pleasureless, essential but antiseptic movies/TV shows/books/et al. that excite his (our) fellow critics, yet generally leave him cold.

It's my experience that after high school (or, at latest, college), few people bother pretending to like things they don't actually enjoy in the hope of impressing someone. The dynamic behind that transaction's always confused me: assuming we're not all perpetual adolescents (no comment), who's the nebulous person being impressed by a declaration of love for the plainly unlovable? Why would someone bother lying about how they liked something obviously unlikable? Blatant insecurity? (Kois cites a collegiate acquaintance approvingly noting Tarkovsky's Solaris as "so boring...you won't get it," which inadvertently sums up the snobbishness of a mentality that only half-understands its own aspirational goals, an attitude people generally seem to figure out is as unlikable as you can get. Most people get over this, right?)

An AV Club comment I can't track down once noted the writer hated Chuck Klosterman for acting like hipsters were chasing him down the street, forcing him to listen to Sonic Youth, which encapsulates what I'm trying to get at: unpopular culture almost never takes an aggressive stance (unless it's socially confrontational, and even then the audience is largely self-selected). "Difficult" film lovers generally have normal friends uninterested in the glory of five-minute tracking shots of someone's head, and can coexist in peace and harmony without wandering around trying to tape people's eyelids open and make them watch Solaris.

On the low (non-high?) cultural side, I don't think it's controversial to state that the vast majority of the population doesn't need to be convinced that they're in the cultural right in preferring the trashy/instantly gratifying/easily viewed. I find it inexplicable when super-right-wingers claim that America's being dominated by an academic, "post-modern" elite. Similarly, there's zero reason to claim that "cultural vegetables" are being shoved down the public's throat. (It's actually easier to argue there's more overqualified liberal arts majors half-jokingly analyzing reality TV and sitcoms online than earnest bores dissecting vegetables, but let that be.)

The tone of the article isn't totally antagonistic; to be fair, it doesn't accuse anyone of bad faith, except implicitly. What bugs me are the twin assumptions that:

a) most things are exactly as they appear to the "average viewer" (or the "many viewers" Kois admits using as a stand-in for his personal discomfort/boredom with something he suspects may be objectively worthy): that no one could possibly enjoy this stuff (whatever the example is) in good faith, that ascetism is the end of pleasure and that's the end of discussion.

b) that therefore, someone is lying.

Of Meek's Cutoff, Kois notes that the film's "as closed off and stubborn as the devout settlers who populate it: "('Pleasureless,' raved David Denby of The New Yorker! 'There is not much action,' noted A. O. Scott of The Times!)." There's no way to argue with this: either you enjoy Meek's Cutoff or you don't. (NB: I know I'm not exactly breaking new phenomenological ground here. Bear with me.) My point: Meek's Cutoff is, for this viewer, the best movie of the last two years. (That I've had a chance to see, anyway.) I thrilled to the boredom of " long dissolves from one wind-blasted plateau to another" — not because I'm a fetishist for non-action, but because I was viscerally moved/jolted by every composition in the film. Note that this wasn't my intellectual response: I'm not really crazy about Reichardt's ideology, but in every feature she's shown the near-Spielbergian talents of a natural filmmaker, one whose understanding of framing and editing is almost preternatural. The climactic sequence of wagons transported down a steep slope with life and death stakes induced something close to shortness of breath, and even before then I was Moved — in a way that was often at odds with Reichardt's political agenda. Plus: it's been 27 years since Stranger Than Paradise: minimalism is no longer a striking anomaly. (Even beer commercials have Sundance rhythms now. )

Kois says Meek's is arid, "closed off," etc. These are subjective impressions, but the implication is clear: who could enjoy these vegetables? There are other examples, all clustered together: "'while I'm grateful to have watched 'Solaris' and 'Blue' and 'Meek’s Cutoff' and 'The Son' and 'Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)' and 'Three Times' and on and on, my taste stubbornly remains my taste." As far as those five examples go: I'm not sure what (respectively):

a) a USSR-made film, rejected by a commisar with the pithy comment "What's the use of humanity traveling through space if they drag their shit from one planet to another"

b) the next-to-last audio testament of a dying British filmmaker

c) a revisionist American western featuring actual Hollywood actors

d) a decidedly "European" film from Belgian Marxists [featuring an excellent chase no less EDIT: it does have a lumberyard chase, but the real motorcycle festivities take place in L'Enfant)

e) an Inuit film shot on video

f) a three-part portmanteau from a Taiwanese filmmaker

have in common aside from marginalization on the commercial level. Their financing/intention/motivation are all different — which isn't even getting into the fact that formally, none of these films have anything in common. And "formally" isn't automatically a sterilility-inducing word.

I've only seen Solaris once, and it almost drove me to desperate measures; it remains the only film I've seen that forced me to pause, then prepare and consume an omelette simply to re-focus my attention. But that's my problem, and I wouldn't question the sincerity of its many admirers. Sadly, I haven't seen Blue or Three Times yet. Plus as far as I remember, many people use phrases like "my taste stubbornly remains my taste" to implicitly congratulate themselves in their resolve to Not Be Moved: obdurateness is a quintessentially American virtue, a reminder that no force of elitist anti-Americans can force you to contradict your basic desires.

Enjoying something isn't a moral issue; nor do I know anyone who wants to spend a lifetime exclusively only the most daunting, endurance-testing works. We all become tired workers at some point: I've spent many hours watching Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris enact their strange ideas of justice, a pretty universal experience. (Goes without saying that not all "low" culture is actually low in artfulness, nor is all high culture high in results, etc.) But there's no threshold for visceral pleasure. Few people seem to actually feel the need to apologize for the comforts of easy-watching mainstream viewing; non-dogmatic highbrow buffs shouldn't have their sincerity questioned, regardless of what anyone acted like in college.

Super Bowl: Eminem & Others

2011-02-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

• Game itself: my only sports loyalty is to the perpetually beleaguered Houston Rockets. Arbitrary bias was for the Green Bay Packers, who a) are not fronted by (as a friend termed him) Ben Rapelisberger b) were endorsed by Lil Wayne. So yay, although the actual sporting event — while technically a "good game" — was endless, with all suspense about whether or not it would turn into a "real game" deferred close til the end of the 3rd quarter. In the end, the typically hyper-inflated affair — introduced by cancer survivor Michael Douglas (!) — was, in fact, a good game, but it took forever to get there. The affair got the quip it deserved from Packers receiver Greg Jennings: "It's a great day to be great." Indeed. Jennings also gave a shout-out to God, which at least served as a counterpoint to Roethlisberger's increasingly insincere-seeming hands to the sky. Plus c'mon: at a time when Republicans are redefining rape with the adjective "forcible," the jokes just kinda write themselves.

• So those commercials: while I watch them, I honestly don't understand why they're such a big deal, since they're mostly terrible. Briefly dismissed: why are Lord of the Rings dragons pimping Coke? That Star Wars commercial was uber-cutesy. I hope David Bowie got a shit-ton of money for whoring "Changes." GoDaddy.com becoming self-aware in its sleazy pitches — reproving a barely interested in the first place audience of leering males with the spectacle of Joan Rivers as a sex object — wasn't really a great idea. Ozzy should get back on those reaction-slowing drugs. Adrien Brody is not Charles Aznavour. Most surprising/satisfying celebrity cameo: Roseanne getting knocked over by a log.

• Seems like a whole lot of the broadcast was based on the mistaken assumption that Tron: Legacy would be a huge hit. Aside from that absurd ad for Android's new iPad thingy, there was the sad spectacle of the Black Eyed Peas' choreographed sperm extras. (Who, lights aside, also kind of looked like Urgh's Invisible Sex.) All I thought was "Gosh, China should've choreographed that." Plus: while the Black Eyed Peas aren't the first hip-hop artist on the Super Bowl (because, hey, Nelly! Twice!), c'mon. How in the world have they sold like 47 million records worldwide?

• But hip-hop was definitely there in not one but two Eminem ads, which frankly blew my mind. I'm not sure I'm an Eminem "fan," but I was for a long while: The Marshall Mathers LP was ubiquitous for a year, and I wasn't even allowed to go anywhere that entire time. In fact, every Eminem album up to Relapse had something to offer, at which point I checked out. Still, I wish him well — "Drug Ballad" is still an awfully good song — but I'm shocked he came up that often. Not really, I guess: though I've checked out, he still sells like crazy (5.7 million copies for Recovery and counting, plus that stupid song with Rihanna that sounds like an emo confessional). That would've accounted for the Brisk commercial. However: that Eminem was brought in as Chrysler's new version of Lee Iacocca — touting Detroit autos to the point of patriotic absurdity, complete with a movie theater marquee reading "Keep Detroit Beautiful" — is just crazy. They really couldn't find anyone more responsible? Poor Detroit. And poor Eminem, for that matter.

• Still, not gonna lie: the commercial itself — condescendingly ill-advised black choir and all — got my attention. Not just for conflating buying Chrysler and American economic rebirth (Iacocca would've been proud), but for the introduction 45 seconds into a 2-minute commercial of Eminem's "Lose Yourself." The song is 8 years old, which scared all of us — but it was, in fact, ubiquitous, and presumably kidss 17-years-old this year had a Proustian evocation of childhood. This prompted a brief but terrifying conversation about what, precisely, me and my friends have accomplished in the quarter century we can all our age, let alone in the last decade. Consensus: not much.

• But even more unearned yet effective nostalgia belonged to that NFL commercial sewn out of sitcoms. A reasonable equivalency for sure, but hey: despite having seen, like, 15 minutes of "Happy Days" in my entire life (plus hating "Seinfeld"), I recognized every junk-food component. I had a TV for about a decade, ages 9 to 18 or thereabouts, and that apparently prepared me to recognized every single pop culture reference for the rest of my life.

• Most Tea Party-ish pregame ever, from the stilted Declaration of Independence reading up through the weird Bill O'Reilly/Obama interview (both play tough, O'Reilly alludes to "haters" without mentioning his part in the affair and Obama "graciously" declines to mention it, everyone wins, they talk about sports, both curse their lives), plus greetings from Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan. But all that patriotic lip-service just faded away once the game started, huh?

• We were all kind of in a coma after eating tacos and the endless game, which I guess is why no one changed the channel away from "Glee." Which I had never seen. Which: what the fuck? Work-wise, I've seen both of creator Ryan Murphy's awful movies (Running With Scissors, Eat Pray Love), plus some of "Nip/Tuck." All dreadful. But so much wrong here. Why is the color palette restricted to dark reds and grays? Why are the musical numbers filmed in a way that made me pine for Step Up 3D? Why does the music suck so much? Why did they desecrate The Zombies? HOW IS THIS POPULAR?

• The broadcast technically ended with Phoenix's "1901." Another meaningless victory for indie rock nation etc.

Glenn Beck live-blog, 1/26/11

2011-01-26T13:53:00.001-08:00

Last night I gathered with a group of knee-jerk liberal types who, nonetheless, packed a bar in Cobble Hill and managed to stay respectfully silent for not just almost all of the State of the Union address (some derisive hooting against John Boehner's sopoforic appearance aside), but even the dual responses. Paul Ryan leaned on Fox News keywords pretty heavily — "the wisdom of the founders" — and claimed to be "speaking candidly, as one citizen to another," but he behaved with far more decorum (and less buffoonishness) than Bobby Jindal last year or (especially) Michelle Bachmann's frankly embarrassing performance. In the hours leading up to the speech, Glenn Beck conducted a program that began with him stroking a bunny, then getting out a chainsaw and comparing Obama's "we need to keep spending or die" rhetoric (quick, reductive version) to threatening to kill a bunny (the economy) with underspending (the chain saw). Whatever.

Today it's snowing in Brooklyn, I'm bored, cabin fever. Let's see how Beck follows up the president's speech.

4:59: Cavuto just said he's a real patient guy.

5:01: Beck has a 16mm projector! First talking point: Obama's "Reagan rhetoric" last night ran hollow.

5:02: Cookies are "Reagan's yumminess." Fish sticks are Woodrow's politics. Bake them together, you get cookie fishsticks. Inedible!

5:05: "I've never heard anyone say 'I'm just a teacher.' But I've heard people say 'I'm just a mom.' I hate that."

5:06: Obama was wrong to call for more respect for teachers. (Beck appears not to understand how salary levels are a key component of how much we value education.) We should respect moms and dads more. Also, Obama looking at a Lincoln portrait is a liar, for some reason.

5:07: Lengthy Paul Ryan excerpt. On China: he was talking about "how bad we are, because they're building choo-choo trains."

5:09: He's said "choo-choo trains" at least four times now. "I think we can all agree on one thing: America doesn't need more choo-choo trains." Beck's unconvinced faster, more reliable service would change Amtrak. I'm not sure he's ever taken Amtrak. It would!

5:10: We can't invest in high-speed trains because, apparently, they would constantly collide into regular trains and kill everyone. I guess he's not into American engineering skills.

5:11: "Chugga-chugga CHOO CHOO!" Starting to feel like I'm watching a weird adaptation of "I Am The Walrus."

5:12: Obama compared to Dr. Evil's ransom, to Obama's disadvantage.

5:15: "So he gave a shout-out to a SHINGLE COMPANY. Hey Obama, you're giving me shingles." 30 seconds later: "he also said he wants to invest in biomedical insurance. Can you find that one in the Constitution?

5:16: Comparison of Obama and recently deposed Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

5:17: This is one of those thing I find totally infuriating. You can't constantly praise oil and endorse anti-solar/green energy all the time, then be surprised and claim green power's a total failure if you've been actively rooting against it the entire time.

5:20: First commercial break. "Hi, I'm Bill Kristol. I write The Weekly Standard." Yeah you do! Followed by the first gold ad of the hour. Then an add for solar generators. Struggling to imagine the mind of someone who opposes solar power except as a life-saving back-up, in which case it's OK.

5:24: Back to familiar motifs from the past few weeks, with an emphasis on The American Experiment ("Can man rule himself?") and the 4 E's (don't ask).

5:27: A brief lecture on the spacing of tree rings (far apart when healthy, close together in times of distress). "Even mother nature knows, better than congress or the government," etc. We must slow down to survive.

5:29: Another argument for slowing down: that's what pilots do during turbulence. Followed by gold ad #2 (the Rosland Capital ads featuring G. Gordon Liddy).

5:31: One strongly suspects "Americans Against Food Taxes" is powered by, say, the same people who make those pro-corn syrup ads.

5:34: Oh snap. Glenn's about to explain his daily routine! "It's insane what we're doing! It's insane what I do." ... "I didn't understand Frank Sinatra's song 'New York, New York' until I moved here. [...] There's about 9,000 people waiting to stab you in the back." Sounds like the Fox News jealousy situation in a nutshell.

5:37: I don't understand who Beck's friends are, obviously, but why does it take them a minimum of 75 minutes to commute to work each way? Even if they're in New Jersey, that seems flat-out wrong.

5:38 "Then your wife is like 'YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME.' So then you have to listen to her."

5:39: "Where's the god stuff? Where's the good stuff?"

5:40: Third gold ad.

5:44: OK. How to fix the overworking of America. First, prioritize: God, family, country. Eliminate "stuff." Such as: Beck does not carry a cell phone, so neither should you.

5:46: Some people do charity, some people think "the IRS is your charity."

5:47: You can't separate your personal and professional life. Prime example: Bill Clinton (!). Can't be a good president, because it's all one. Very zen.

5:49: More stuff about his wife (off-camera, someone named "Oscar" snickers). More stuff about post-9/11 values. 4th gold ad.

5:53: "Yes you can do something about your tax problems." Riffing on Obama to sell tax services. Nice!

5:56: "The middle seat" is a metaphor for being generous enough to let someone sit in the middle chair on public transport and talking to them. It's one of seven steps, the first of which is "work the problem," yet another invocation of Beck's former addict status.

5:57: Fifth gold ad.

Wrap-up: Like "The 700 Club," pretty much every single episode of Beck's show features at least one batshit moment, but it has to be said that Beck's far less compelling now than he was a year ago. After about 20 minutes of what passed for a point-by-point rebuttal of the state of the union address, Beck settled down into the same points he's found his stride in repeating and hammering home. Like the Breitbart websites (except, oddly, slightly less political), this comforting repetition keeps his audience in a self-created loop, while all the spiritual talk imbues the nasty politicking, endlessly ridiculous comparisons (Dr. Evil? Cookies and fish sticks?) and noise-making with a quasi-religious ambiance.

The conclusion I'm increasingly arriving at about Fox News (and the Tea Party in general) isn't just that it panders to people afraid to contemplate a post-American world. Americans watch a shit-ton of TV, or at least they did before the internet (I don't know the numbers anymore, but it's hard to believe the average household set is still on for 7 1/2 hours a day, as it once was). Judging by the many, many ads for life insurance, medical care, etc., the show's audience is very geriatric, old folks who were going to have the tube on anyway. All the god/crisis/constitution talk imbues a normally acceptable-but-hardly-laudable activity with patriotic dimensions, giving viewers the feeling of political engagement while asking nothing of them.

Gravity's Rainbow, pg. 267-268

2011-01-20T07:51:00.000-08:00

In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop's starving.

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as possible, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . ."

"But-but bobwire," Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin' away, "that's progress—you, you can't have open range forever, you can't just stand in the way of progress—" yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who's springing for his meal.

Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

2010-11-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

[I put this up in very rough form mostly to be able to look at it in a format that wouldn't make my eyes bleed. You could pretend this isn't here until I take this bracketed disclaimer down; this is definitely a "work in progress."]

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy begins with the rhetorical question "Could we get much higher," spends nearly 70 minutes proving yes we can, then ends with a nice round of applause. The applause is Kanye's acknowledgment of his excellence, but it's also the tail end of the Gil Scott-Heron sample closing out the album: the response comes from a small but appreciative turnout, suggesting Kanye inexplicably still thinks he's undervalued. And in a sense he is. A partial list of the stuff he hasn't done is stab someone in full view at the Vibe Awards (like 50 Cent compatriot Young Buck), rape or assault anyone (like uncountable NFL players), or indeed do anything worse than talk some shit about George W. Bush on national TV (in a sentiment that would've been vigorously and unthinkingly applauded "Real Time with Bill Maher") and interrupt Taylor Swift, who's sold 13+ records million worldwide, made $45 million this year and presumably isn't crying into her beer about this. Michael Vick? Awesome football player without much sympathy for dogs. Kanye West? World's leading asshole. Go figure.

So Kanye certainly has a point in wondering why "South Park" spent a whole episode mocking him when his sins are venial rather than mortal; he finds himself seemingly more valued as a cultural punching bag than as a musician. That goes some of the way to explaining My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy's musical aggressiveness and lyrical defensiveness. Unfortunately, Kanye's version of "defensiveness" is talking about his dick relentlessly. He's never been shy about sharing his views on higher education (overrated, financially disadvantageous), AIDS (quite possibly a government conspiracy), his mom (awesome) and materialism (fun). None of the positions he's taken could be considered intellectually responsible, but they've all been presented in lively, upbeat fashion. With their loose academic theme, the upbeat trilogy of The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation presented a Kanye engaged with the world around him. With the title change and emphasis on broadcasts from Planet Kanye, 808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy are determinedly solipsistic and way less ebullient; the music pushes further, but lyrically Kanye's retreating from empathy even as his technique keeps picking up.

That makes the dour sexuality foregrounded here kind of a drag. When Prince was filthy it was funny because of how far he went; when Kanye talks dirty, that mostly means he wants to say "pussy" a lot. The lowlight is a three-minute Chris Rock "skit" consisting of a grateful post-coital man asking his girlfriend how she "reupholstered" her pussy, how she learned how to talk dirty, etc. "Yeezy taught me" is the unvarying response; Rock's grateful response "Yeezy taught you well" is about as creepy and sad as it gets. These are easily the worst three minutes of Kanye's official discography (yes, even worse than "Drunk And Hot Girls"). For all his bravado, Kanye isn't terribly specific on what, exactly, makes his dick the one to end all dicks: he appears to be interested in having sex with the lights on (as evidenced in "All Of The Lights" and the "fuck with the lights on" breakdown on "Hell Of A Life"), which is setting the bar fairly low bragaddacio-wise. The freakiest thing here for real is Nicki Minaj's intro, and that's mostly because she's capable of being really terrifying.

I'm being a little deliberately obtuse: "All Of The Lights" is about having sex with the lights on, but it's also a defiant statement of pressing on, of wanting the spotlight on you to assert you're here more than ever despite public shaming. "It's nice Rihanna is still OK," a friendly sarcastically noted, but certainly Kanye knows when using her chorus against his narrative of a spouse abuser. (On both this and "Blame Game," he — for the first time — sings from another male's first-person perspective, allowing him some distance; it's telling that whatever's bothering him, he can't talk about it specifcally and has to resort to narration.) The idea, presumably, is a heady mix of artistic ambition, sexual restlessness and the generic imperative to "push hip-hop's boundaries." But song length, in and of itself, is not inherently ambitious: a lot of songs here go 5+ minutes without developing musically, which is disappointing from the creator of "Gone" (arguably the five-and-a-half best minutes of aughts songwriting). Given all the dick talk, it's hard not to think that song length=dick length=ambition, at least in Kanye's mind, which isn't the case.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a very good album: in pure recording terms, it has the special sheen of someone with very expensive mixing boards who knows precisely what to do with all of them. Musically, Kanye's always endorsed stealing from whatever genre: he's as likely to sample Curtis Mayfield as he is King Crimson (!) or (as he does on "Blame Game") Aphex Twin. The "first rapper with a benz and a backpack" understands that he's playing both to mainstream hip-hop listeners and fussy, more underground-inclined fans, and that his audience is more racially balanced than most. I'm just guessing here, but in terms of pop stardom Kanye is beloved both by white collegiate types, NPR listeners and the passing booming cars of Bushwick, where I live. That's not a bad trifecta, and it lets him sample whatever he wants while consciously rewriting what "the black musical tradition" might mean.

Part of what's interesting about Fantasy is how explicitly Kanye seems to be modeling himself on peak '70s Stevie Wonder: as a one-man auteur drawing upon black and white musical traditions in equal measure for a crossover audience. He is, in fact, all that, but this isn't Songs In The Key Of Life; it''s a frequently brilliant album with lots of musical dead patches and too many guest verses. The album originated with the idea of paying tribute to mid-90s East Coast hip-hop; you can here that on the many repeating, basically static verses given from person to person. You can sense the album's rumored origins as a Pete Rock-produced, '90s East Coast tribute in the emphasis on verse after verse: more than ever, this is Kanye's most rap-oriented album, even as the song lengths and music call that categorization into question. Most of the guests are good (though Jay-Z's verse on "Monster" is kind of sad and dispiriting), but they're not all necessary, and they bend to Kanye's themes more often than not. One of his great hosted guests was Paul Wall on "Drive Slow." Wall's good at pretty much one thing only — proselytizing for grills to fuck up the inside of your mouth as bad as his — but Kanye let him do it uninterrupted, a generosity towards someone with completely different interests. It's hard to find a similar instance here,

Slave imagery runs rampant, from Kanye's modest self-description on "Gorgeous" ("the soul music of the slaves that the youth is missing") to the comparison of gang bangs to plantation workers ("and if we run trains we all in the same gang/Runaway slaves on a chain gang"). A crossover musician with a message, Kanye's sense of history is firmly one of racial wrongs and omissions, which is interesting and justifiable, but kind of queasiness-inducing when tied to his own sense of overinflated wrongs. (Not even going to touch his obsession with "white girls" and attendant apparent guilt. Apparently something's even worse when the lady's non-black.) He worries about what hip-hop is, mourns Michael Jackson reads some terrible poetry by Chloe Mitchell. The more he says how much he doesn't give a fuck, the more clear it becomes how desperately pissed off, paranoid and implosion-ready he is. Kanye's ego used to be his rocket: it was fun to brag along him. Now it's an albatross.

The most compactly successful song is "Power" and the best "Lost In The World" (more on that in a second). The undeniable centerpiece is "Runaway," the nine-minute behemoth of gorgeous self-loathing. The stark piano is gorgeous, the repeated "Reactions!" zipping from speaker-to-speaker unnerving like a mixtape DJ with sinister intentions, disrupting the prettiness like a sudden paint slash across a perfect white canvas. For some reason Pusha-T sounds exactly like Kanye (you want to see true egotism in action, start there). The three-minute outro, however, is pretty much a repeat of "Robocop" but much more flowery; the idea seems to be to say "See, I've confessed to being an asshole, but look at the pretty music I can make," which is kind of distasteful.

"Lost In The World," the final and best song (barring an extended sample outro) mashes up Bon Iver, pounding drums that can only be called "tribal," chanting voices and a repeated, urgent question: "Who will survive in America?" This is not a bad question to ask at this moment, and it's the only one Kanye asks that might strike workaday listeners as relevant. The song's so exciting it doesn't really matter that half of this is middle-school gibberish ("You're my angel, you're my demon" — brought to you by Dan Brown, presumably); it's all motion to the end, open to the outside world for once. This is a frequently near-great album, but ambition isn't execution until the end.

The Social Network, Round 2

2010-11-24T19:59:00.000-08:00

A month ago, I argued about The Social Network for a solid 45 minutes with Mike, one of the few friends my age who's actually been climbing the career ladder uninterrepedly since graduation. Three weeks away from moving from New York City to New Orleans in pursuit of a better job, he was way more qualified than me to weigh in on the vexing issue of whether or not the film's Mark Zuckerberg (who, let's stress, is basically fictional) is the hero or villain. For Mike, Zuckerberg was clearly defensible for a simple reason: no one got hurt. Eduardo Saverin currently has a 5% stake in Facebook worth $1.3 billion; the Winklevoss twins got a $65 million settlement. No one involved's strapped for cash; this was an abstract tussle for cultural cachet, not a truly despicable piece of corporate crime. Mike feels the same abstract urge to take risks and do whatever's necessary to move up not because he's fighting for his economic life — he'd be covered — but precisely because it's something he has the option of doing.

I argued the exact opposite for 45 minutes (that Zuckerberg's the loser, lost and alienated from his only friends), and we both had legions of supporting details. It was amazing we could both argue opposite sides for 45 minutes without either of us breaking down, and it made me want to see the movie again, trying to zero in on "what the film's about." Ambiguity seems to be the point: the reason the ethical rights and wrongs can't easily be sorted out is because they don't have real, firmly rooted moral precedents. You can't measure the lasting value of Facebook this early in its existence: there's simply no way to tell what it'll be, or how long it'll be a subject of worldwide obsession.

"We don't know what it is yet," Zuckerberg keeps insisting, and the film agrees. How can you evaluate something when there's no reasonable metrics in place to measure value? Facebook crashed the Harvard servers and made Zuckerberg the world's youngest billionaire by tapping into a need most people had never previously known they could feel. The movie proposes it's an overwhelming, sexually motivated urge for horny college students, but it could be any of the things the site does (allow you to snigger at less fortunate high school acquaintances or envy more successful ones, keep in touch with people you've met once for no apparent reason, etc). And it's seven years old. You could argue there's comparable internet precedents even in this foreshortened, but size matters.

The first lawsuit: whether or not Zuckerberg stole the idea from the Winklevoss twins, stalling them because he knew being first was more important. But that's not quite clear: "If you had invented Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook," Zuckerberg says in a particularly Mamet-y moment. His argument isn't that he didn't steal the germ of their idea; it's more that they presented the goal in a hamfisted, ineffective way (posting traditional Harvard studs for the presumed universal adulation of young ladies everywehre). Zuckerberg's big lightning bolt — the final piece of the concept he strains to grope for — is a sublimated, simple one line question about people's relationship status. It's the difference between a hard sell and a (sorry) inception. Given that his code was entirely different and that the Winklevoss' site would (in the film's conception) almost certainly have failed, does it matter Zuckerberg took a raw idea, made it substantially better and refused to give even token financial compensation to its source? It's unanswerable.

The second lawsuit: did Zuckerberg dick former best friend Savarin out from reasons of sullen resentment? Probably, the movie suggests: Zuckerberg sometimes disputes testimony, but most of the time everyone agrees on what's being said. You can take the linear narrative at face value, the same way Zuckerberg does while demonstrating his utmost contempt for the proceedings: the truth is simply irrelevant to the larger enigma. He did something evil (in the film's telling), but it's yet another lesson on why you should always read what you're signing, so it's hard to feel that bad for the wealthy Savarin.

Facebook's impact and financial value and ability to exploit people's self-created needs are simply immeasurable, the kind of dilemma sure to drive an OCD type like David Fincher nuts. All the verbal fussiness and back-and-forth is an increasingly frantic skirmish to avoid staring the informational void face-on. In Zodiac, Jake Gyllenhaal became increasingly the only one who cared, quantifying one thing for the record long after people had stopped paying attention. In The Social Network, the instigator at the center doesn't care about sorting out what he does; his obsession will be many people's mess to clean up. That's what scares Fincher and Sorkin, I guess: something that can't be measured. That weird, sickly horror film patina — the bags under Eisenberg's are the biggest since Tak Fujimoto shot Chris Cooper like a monster in Breach — is panic at the unknown. Fair enough.

Pinkerton

2010-11-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

Pitchfork's review of the deluxe reissue of Pinkerton is pretty infuriating for a number of reasons, but the main problem here is the eternal one: what do we do with Rivers Cuomo? How do you evaluate a new Weezer song in 2010? Here's a guy who came swinging with one album of radio-ready anthems, followed it up with an even more rocking, initially reviled cult classic, and then returned to destroy his following twice over: first by writing songs that were sonically identical to Blue Album (thereby opening himself to accusations of cynically retreading himself), and then going off to some other planet where it's acceptable to write a song like "We Are All On Drugs."

That planet, as it happens, is FM radio: the mostly wretched Hurley is the band's sixth album in a row to debut in the Billboard top 10. Weezer has fans, but (with some rare exceptions) their following is completely different from their first wave. They've jumped generational waves without missing a beat, a feat that's abstractly impressive. That kind of commercial success appeals to people who believe populism automatically confers cultural significance, while simultaneously alienating those who believe marginalization automatically equals personal significance. And no matter how much Pitchfork loves Lady Gaga or Ke$sha or whatever other goddamn populist pop thing we're supposed to genuflect before, when it comes to a band like Weezer, those '90s battle-lines and scars still linger. It doesn't matter if the album was vindicated long ago; any review will start from an inexplicably defensive position, because mentally it's still 1996.

In his mostly useless but sporadically amusing collection Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman claims that he really loves that song, "Beverly Hills" and "Freak Me Out" because, well, he's a populist. That's not what he says (he goes on for a few pages about how literal-minded a songwriter Cuomo is, which is true, and then lapses into a stoner reverie about weirdos lurking in shadows), but that's what he means. This is kind of a load of shit ("Beverly Hills" is abominable and no amount of college + Christgau hyperbolic essay-writing will ever convince me otherwise), but it's also an apt way to think about Cuomo, because it mirrors his approach to post-Pinkerton songwriting. Both Klosterman and Rivers are smart guys who at a certain point decided that the defense and preservation of lowest-common-denominator music (something so pervasive that it certainly didn't need their help) was their true calling. They're aware of other stuff; they just don't care. Last year I interviewed Cuomo, which had to easily be one of the five most pleasurable interviews I've ever done, and certainly with a musician. In the course of the interview, he mentioned studying Boulez and Schoenberg, which is certainly the long way round to writing a sub-Dandy Warhols piece of shit like "We Are All On Drugs." He also spoke about moving from the Pixies to the simplicity of The Beach Boys lyrically. Then I asked him what he'd been listening to lately, and he opened up his iTunes and geeked out on Gloria Estefan's "Anything For You."

This is a long way of saying that Rivers Cuomo knows precisely what he's doing: he's far smarter (both in understanding how songwriting and composition work technically, and also as a businessman) than most bandleaders, and the fact that most of what he does now sucks is kind of irrelevant. He made a conscious decision to discard most of what he knows in his songwriting, and he seems perfectly happy with it. Good for him. Anyway, most Weezer albums have at least one salvageable track (Red Album has the stupidly catchy "Pork 'N Beans" and the bizarrely compelling "The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived," and "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" is a pretty good opener on Red Album). Worrying about latter-day Weezer is a total waste of everyone's time; either you have the time to sift through and abstractly appreciate what he's doing or you don't.

None of this is relevant in any way to the album Pinkerton, which in a bit I'll get to arguing for as a '90s keepsake as much as a musical monster. Here's my relationship to it: in high school — which is precisely when I should've been rotating it on repeat — I didn't much like it. I had enough problems of my own to contend with without sinking into Rivers Cuomo's sexual angst. I pulled it out about a year ago for the first time in years and basically haven't put it down since. My point here is that when I should've loved it I didn't, and now that it's irrelevant to me thematically I love it; it does not have to be appreciated through one confessional prism. It's pretty much near-perfect work, insofar as it flows immaculately from start to finish and almost every song can be listened to singly as a concise gem (except for "Butterfly," which is admittedly pushing it). The songs that freaked me out as too hysterical in high school now strike me as mostly awesome, especially "Getchoo." It's too much, but it's the good kind of too much. It's loud and it rocks. At times, it's almost dangerously ramshackle like Third/Sister Lovers but on purpose, with no drugs, which is impressive.

Lyrically, Pinkerton is problematic in a number of ways, but, again, it's the fun kind of problematic. Rivers Cuomo is writing from the heart of the '90s, a decade that would finally mandate sexual tolerance for anyone who wanted to be a Sensitive '90s Boy, which Cuomo is nothing if not: this is a guy who established himself by comparing himself to Buddy Holly and whining about Heinekens taking over his fridge. This is not a misogynist guy: he blames his mom for everything, sure, but on "Say It Ain't So" he blamed dear old dad for all his trouble, so that seems fair. This is the guy who wants to be your better boyfriend and can't stop worrying the girl will inexplicably leave or assert herself in some way: this is Scott Pilgrim before the gift of self-respect. What's brave about Pinkerton isn't the specific creepiness on display (although some of it is very creepy indeed, in ways that could only occur to this guy); it's that Cuomo is flaying himself, repeatedly, for not being the kind of good progressive 20something he should be. Instead, he's giving in to all his base instincts, no longer the guy he wants to be. He's making an awful lot of shoddy-sounding excuses for himself, but he can't stop himself.

In this respect I've always been particularly amused by "Pink Triangle," in which Rivers is straight-up pissed that some (faceless, nameless, personalityless) girl is a lesbian. This is not a very good (or tolerant) thing to admit to, but it's funny; in the decade where gay characters get mainstreamed on sitcoms, Cuomo's pissed his own heteronormative life has been disrupted. In a lot of ways, Pinkerton is an uber-90s album, in which a sensitive guy flagellates himself for not being sensitive enough. The '90s were the decade of ludicrous spectacles like Promise Keepers rallying in DC to, like, pledge to be good dudes. Being a guy in the '90s is rough if you have any degree of self-consciousness and desire to be a good person at all: pretty much everything is telling you all of your base instincts are horrible, horrible things.

This is not a problem special to Cuomo; he was just unusually open about it. Another '90s sadsack had similar issues: Elliott Smith told a "Spin" reporter that in his college time, "I was reading all this heavy-duty feminist theory—Catherine McKinnon, in particular. I really took it to heart, and it kind of drained all my energy away. I didn't want to do anything. If you're a straight, white man, she made it seem impossible to live your life without constantly doing something shitty, whether you knew it or not." There's not a single Elliott Smith song about this, but this is pretty much what every single song on Pinkerton is about. Rivers' transgressions, in the overall scheme of things, are pretty trivial: he's an immature jerk in relationships who thinks everything is about him, he has no empathy for his partners, he fantasizes about underage Japanese girls (though he knows he could "never touch you, that would be wrong"). That sucks, but no one's exactly getting scarred for life here except Rivers.

Here, of course, "sensitive" means something more like "empathetic" rather than "feeling everything way too much, which is the main problem.) But "Pink Triangle" gets even better because he heard she's a lesbian; he hasn't even talked to her. They were "good as married in my mind," which is pretty pathetic and not that far off from Don Gately in Infinite Jest who, "if a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at [him] as they pass on the crowded street [...] has within a couple blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head [...] By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happily still hooked up with her in his sunset years." This is basically Rivers Cuomo in 1996, and Pinkerton is unsparing at laying out what a dick he is. There's very little mediation or self-censoring.

There's no real reason to review Pinkerton and Death To Heavy Metal together, except to use the former as a stick to beat the latter with and fight the battles of 1996 all over again, which is basically what Ian Cohen's review is all about. In 2010, Pitchfork (and therefore, whether we like it or not, much of mainstream music criticism) is all about rewarding "embarrassing" "honesty" and "sincerity," terms which all deserve their separate scare quotes. It's the only way to explain a sentence like this: "The supposedly juvenile feelings of Pinkerton still pack visceral power years after listeners would've supposedly outgrown them." Those twin "supposedly"s are an aggressive statement: juvenile feelings are mature feelings, and we do not outgrow them. (Except for Rivers Cuomo, apparently, whose songwriting now displays absolutely zero emotions.) Arguable, I suppose: Cohen's repudiating someone who isn't there, someone telling him Pinkerton is for teenagers only. This is a pretty pointless: why can't the album be both juvenile and great? Why do we all have to embrace our gooey innards or risk being accused of being, I dunno, "supposedly mature"? What's this weird either/or divide when it comes to emotion in music? This is somehow all the Arcade Fire's fault.

ANYWAY. Here's my beef: Pinkerton is a great album, the band's last. That they have failed to live up since to the kind of standards of emotional self-disclosure is not a problem, or it shouldn't be. Ragging on latter-day Weezer for not being old Weezer is sort of like complaining that, say, The Limits of Control isn't like Stranger Than Paradise: it sounds like a compelling precedent, but it's mostly completely irrelevant. There are a lot of weird things to accuse Pinkerton of: witness, say, this bizarre diatribe on how Rivers Cuomo is everything wrong with man-boys these days. There are a lot of things to love about it. But you cannot insist that Pinkerton transcends context, or eternal, or eternally pathological, or whatever: praising it for being a gapingly sincere wound (and valuing it primarily for that) is as stupid as accusing Rivers of not being a good enough guy (which is what the whole record is about). It's a rock album: it's loud and it's fun, and it's absolutely inseparable from its year.

Misc. music, 9/10

2010-09-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

• New Thermals album — Personal Life is the first one I've been able to listen to from start to finish, no problem. Normally it gets pretty exhausting pretty fast, but Personal Life has pacing, which is pretty new for Hutch Harris et al. Slow songs, fast songs, etc., less boomingly epic than Now We Can see, wiry and poised. It's taken a long time for these guys to grow on me: they're probably the only band on the planet that could cover Green Day radio hits without seeming like assholes and making even a hater like me enjoy. Despite their semi-annoying personas (all that kneejerk leftwing bitching), the fact that Harris kinda sounds like Placebo's Brian Molko and the annoying fact that the band's been known to use Twitter to score weed on tour, they're still pretty good at what they do. "I'm Gonna Change Your Life" is a nicely threatening piece of obsessiveness to open on, and it's an all-round no-nonsense piece of work. Reviews have tended to complain a little bit about the missing energy and speculate this is merely transitional; me, I get on the train here for real.

• New Eels record (Tomorrow Morning) is getting the usual mixed notices; it's certainly the best of the alleged divorce trilogy. Hombre Loco has its moments ("That Look You Gave That Guy," "My Timing Is Off") amidst the general melange of half-assed pastiches (Mr. E should never be thinking about Jack White, ever), but End Times was personally too much to slog through more than once. Tomorrow Morning is as peppy an album he's made since Daisies of the Galaxy, containing at least two highly enjoyable moments of uncharacteristic, nearly-hubristic peppiness. "My baby loves me!" he barks on, uh, "My Baby Loves Me." "Unlikely but true." There's also "The Man," whose lyrics are a little off (you really have an epiphany talking to a homeless guy? And you get a moment of "silent grace" from a skinhead?), but it's lots of fun. Over at Slant, Kevin Liedel bitches that the long instrumental bits (Mr. E somehow pulls off the six-minute-plus "This Is Where It Gets Good" with a supple, unexpected sense of menace) are borrowed from "decade-old work" by Radiohead et al., which is true but kind of irrelevant. I don't really understand why Mr. E does stuff like write concept albums from the point of view of a wolf-boy (or whatever Hombre Loco was about), or what he needs all those dinky interludes for, but all the chaff is part and parcel of the package. Point being he doesn't need originality; you just show up for the baseline pop-craft, and it turns out lightly menacing (with a disconcerting swagger) is a good pose for him.

• Been straggling through T.I.'s Fuck A Mixtape mixtape; he's in good form as ever, but that proverbial DJ just won't shut up, which is seven kinds of annoying. The skits are actually funny; the real stand-out song is "Get Yo Girl," in which T.I. quietly and semi-politely demands some get this female out of his face, on account of her being drunk, her breath smelling like Patron and marijuana (which is somehow a problem for the guy getting arrested for hotboxing just after getting out of jail, but whatever), and stating very specifically that "she's very unattractive." I've never heard a song quite like it, though my friend Andrew Unterberger suggested its possible kinship to Ludacris' "Hoes In My Room," in which an uncharacteristically non-jolly Luda — exhausted after a show and just wanting to smoke some weed with Snoop Dogg — demands to know who let these hoes in his room. But still, not quite the same thing. Relatedly, I suppose, I've had two really morally unsound misogynist tracts by Clipse — "Ma, I Don't Love Her" and "So Fly (Now We've Had Her)," which is kind of like their version of episode five of Berlin Alexanderplatz ("we call her hand-me-down"), with its unforgettably nasty final taunt "See sis? We do girl records, right?"

• I still haven't managed to make it to the end of Drake's album, but I do enjoy Mr. Rick Ross' Teflon Don, which is fine start to finish but features three particularly fun tracks. "I'm Not A Star" is awesome, "Maybach Music III" rocks like c.-1978 Stanley Clarke (those guitar solos are out of control) and "MC Hammer" — with its massive, thuggish, clobbering backbeat — is wildly entertaining, as Ross inexplicably insists that not only is he MC Hammer ("Too legit to quit"), but that means he's "about dreams," which makes zero sense. (But it's adorable that Ross aspires to be MC Hammer; not many people would admit that.) Nice one-liners too ("I'm ridin' dirty/My dick clean").

• Metric basically make music for 14-year-old girls (the fact that they're good friends with Olivier Assayas is kind of bizarre; they're so much squarer than anything else in his iTunes), but they're pretty good at it, and their two soundtrack songs this year keep the string of slick hits coming. Emily Haines is an embarassing, oft-histrionic lyricist, but she's got a pretty voice and a very technically-proficient rhythm outfit behind her, so it tends to work out OK. As they've gotten more pointed in their aggressive moments and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have added on more ballads, they're basically becoming indistinguishable. And Haines' melodrama is a perfect fit for the Twilight: Eclipse theme song, the perfectly enjoyable "Eclipse (All Yours)." Their Scott Pilgrim track "Black Sheep" is only the second-best song released under that name this year (Suckers take the prize), but it's a respectable enough five-minute workout. And it is, of course, that Metric were chosen to be in a movie with this many Canadian jokes. The soundtrack also features Beck's "Ramona," which is like a happier, slightly more psychedelic version of Sea Change in 4:23. It's the best thing he's done in five years.

Tea Party 8/28

2010-09-03T11:54:00.001-07:00

Towards the end of Glenn Beck’s 200-minute mega-church-style “rally”/sermon “Restoring Honor” — as bagpipes blared an ill-advised version of “Amazing Grace” and cameras searched the crowd for those swept away in a patriotic frenzy — they stopped on an elderly man dressed on one of those folded yellow hats so popular at Tea Party gatherings (the “1776 Clothing Company” was doing brisk business handing out cardboard fans). Seeing himself on the big-screen, he about-faced, slowly saluted in a I’ll-never-stop-serving-you-Old-Glory gesture, then returned to singing along. It was as schticky and corny a gesture of Americana as any cynical TV director could’ve hoped for, and it worked: what Gawker dubbed with cruel but acute concision dubbed “America-porn for the elderly in lawnchairs” succeeded in squandering one of the biggest Washington D.C. gatherings in recent memory. The masses (or maybe just media train-wreck watchers) wanted fire and revolution: Beck gave them nearly three-and-a-half hours of Jesus and gospel.

The Tea Party’s vaguely libertarian gobbledy-gook is familiar to me having grown up in Austin, where you can pick up Lyndon LaRouche’s newspaper at Whole Foods; Austin’s famously liberal, but my dad’s medical office was full of the elderly, peeved and well-armored, so I’ve been fascinated by this stuff for years, and really didn’t want to miss Beck’s second big march upon Washington. The first was galling in its effrontery: using a march the day after 9/11 to ostensibly “reunite the country” under the guise of Chicken-Soup-ish “9/12” values, while in fact effectively serving anti-Obama/taxation notice under the guise of extreme patriotism. For this year’s follow-up, Beck chose another loaded date — 8/28, the day 47 years ago of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, a connection that promised to be all kinds of offensive. It was, instead, a dilution of the previous year’s questionable content, if not the size: estimates vary between 300- and 500,000 attendees, but no matter how you count it the share scale of the gathering was impressive. And wasted.

Sarah Palin was billed to speak as the biggest attraction after Beck, though in truth she came and left early without leaving much of a mark. The proceedings were Beck’s to ringmaster, and consciously modeled on a mega-church ceremony: long, with an endless closing sermon, gospel interruptions, would-be-flashy videos and lots of Jesus. If an observer with no knowledge of the Tea Party or any of the speakers were dropped in, he wouldn’t see anything that alarming: the ceremony was — with a few notable exceptions — apolitical and sappily religious, the kind of thing that should cause no one alarm. But context is everything, of course, and the racial dialogue (among other things) playing out onstage was more than perverse enough to compel attention.

The birth-certificate loons have mostly subsided; these days, we have new code words to talk around race, in the same way that “urban market” means “black.” The big Tea Party buzzwords for now circle around “judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin” — which means, in fact, that we should immediately all concede that we’ve finally achieved a post-racial society, and that anyone who claims otherwise is just self-servingly trying to start trouble, and everything’s cool except that the Democratic Party is keeping black people enslaved to a welfare nation. Or something.

It’s worth conceding, of course, that while the crowd was almost to-a-man white, the Tea Party as a whole — fringe types with straight-up apocalyptically paranoid signs aside — isn’t really into racism per se; what they’re worried about, as Christopher Hitchens correctly pointed out, is learning to live in an America where Anglos are the minority, because they suspect all minorities still secretly hate them and are just waiting for the chance to rise up. (See also: the ridiculous handwringing about whether or not Machete will incite riots and racial violence, when not even Do The Right Thing made that happen.) Not for nothing do Tea Party attendees tend to be past the half-life stage; they may not be racist, but they remember enough of their parents’ oft-dubious mores, and it leaves them concerned. That’s not say that they’re racist in any meaningful way, just that what they’re concerned about preserving (“white culture”) is pretty much of no interest to many people.

Let’s give them this: the crowd was overwhelmingly polite, never once even remotely threatening. The first 80 minutes or so unfolded in more-or-less rapt silence; as things dragged along, talk turned to the incredibly foul lavatories and people exchanging contact info, but never once did incivility rear its head, despite shirts depicting the eagle of justice sharpening its talons. In the same way you could argue video games let people get their violent energies out harmlessly, it’s possible to argue that Beck’s rallies serve some kind of useful cathartic outlet, plus money for local restaurants and businesses. This will my last concession to attempted fair-mindedness.

After a brief opener from Beck, there was a woman who spoke of how proud she was when her son died in the Marine Corps (first on-stage crying: 28 minutes in) and, after a series of intermediary speakers (and a shameless attempt to get everyone to text a $10 donation right then and there, thereby marking the first of the rally’s overt ambitions to “make history” out of the sheer numbers), Sarah Palin finally arrived. True to her reputation as anything but a team player, Ms. Palin struck the only contentious notes of the day, making a passing (and frankly weak) jab at “certain people” who believe we need to have “elemental transformation” in this country, rather than “restoration.”

What she meant was unclear, and would only be clarified as the rally wore on; Beck uses repetition and microcosmic definition expansions with the droning effectiveness of a particularly boring but inexplicably hypnotic lawyer. For now the only thing that’s clear is that Palin’s entering her Stephen Malkmus period, blurting out words with endlessly random emphases and weird starts and stops, never once becoming predictable. Palin awarded badges of merit dating back to Vietnam (in passing invoking John McCain to tepid audience applause), then was on her way.

Then came another chintzy video to introduce Beck’s most self-serving idea yet: presenting “civilian purple hearts,” effectively demeaning the entire military (and the idea of military tradition as still retaining meaning no matter who the country’s at war with) he claims to celebrate. Megachurch pastor C.L. Jackson, upon receiving his, immediately noted that he’d been at the 1963 rally and that Beck was eminently in the lineage, and that he personally considered him a “son of God,” thereby settling all racial unease definitively, once and for all. But just in case that wasn’t true, there was another hour of “Hey look! Minorities!” to prove it.

First, though, there was Tony LaRusso, the first non-Palin speaker to attract a real reaction from the crowd; St. Louis Cardinals fans were in evidence, and were just as pleased to see him as they were to see the great Albert Pujols, who spoke (naturally) of his love of Jesus. LaRusso and Pujols recently publicly disagreed over the Arizona immigration law; neither seemed to fully understand the implications of where they were speaking. (Pujols seemed to think he’d received a legitimate award, proceeding to thank people that had gotten him to this point in his life.) The award was for “hope,” though it seemed to qualify more for “faith,” but also for plain sports enthusaism; all LaRusso really seemed to say was that Pujols has a hell of a work ethic, which is almost certainly true.

After one more unnotable award (awarded by proxy), there followed, basically, a gospel hour, beginning with the awful Alveda King. She’s a niece of MLK and the right’s go-to for “See? Even one member of the King family agrees with us!” King’s books have titles like “How Can the Dream Survive If We Murder the Children?: ABORTION IS NOT A CIVIL RIGHT!,” endorsed Steve Forbes in 2000, works with Priests For Life, and is generally a terrible person. She made a majestically offensive speech directly connecting the tradition of King with the tradition of Beck and speaking of the need for unity, while simultaneously decrying abortion and gay marriage — a point subsequently hammered home by the young woman who sang a song about the same subject (“Unity/you and me”). Beck rallies have absolutely the worst, most maudlin, didactic political songs you’ve ever heard in your life, comparable in plausibility to those ‘80s Wendy’s training videos. Not that anyone expects great music at political rallies, but at least John Rich’s Christmas special appearance (where he played a song [skip to about 3:45] about his grandfather’s WWII experience called “The Man,” featuring the priceless chorus lines “Cuz we’d all be speaking German under the flag of Japan/if it weren’t for the man and Uncle Sam”) was legitimately offensive.

After yet another video directly linking Beck to MLK (dissolving from the memorial then to it even more filled up today), we then proceeded through what must’ve been an hour or more of Beck just speaking, at endless and tedious length, about faith/hope/charity, the importance of Jesus, ad nauseam. The only time, in fact, that he alluded to the conspiracy theories that constitute his stock in trade, was when comparing himself to the first guy on the Titanic to spot the iceberg. He wasn’t kidding. (Aside: the worst thing about Tea Partiers is that they're convinced that they're all incredibly well-educated and any kind of argument you shoot back, no matter how empirical, is just more of your liberal brainwashing shining through. You can't argue with someone who knows everything.)

This all went on forever and ever until, eventually, the whole thing came to a tasteless coup de grace with the aforementioned bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace,” of which he less said the better. The Tea Party effectively had a chance to scare the hell out of people with the prospect of angry, unarmed (“next time”) people coming together in the nation’s capitol to wreak all kinds of havoc, then put their best public face forward to say “Look, we’re really not that scary.” That is, if you didn’t know Glenn Beck was famous largely for peddling conspiracy theories that make Oliver Stone look like a paragon of restraint — convoluted tangles explaining how Theodor Adorno and Karl Marx tried to destroy America, or something — you wouldn’t object to his mild brand of American exceptionalism. It’s stupid but not evil to insist that America is, in fact, not the victim of changing economic tides, and that we can be exceptional if we just think so (as opposed to acknowledging changing economic realities and sucking them up) — but that’s not how Beck got big.

Or perhaps you didn’t know that Alveda King — the people’s champ! — has written things in her (self-published!) books like “Many women become bitter, hurt and disillusioned by relationships and life circumstances to such a point that they forget that their dreams ever existed. As a result, many women become lesbians, prostitutes, drug addicts, or other such courses in life." And so on and so on, all the way down the line (except for Mr. Pujols, who I exempt from blame). Once you have the context, it’s all very unpleasant: white Americans coming together to celebrate not paying their taxes as an issue worth taking up arms for.

When we were walking up to the Monument, my friend joked “It’s our generation’s Woodstock!” The Tea Party, of course, doesn’t do irony, and a guy in earshot responded “It’s gonna be even better than Woodstock!” Hating Woodstock is a very big deal for Tea Partiers; it symbolizes, for them, everything obnoxious and horrible about liberals and hippies and self-indulgence. (Which, honestly, I can sympathize with.) And if that was “revolutionary” — and if this kind of gathering is as well, which seems to be the whole point — then this is the first revolution in history to be conducted by people largely aged 40 and up. For people who really hated the ‘60s and lived through it (or the fallout), this is their chance to unironically pine for the ‘50s; it’s being reactionary as revolution. Which obviously is a load of crap.

It ended, then, with Beck calling for the people to go forth from this day, infected with the spirit of Christian humility and American exceptionalism and change the world. This won’t happen, for a simple reason: if you were, say, a principled hardcore Libertarian with all the atheistic tendencies that generally includes, you wouldn’t be happy. The rally brought together all the anti-taxes crowd — but that’s all they can agree on, and frankly in the overall scheme of things Glenn Beck’s legacy will sway less electoral votes than Ross Perot ever did. And that’s just embarrassing, but also an admitted relief.

Admin/links/Tea Party, 8/22/10

2010-08-22T12:02:00.001-07:00

I keep meaning to post stuff here and then not doing it; there's so many failed drafts. But here's what I've been up to since we last spoke:

• Greencine posts on Wendy Carlos' Tron score, my totally unexpected conversion to being onboard with digital projection, and in praise of Michael Cera. I'm up on Greencine once a week (Tuesdays if we can pull it off), so think of that as one of my usual blogging places. There's more stuff coming on the way, but I can't talk about it yet.

• A fairly lengthy-ish write-up for the LA Weekly on Thom Andersen's new film Get Out Of The Car.

• I also updated my personal website's viewing logs with 8 months' worth of notes, if that's your kind of thing.

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What I've been watching: Zero For Conduct, Sacha Guitry's La Poison, 1931's French obscurity Bouboule's Gang (primitive sound filmmaking with novelty value and location footage, but definitely not Lubitsch), Claude Autant-Lara's Four Bags Full (not sure why this isn't better known, aside from Autant-Lara being damned by the New Wave; this is a terrifically dark, bold Occupation comedy, aside from the cop-out ending, and deserves to be rediscovered, not least by Inglorious Basterds lovers), Frederick Wiseman's The Store, Salt and Eat Pray Love for Sight & Sound review, Inception (seriously?), Soul Kitchen, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, 1971's The Burglars, Popeye, Kiss Me Kate (almost killed me: '50s MGM musicals are my least favorite thing), Swing Time, Flying Down To Rio, Raoul Walsh's 1953 3D rarity Gun Fury, My Night At Maud's, Ozu's A Hen In The Wind, and Rohmer's totally terrific Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle.

Read Ken Auletta's Googled. We can talk about that if anyone's game. He's way too paranoid, but it's still worth a vigorous skim.

New listening from this year: The School, Loveless Unbeliever; The Walkmen, Lisbon; Eels, Tomorrow Morning; Lloyd Cole, Broken Record; Jaill's highly recommended straight-out-of-1978 power-pop That's How We Burn, The Burns Unit, Side Show. From before: the acoustic version of Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, Wipers, Youth Of America.

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Lastly: for personal, masochistic reasons, I'll be almost certainly attending the Tea Party rally (er, the "Restoring Honor Rally") in Washington DC next weekend. Long shot here, but I don't suppose anyone would like to pay me to write about it (I'm not a political writer obv.). But if not I'll put something up here when I get back.

Admin/links, 7/31/2010

2010-07-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

First things first. Material published this week:

Charlie St. Cloud review, the first of many for Box Office Magazine. Two additional notes: using Bloc Party to signal 2005 without a date-stamp was a nice touch (I remember that album far too well), and Amanda Crews is unbelievably crushable.

Some stuff about the visual reference points of "Mad Men," the first of what's planned to be weekly bloggage on Tuesdays for Greencine. Something I didn't get into (because it'd be totally counterproductive) is that the show still isn't as good as people think it is. Point of proof number one: the first episode of what's probably the most anticipated season premiere of any show this year begins with the words "Who is Don Draper?" I mean come on Jesus etc.

A book review of Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not An Option. If you didn't know I did book reviews, I do and would love to do more. The title story really is great, the rest not so much but always has its moments.

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Re: previous post. There is apparently no way to do this right, as I heard from at least two people who said the tone was so arrogant it was pretty offensive and one guy who said it was way too self-deprecating. What can you do. The specifically offensive bit was about "amateur writers," which was placed in scare-quotes to indicate that the distinction is meaningless; whether or not people get paid for their work increasingly has little to do with the quality of said work (cf. most recently A.O. Scott recommending the work of Dennis Cozzalio, Roger Ebert and Jim Emerson without making professional/amateur distinctions, which is absolutely correct), but the way it came out may have conveyed "I'M A PROFESSIONAL AND YOU'RE NOT." Which was not my intent, and I apologize if it came off that way; I'm grateful for any/all readers. Onwards.

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Stuff watched this week: 8 Louis Feuillade shorts from 1908-13, 2005's The Call of Cthulhu, Assayas' Carlos (review pending), Burr Steers' 17 Again as prep for the aforementioned Charlie St. Cloud, and Michael Ritchie's super-awesome Semi-Tough.

Stuff listened to for the first time this week: Rick Ross' Teflon Don, Suckers' Wild Smile, Stevie Wonder's Talking Book.

Reading: Joseph Heller's Something Happened, which is pretty much killing me.

Status update

2010-07-19T22:19:00.000-07:00

Nearly a year ago, I started blogging for IFC. It's been a blast; among other things, I learned how to write at a demon-on-speed pace, and discovered more about the internet than I thought possible. But all good things must come to an end, so 566 entries and 1,353 comments later (many of those latter variants on "The author did not mention Groundhog Day and is clarly [sic] a fool"), I'm no longer blogging for IFC. Consequently, I have a lot more free time and an urgent need for work. I'm putting this announcement out there/here because hey! New media! Why not. I've learned to (not) be surprised by unexpected things taking off sometimes. It's not really my style to self-hype and beg for work publicly, so I'll just do this the once. I am actually e-mailing people, rounding up options and so on; I just wanted to cover all my bases, just in case I have fans in high places who want to give me work whose e-mail I don't have or something. I don't really know myself, honestly.

That said, I'm not completely myopic. I realize there are many, many film writers out there who are older, more experienced and better writers than me; I hit a roll sometimes, but I'm not consistent. The existence of enthusiastic "amateur writers" (i.e., as respected on the internet as anyone professional) proves that, really, I should go off somewhere, get a real job and come back in ten years. And I am looking (in a fairly half-assed way at the moment) for some kind of part-time work that doesn't involve writing, which is tricky because I don't have any real skills or experience; the closest I ever came to a real job was doing phone tech support for xBox 360 for two weeks once. (No, really.)

Anyway, I don't think anyone really gets a big kick out of this kind of online self-whoring, so I'll leave it at that (hopefully); my contact info is vadim dot rizov at gmail dot com if anyone wants to entertain me. There'll probably be more writing up in here (at least for a while) so I don't get out of the habit of writing daily, which is a good one. For the sake of value for money, here's a short list of stuff I learned about myself/online writing while blogging:

* Writing about blockbusters is fun. The name of the blog was "Indie Eye," but nomenclature's always arbitrary anyway. I'd been vaguely aware of this for a while — I never took more notes at anything than Terminator 3, I swear to God — but movies with too much money tend to inadvertently throw subtext at the wall, which is perfect for blogging. Smaller films tend to be more focused (they have to be) and demand criticism; blogging isn't criticism, unless you're sneaky about it.

* A personal voice creates the illusion of meaningful disclosure. I struggled with this for a long time, because we live in the age of oversharing and all that crap. I guess I could blame Emily Gould for this (again!), but for me a big moment was Chuck Klosterman's chapter in Fargo Rock City about how he drinks too much. I used to try to emulate this and work in all kinds of garbage because I thought it would make things more "personal" and interesting, but it's not something I'm really capable of for a lot of reasons. But it is possible to write in a colloquial, low-key way that sort of sounds like I'm telling you something meaningful about myself, even if I'm really not. It smoothes a lot over.

* If you need to make a list, use IMDB keywords. The internet pretty much runs on lists with YouTube embeds, and that makes sense: people at boring desk jobs pretty much have the easily-amused attention spans of chronic stoners anyway. I used to hate them, but I've kind of come around: if you give people the clips of stuff they already know and love (i.e., The Big Lebowski and Children of Men over and over and over until we're all dead), you can sneak more obscure fare into there. This is the best way of maybe leading otherwise reluctant people to movies they might love. Using the sketchy, uneven but undeniably amusing IMDB keywords search function is the best way to kick-start your memory.

* If someone asks you at a gathering what you do and you say "I'm a blogger," you'll immediately want to down your drink and get another as fast as possible. Trust me on this.

* "Eventually we must talk of everything if there is enough time and space and printer's ink." That's an Andrew Sarris quote Dan Sallitt has at the top of his blog, and I didn't really latch onto it until three or four months into blogging. 12 posts a week is a lot; there simply aren't 12 news items to talk about every five days, even if you stretch your definition of "news" to be as elastic as possible. What I learned is that everything is fun to write about, especially if, say, you're just over at your friend's house and Kindergarten Cop is on. Basically I learned that I can write about more than I thought possible, and that everything can be written about. And probably should.

Halftime lists

2010-06-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

Here's some cursory halftime top 10s for music and film, with brief notes:

Film

(still have yet to catch a bunch of stuff: Winter's Bone and Dogtooth are the most egregious omissions)

From previous years, released this one (minimum standard: one week run in NYC)
The Father of My Children
The only title on here that isn't a straggler from last year's NYFF, which is kind of sad. It's pretty clear to me that Mia Hansen-Løve is soon going to be capable of pulling off just about anything she wants to; All Is Forgiven is slightly preferable (it's more tough-minded in ways that resonate with me), but certainly didn't prepare me for the first half of this, which performs the far-from-negligible feat of rewriting Irma Vep as a slowly unraveling and increasingly dysphoric downward spiral — and let's not even talk about the back half, which (among other things) features one of the more remarkable teen-post-morning-after scenes in recent memory. As in All Is Forgiven, this is a film of two opposed halves, but that film elided the central event (rehab); this places it dead center but renders it completely elusive.

That said, Olivier Assayas' jukebox is more fun than his fiance's.

Sweetgrass and Ghost Town I wrote about here

Wild Grass I'm just gonna copy and past my capsules from last year's viewings to save time. I need to take a break from this movie and come back to it eventually:

1st viewing an exuberant, disorienting experience, as odd as Punch-Drunk Love (odder, really, since it's not psychologically coherent, but the colors have the same pop) and, at heart, as morbidly playful as Synecdoche, New York without the overwhelming despair. It's manic-depressive even as it's energetic, making it clear very early on how truly deranged these characters are and hinting at far worse; is Andre Dussolier a rapist? What's his dark past? (As in Private Fears in Public Places, whether Dussolier lives with his wife or daughter is left alarmingly unclear for a while.) Resnais seems to have been watching Gondry as well — there's one virtuoso, impossible trick-shot collapsing time with the help of hand-held shakiness — and impossibly inventive. Exhilarating, and seemingly infinitely self-referential: one of the final tracking shots past rows of gardens seems to invoke Night And Fog, while three smoking/no smoking posters behind Mathieu Amalric's head at the police station summon up, well, Smoking/No Smoking. (Surely there's more I'm missing.) Pretty much inarguably a major film, far from a minor final dispatch. This is not a late auteur work that needs apologies made for it.

2nd viewing, basically I realized the whole thing's suffused in death and morbidity. I'll return to this.

Everyone Else: another NYFF capsule, as follows:

My one serious objection to this movie is that it's a bit Mars/Venus-y: guys want to go hiking, girls want to go on picnics; guys want to stay home and drink in the privacy of the living room, girls want to go to the club and dance dance dance. Those are legitimate bones to pick, but this film is both general and specific, while also maintaining depicting intensely awkward and miserable circumstances in a way that's just barely on the right side of dark comedy, a serious achievement. The film's main limitation is self-imposed — like mumblecore, it's fiercely introverted, shutting out the outside world, but that speaks to the intensity of the relationship as unwisely self-contained universe. Perfectly, subtly acted; a huge leap from The Forest For The Trees. [In retrospect, I'm not sure if I should've laughed as much as I did. I will note that a good friend who's roughly 70% taste compatible with me film-wise called a few months ago after this finally reached Omaha and said he thought it was the best movie since Synecdoche, which was the best movie since Zodiac. My admiration for this film is not on that level of magnitude.]

From this year, more or less ranked:
Greenberg — an absolute lay-up, given my taste and perfect sympathy for abrasively self-blocking dudes who are their own worst enemy. (Ahem. Sometimes, though I'm not nearly that bad these days.) Plus Baumbach's sensibility (at least dating back to The Squid And The Whale — have yet to investigate the first half of his career) is very much in line with mine — I dig all those articulately self-loathing train-wrecks — so I actually dragged myself to see this at like 10 on a Thursday night two days after getting back to town after SXSW, because I just couldn't wait. Some more capsule/bullet-point stuff:

a) Some kind of a breakthrough for Baumbach; if it's not as tightly realized as The Squid and the Whale, it also offers a surprising detour from the increasingly ratcheted-up nastiness Margot At The Wedding suggested Baumbach would keep upping to unsustainable levels. Squid/Margot deal with protagonists in the process of actively scarring and damaging those around them; in Greenberg, the damage is long gone and past, which makes Greenberg a peculiarly empathetic character. Yes, he does damage to Greta Gerwig — but she's in just enough of a twenty-something funk that she's too old to get seriously wounded, while too young to really take care of herself. She'll learn.

b) Baumbach in widescreen for (I believe) the first time, which frees him up; the handheld camera has been toned down and the shots are casually sunny and expansive. It's a true LA movie, and that includes the little touches: I especially liked Gerwig's friend at the bar. Her sneering disbelief when Greenberg says he doesn't drive — "You don't drive? Have you ever driven?" — suggests the bottomless arrogance of the worst kind of Angeleno, and I absolutely recognize it.

c) Given that we spend the first 15 minutes with Gerwig, it could just as easily be called Florence; if Roger's our true subject, that's because he wears himself down enough over the course of the film to emerge at a moment where he has at least a fighting shot of beginning to fix himself, while Florence remains unchanging, for better or worse. Sporadic feminist outrage has erupted over Greenberg's treatment of Florence, as if the film were endorsing masculine dickheadedness, which is very misguided indeed; these kinds of fatally unbalanced relationships are certainly not uncommon, and thinking the movie endorses it is just nuts.

d) For all the advance word of how incredibly unpleasant everyone on screen is, this is the most easily digestible film Baumbach's made since his hiatus; much of it is quotable without context ("Leonard Maltin would give me two-and-a-half stars"), the laughs are timed evenly and the whole thing seems less designed to make you squirm. I really like this movie, so much so I don't trust myself.

Cold Weather and Putty Hill I wrote about here, and Audrey The Trainwreck was addressed here; the latter's absolute neglect on the festival circuit (unless I missed something), not to mention lack of distribution, is an absolute fucking disgrace. This is a major breakthrough film.

And Everything Is Going Fine was addressed here and is apparently due for direct-to-DVD release by Magnolia next year, which is too bad. It's my favorite Soderbergh since, I dunno, Bubble. But I'm also a morbid DFW fan, which undoubtedly plays into it.

I didn't have a chance to write about Michael Madsen's Into Eternity for various reasons, which is a shame. Briefly: this is the most formally pleasurable documentary since probably Workingman's Death (not least because it's shot on 35mm!). I'm not the kind of guy who cares particularly about social issues, so a tract about nuclear waste disposal isn't necessarily an obvious thing for me to dig, but Madsen approaches his subject in a way that's orderly, playful and gorgeous; he cops some moves from Errol Morris (one shot is pretty much directly lifted from Standard Operating Procedure) but also has a voice of his own. (The finale — a crane into the darkness of the cave with Sibelius blaring — is a boldly expressionistic gambit that pays off in impact as much as in the pleasurable shock of its sheer gutsiness.) The parts of Madsen delivering speeches timed to a match burning out are so Lynch-y they have to be a joke, and it's a good one. I hope this gets distribution; it deserves it. If you're going to make people care about depressing things, this is the way to do it.

And c'mon, how blessed is he with that name? Jeez.

Music

A really great year so far, though I'm a little behind; the left channel of my trusty speakers has fallen silent, and I can't afford new ones for a bit (unexpected moving expenses have wiped me out a bit). I suspect that Wild Nothing album is right up my alley, but we won't know for a bit yet. (Other notable listening omissions I'll catch up to eventually: Drake, Janelle Monae, Ariel Pink, Rhymefest.) That said, let's do this:

Albums

1. The National, High Violet — addressed here earlier this year. Not much has changed since then; I'm at 43 listens and counting. "The Runaway" is a little bit of a drag (I prefer the more stripped-down live-in-the-radio-station version from last year), but there's really not a weak song in the bunch, and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" is clearly some seriously life-affirming, spine-chilling shit. More than anything else, The National understand the precise weight and texture of banal depression, the stuff of workaday slogging; they're also frighteningly talented musicians who understand how to make brass arrangements carry emotional weight. Every day I wake up and say a little prayer that Matt Berninger's drinking won't get too out of hand.

2. Spoon, Transference — addressed here. Spoon are part of my life in a big way; I'm an Austin kid and, as Britt Daniel once sang, "I have your blood inside my heart." I put this on ice for a few months, but I'm listening to it again right now and it really is as fully-fledged a statement as they've ever crafted. My friend Andrew Unterberger thinks Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is basically an overly-slick exhibition of staid craftsmanship, which is nuts — but I see what he's saying, and Transference pushes the boundaries in a way that makes that album's immaculate craftsmanship look sterile.

3. Teenage Fanclub, Shadows — just when you thought this list couldn't get any whiter or blander...look. I'm as surprised as the next guy at how much I like this. I don't really know much about the Fanclub, although that'll probably change soon; I listened to Bandwagonesque quite a bit in high school (it's pretty much mandatory entry-level listening for anyone interested in '90s Scotrock), but it was a little too #1 Record for me (I'm more of a Third/Sister Lovers guy), and nothing on there is nearly as good as "Alcoholiday." Then I missed everything until Man-Made came out a few years ago, and frankly that album's a drag: the clean, Tortoise-inspired production does them no favors.

I guess Shadows isn't a terribly "relevant" album; the fact that Fanclub are still with us should theoretically be no more interesting than, say, the fact that the Trash Can Sinatras are still doing work. But this is one heinously well-crafted album, with so many highlights I've basically been fixating on two or three songs at a time and picking them apart. "Baby Lee" was my first obsession — those downward thirds on the chorus are really something else — but the fugal last two minutes on "The Fall" are out of this world, and I appreciate how "Sweet Days Waiting" flat-out steals the verse from The Beach Boys' "Forever." Some of the lines are good — "modern life corrodes us all, you know that it's true" is a nice bit — and there's a lot to love here if you love pop craftsmanship. And if I tell you I spent a hefty chunk of last year listening to Jellyfish on repeat, I guess you'll understand where I'm coming from.

4. These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid — I liked These New Puritans' first album just fine -- it had a nicely spazzy committment to being annoying -- but nothing about it suggested they were anything more than waspish provacteurs, using stupid tinny keyboards and nonsense lyrics to mock and destroy the sonic zeitgeist of amateurish dance music for indie kids. Beat Pyramid opens with two minutes of a woodwind suite (!), followed by "We Want War," which is one of the most staggering things I've heard in a while (and certainly one of the few songs that could be deemed "original"). "Beat Pyramid" wouldn't be a bad name for it, given that when the backwards-singing choir (or whatever the hell that is) kicks in at 3:50, the band isn't even getting started. It's like, what is this thing? There's some joker with a deep voice laughing; it should be cheesy, like a half-assed Joker calling card, but it's kind of chilling. The arrangement just gets more and more brass-atrophied as it goes along; it has the structural depth and fugal structure most motets would kill for, and the song's basically unprecedented. Most bands who cite classical composers as inspiration stick to Steve Reich, Erik Satie and the like; TNP cite Benjamin Britten, and I'm inclined to believe them. The rest of the album is perfectly fine, although it couldn't possibly live up to that. Most reviews have been on the "respect > love" side, which is understandable (if lazy in a universe where I have to deal with drooling Animal Collective fanboys), though it's more like it's impossible to get any work done while listening to it.

5. Broken Bells, Broken Bells — Heard the unmastered leak first, then the real thing; rarely has what mastering can do been so clear, as this is almost certainly one of the best-sounding records of the year, and for a while I just listened to it on that level. Then the songs started popping out at me as well. I love the supremely casual amble of the intro: the first 25 seconds don't really do anything but lope from some synth blurts into another typically meticulous James Mercer composition, almost as if by accident. I think (oddly enough, all things considered) working with Danger Mouse has actually loosened Mercer up; he even attempts (and pulls off!) a falsetto on "The Ghost Inside."

The other thing to note is that this is a staggeringly grim album; Mercer was never exactly a cheerleader, but here he's going on about all kinds of tiny apocalypses. (Song titles: "Your Head Is On Fire," "Sailing To Nowhere," "The Mall & Misery.") And if you watch the video for "The High Road," it's clear the newly matured Mercer -- boyish the last time I saw them live, now gray, grizzled and looking like some kind of '70s B-movie bar extra -- has suffered god knows what in the process of breaking up The Shins; he looks grizzled and pissed-off. Regardless, this is a terrific, crafty record, and a welcome comeback from a guy who didn't initially seem like a lifer but now seems to be getting comfortable with it.

6. Beach House, Teen Dream — impressive as hell, though for some reason I don't love this the same way I did Devotion. I will say that the fact that they had much more to say than their first album indicated is very unexpected and pleasing.

7. Local Natives, Gorilla Manor — a mixed bag, insofar as Local Natives are practicing a very low-stakes, almost generic kind of indie rock (and the lyrics mostly suck). But I increasingly appreciate what they accomplish inside those limitations: "Camera Talk" is a hell of a song (even if it's basically just a stupid tribute to taking Facebook pictures), and the way they cover Talking Heads' "Warning Sign" (i.e., turning it into the three-part folk rock David Byrne deliberately was destroying) is smart and impressive. Room for growth here for sure.

8. Let's Wrestle, In The Court Of The Wrestling Let's — Like Cymbals Eat Guitars, the amiable gentlemen of Let's Wrestle appear firmly convinced that the best music ever was college radio about 1995, and I'm certainly not gonna argue with them; I love that shit. The lyrics are clever ("My friends are in prison and that's where I want to go because I hate everyone") and darkly but comically morose ("They said if you want to help just kill yourself, but I won't do that"), the guitars are crunchy, the chord changes work, and the songs are short. Rock on bros; Built To Spill this ain't, but it's more fun than anything those guys have done lately.

9. Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM — not to take anything away from the lustrous Ms. Gainsbourg, but this is the best thing Beck's done in years (probably since The Information, which I dig, although his recent Record Club covers projects have definitely yielded some unexpected gems). Best bits: the dramatic strings of "Time of the Asassins" (could be slapped onto a '70s movie's opening credits with no questions asked), the playfully ominous rumble of "Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes" and the totally bouncy "Heaven Can Wait" duet.

10. Vampire Weekend, Contra — this should probably be higher up on the list, but I'm too lazy to redo the numbers. That VW could write excellent pop songs we already knew; that they'd up their game so quickly and throw in all kinds of extra fillips, arrangements and ambitions is a big surprise. This is ambitious music; the casual aura's deceptive.

Songs not factored above

Sleigh Bells, "Rill Rill" — I will get around eventually to properly considering all of Treats, which definitely seems like a year-end contender; this is the rare album that uses noise and distortion not to rock but as legitimate tools to construct sugary pop. (Rarely has an album so potentially abrasive seemed this much fun.) But first I'll have to get over the staggering greatness of "Rill Rill," a song that's the closest thing I've heard to The Soft Bulletin in the last 11 years. There's two pulsing beats, then the full-on assault of Funkadelic piano sample, bells and all kinds of other frills; like Dave Fridmann's work on that album (especially "Waitin' For A Superman"), the gap between the storm and the calm at the center creates a powerful sonic chasm. This is basically a song about a stupid Brooklyn girl running around on a typical weekend night — showing off her tattoos, cutting lines in the bathroom, celebrating facile girl power — but I could care less.

...we're at 3,000 + words. I'm gonna stop here for now.

Positive things I have written in the last year

2010-06-25T13:05:00.001-07:00

There is something very depressing about being told you're relentlessly negative. Here is an incomplete list of stuff that's either effusive or damn-near-close-to I wrote in the last year to prove I'm not Dale Peck. This bothers me; this last stands here for future ref.

Fantastic Mr. Fox review

about Jim Finn

regarding Ulrich Seidl

Reviews of Rolling Thunder and The Outside Man

Harmony and Me review

enthusiastic NYFF endorsements of Sweetgrass,
Ghost Town and To Die Like A Man

effusive praise for the True/False film festival, and many of the films I saw there

praise for Putty Hill, Mars and Cold Weather (and, later, Audrey The Trainwreck and Beijing Taxi)

Plus posts below gushing over mumblecore, The National and Spoon and a book review that got an A- and innumerable blog posts

A brief taxonomy of mumblecore.

2010-06-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

This is mostly done because various tweeps have been slagging on THE VOICE OF MY GENERATION. There will be no citations or links; I'm just going to spout off.

About the word itself: Yes, it's an annoying label, coined as a late-night bar-grumble, adopted reflexively by a press that always functions better when something can be reduced to a neologism. And yes, it sucked for filmmakers who had to answer to it (or to people's perceptions of it). Nonetheless, it'd be silly to deny that so many filmmakers who work with/act for each other's films and circle the same demographic relentlessly don't have some commonalities. It's also equally stupid not to acknowledge that this was, at most, a five-year boom; all the instigators are now spiraling out into different directions.

Not Mumblecore
John Cassavetes: Cassavetes has precisely zero relationship to "mumblecore," but he kept getting invoked; the link, presumably, was one of a new breakthrough in "screen realism," which is a) a misunderstanding of the oft-theatrical/operatic nature of Cassavetes' performances b) stupid. The key link — one I saw Dan Sallitt make somewhere or other — has to do with changing definitions of what constitutes "realism" on-screen.

David Gordon Green: Cited by Matt Dentler as the godfather of the genre, seeing as people in George Washington and All The Real Girls do, in fact, mumble a lot — but Green's a lush 35mm stylist, so the comparison really doesn't go anywhere very fast. It is true that DGG is a graduate of NCSA, which also produced people like Aaron Katz, but that doesn't really mean much. If Green is mumblecore, then so is Judd Apatow.

Mumblecore
Andrew Bujalski
Personal history: I'm pretty sure Bujalski brought Funny Ha Ha to Austin in 2003, when he was taking it around the country personally; I saw it in the ad hoc screening room at the back of a coffee shop, which seems about right. Never before had I seen passive-aggressive non-communication depicted with such acuity. I was sold. Subsequently, I interviewed Bujalski after the release of all three of his movies.

Stylistic hallmarks: Bujalski's aesthetic is (up to this point) based solely upon the unusual fact that he actually uses film and grain, which he loves. As the instigator and so forth, Bujalski's films are the most opaque, even if they seem to have a clear surface. In Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, Bujalski sympathetically anatomizes failures of nerve and communication without excusing them. To say that they're about white post-collegiate grads drifting directionlessly through life is like saying Cassavetes movies are about raging alcoholics who yell a lot; it's a deliberately obtuse description. (To the extent that they're about the same group of people over and over, they're not self-congratulation; they're generationally specific variations on the same failures rather than celebration of same.) If Funny Ha Ha belies its title (it's a tough watch), both Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax are increasingly Stillman-esque comedies laying bare the unofficial rules of social interaction of a generation of kids trained to be polite and self-effacing as a response to an increasingly loud, boorish and self-congratulatory society. (And don't even start with the hipster crap. When he makes a movie about kids taking acid, hooking up in gay clubs and smoking out on rooftops under the heat of the Brooklyn sun, then we'll talk.)

Criticisms: Early booster Ray Carney has (reportedly) turned on Bujalski for failing to take the brave emotional chances and conflicts of Cassavetes, which I think is code for "this isn't realism if people aren't screaming/being emotionally brave." He should know better.

Joe Swanberg
Personal history: I've seen LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs and Alexander The Last. One time at a SXSW party he asked me if I'd seen his wife. Considering I'd never met either of them, that struck me as odd. I'm friendly with C. Mason Wells, his collaborator on LOL.

Stylistic hallmarks: Almost certainly the most divisive filmmaker of the cluster, Swanberg's films are the antidote for people who find Bujalski unrealistically neutered and sexless (which he's not, but some people seem incapable of crediting the reality of anything they haven't personally experienced). There are a lot of sex scenes in his work, and I personally find them fairly unproductive; some of them (like the cutting back and forth between rehearsal sex and the real thing in Alexander) are pretty much on the level of freshman creative writing class thinking.

Swanberg has been accused — justifiably — of complete visual indifference, though with Alexander he seems to have discovered framing, lighting, etc. His work up to now has been characterized by an absolute focus on performances (lots of erratic zooming in and out for emphasis) rather than visuals, to an extent that's kind of visually unprecedented for movies that receive distribution, are seen by people that aren't the filmmaker's friends, etc.

Criticisms: Besides that the movies look terrible and have too many sex scenes? That they privilege narcissism — which is kind of true. My favorite of the three films I've seen is LOL, a supremely accurate depiction of a group of people I absolutely recognize and would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid. There's, nonetheless, something hard to dismiss about his work; the sheer fact that it irritates (rather than just bores) me suggests something.

Aaron Katz
Personal history: I've met Aaron a few times while he lived in Brooklyn. He's an exceptionally quiet dude and I have exchanged maybe 150 words with him in my lifetime. Also I drunkenly geeked out on him after seeing Cold Weather. Also I'm friends with the good folks of Benten Films, who put his first two films out on DVD. Consider my critical objectivity fatally compromised.

Stylistic hallmarks: The unapologetically rarified aesthete of the group, Katz's movies rarely look less than stunning. Stylistically and thematically, they're all completely different creatures. Dance Party USA is sort of like a Larry Clark movie without the hypocritical mixture of puritanism and lechery: it dares to consider the fallout of a rape without losing its nerve. It's also sensitive about setting up spaces where teen boys and girls can talk among themselves; I generally think it's terrific. Quiet City is also a dazzling movie — the near avant-garde interludes, dreamily abstracting the passing subway view into creamy colors, lines and dots — but everyone in it frankly pisses me off. If you want to talk about a movie that's reflexively coy, inarticulate and asexual, well...yeah. But that's just me.

Cold Weather is a whole other beast, and a very good argument for why no one should ever use the word "mumblecore" in 2010: it could (and hopefully will) be a crossover hit. It's the kind of mainstream-ish comedy that could've been slipped under the radar in the late '70s/early '80s as an inexpensive studio film (by Joan Micklin Silver, say), and it's absolutely "written" in every sense of the word.

Criticisms: I'm pretty sure everyone likes this guy. Pass.

The Duplass Brothers
Personal history: I saw The Puffy Chair in Austin with a friend who's about as good-ol-boy/frat/blond/football booster as they come, a man who spent much of his time at NYU drinking straight whiskey and generating all of his income through sports betting. He had, as a matter of fact, dug Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation while intensely disliking all of the people in it (see, it's possible! This isn't just about circle jerk clique-ishness and self-congratulation), but noted after Puffy Chair "That was like Funny Ha Ha for my people." This was absolutely correct. I also ended up seeing Baghead in Austin; I have yet to see Cyrus.

Stylistic hallmarks: The Duplass brothers have a strong interest in maintaining a traditional three-act structure (or five, depending on how you feel about it); their films have openings, middles and resolutions, along with beats. Like Noah Baumbach — who edits the hell out of his work to cover, quite successfully, its relative structural conventionality — their handheld cameras, fondness for spontaneous, out-of-nowhere jokes and superficially roughshod surface covers this off. They're the most overtly jockish, which is a good thing; the word "dude" is probably abused in Puffy Chair as many times as "fuck" is in The Big Lebowski. What they're doing is tricky — Baghead is so meta about its genre-tweaking game it devours itself in the last twenty minutes — but insanely ambitious.

Criticisms: General sloppiness and inchoateness. YMMV.

Kentucker Audley
Personal history: I interviewed Mr. Audley (nee Andrew Nenninger) for the release of Team Picture and met him at a few parties afterwards. He sent me his two latest films, and I really should sit down and watch them.

Stylistic hallmarks: Team Picture is supremely casual, a slacker comedy shot with an artlessness so deliberate it's almost, I dunno, Cukor-esque (better analogies welcome); if you think he's making a lazy movie about lazy people, you're not paying attention. I find it consistently hilarious. I don't really know what else to say, honestly; it's a pure comedy, unless you don't think it's funny. It is notable, I guess, that Team Picture is distinctively "southern" (i.e., based in Memphis) and proudly regional (it's kind of amazing how Bujalski has shot movies in three different cities while studiously avoiding showing any of the geography; he's more after a mental state of mind that can't be pinned down that easily).

Criticisms: Eh. Hold.

*********

I'm not about to start talking about post-mumblecore stuff (Medicine For Melancholy, You Wont Miss Me et al.), mostly because a) they're so thematically/stylistically differentiated it should be obvious (and if you don't believe me, try to get your hands on Frank V. Ross' Audrey The Trainwreck, which cops a lot of moves from Desplechin and Assayas, which is some kind of Amerindie first) b) I'm getting tired. Hopefully I've demonstrated some stuff about the differences between this allegedly monolithic group of of filmmakers.

Three things to refute while I'm making my way out the door:
a) Where are the minorities? Look, I know we live in a post-racial, post-Obama world (note: I am not remotely serious), but this seems like a problem about how we don't live in a post-racial world. For serious.

b) It's always about whiny 20somethings. Well: OK, you fund their shit then. Do you honestly believe that this group of filmmakers are so solipsistic, so infinitely self-regressive they just want to produce the cinematic equivalent of roman-a-clefs indefinitely? Reading interviews with all of them will review an enviable cinephilia much better informed than their big-budget confreres; it's not like they're unaware of the possibilities. But: you want to make a movie. You have almost no money. You have friends who can work with you. I mean Come. On.

c) Only the people the movies are about can relate to the movies. Sure, and only waifish Marxist gamines watch '60s Godard.

[update: d.) "I don't get the point of mumblecore," tweeted friend of the blog and all-round good guy THE FUTURIST! And yet I know for a fact that he's expressed his appreciation for Mutual Appreciation and Dance Party USA, while disliking other "mumblecore" films. Point being it's like saying "I dislike Godard and Rivette; what's the point of the French New Wave?" Not even all the filmmakers like each other; you're not obligated to either.]

"The Karate Kid" liveblog

2010-06-13T16:57:00.000-07:00

Never seen the original Karate Kid; today it's raining and miserable and I don't feel like trekking through the bullshit (and Puerto Rico Day!) to get to Winter's Bone. So retraoctive nostalgia, today you're my bitch (or, more accurately, I'm yours). Let's do this. For the record, I've never seen Rocky or any of John G. Avildsen's other fine films; I did, as a kid, inexplicably read the novelization of The Karate Kid Part II a number of times, and I also saw The Next Karate Kid, which even as an eight-year-old I knew was dreadful. So that's my background. Let's do this.

0:37: "Newark, New Jersey - September." Not the most prepossessing opening, is it?

1:57: I find it difficult to believe any sane person would object to leaving Newark and moving elsewhere — especially California, I mean c'mon. Those opening shots are depressing.

2:53: I guess it's kind of bold to start with the road trip move itself rather than setting up home, the leaving, the trauma, etc. However: Bill Conti's blaring Copland trumpets are way too overstated, the landscape is scrubby and uninspiring and how the hell did they move their entire lives in one car? Are they dead broke or what?

3:46:: Ah, palm trees. So I take it we're in California now.

4:57: I don't want to be mean or anything, but Daniel's mom seems like a real weirdo. That Noo Yawk accent is way over the top. Actually, I have to take that back: Wikipedia says Randee Heller really was from Brooklyn, and also played Rizzo in Grease on Broadway, which actually makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Macchio's bitching about how he enjoys New York winters. Miserable bastard.

6:28: I dig the neighbor kid Freddy; he seems nice enough. When you get Macchio to talk, his macho posturing about how he can kick ass with karate is actually kind of realistic and endearing. First thing that's rung true so far.

7:49: This whole "New Jerseyites in exile and pining for a return home" thing is kind of hilarious. Macchio's relationship with his mom is honestly kind of sweet. This is starting to pick up.

8:30: Miyagi already introduced, which is efficiency. Downside: he just caught a fly with some chopsticks. Is this movie consistently heavy on the stereotypes, or just sporadically?

9:32: That's one dirty fucking beach. (Which is consistent with my experience of LA, admittedly.) The Jan & Dean song is kind of fun though.

10:20: At the end of the beach scene, the slo-mo dissolve out is one of those after-the-fact slowdowns. The effect is oddly Wong Kar-Wai.

11:32: William Zabka has arrived. This shit just turned into The Wild Bunch. Too bad, it was actually kind of authentic-seeming for a bit.

14:33: I mean, Daniel definitely just got his ass handed to him on a platter and that's humiliating, but for the kids to just walk away from him seems a little mean. We all have our off nights, no? And It's not like they were doing anything.

15:55: So Daniel's wearing sunglasses (inside, at breakfast) to cover up the black eyes from the fight. His mom demands he take them off: "Are you on something? What are you hiding?" Nancy Reagan's America for sure, even though he tries to banter his way out of it.

16:20: This.

17:07: Daniel's new high school has a plaque from the Native Sons of the Golden West. I.e., these guys. From their website: "as was normative for many of its counterpart organizations in times gone by, for a number of decades, the Native Sons was heavily dominated by a tone of Anglo-Saxon Americanism that included some exclusionary membership policies. As time has progressed, those policies have long since been succeeded by forward-looking, all-embracing ones. So today, the Native Sons membership encompasses people from all ethnic segments that characterize the richly diverse general population of California." Grand.

18:16: Despite the fact that Elizabeth Shue obviously wants to bang him, Macchio still can't get any respect. What the hell.

19:43: Jeez, Shue's a cheerleader? I guess this is back when those could be protagonists without being mocked. Not anymore though, right?

21:54:: He pays for her public school lunch! How chivalrous.

23:31: Pretty much the first thing we learn about Kreese is that he's a Vietnam vet, which a) explains why he's a psychopath b) why Zabka's an asshole. That's some serious shorthand and stereotype-mongering right there. Does Big Hollywood know about this?

25:29: Macchio soliloquizing to himself about Elizabeth Shue ("I think she's beautiful") while chewing brocolli is some bizarre pint-size would-be Brando bullshit.

31:49: Dude, I would not trust this kid with my bonsai tree. Not at all.

34:07: This is basically just the generically "Asian" version of a Magical Negro. Daniel's mom works at a restaurant called Oriental Express, no less.

36:20: He comes to the school costume dance hiding in an ad hoc shower stall? Really?

38:50: Things that don't happen in PG movies anymore: a kid rolling a joint in a bathroom stall.

42:14: Less than convinced by Miyagi's prowess. His kicks seem too soft to really connect.

55:52: Finally got to "wan on, wax off." This is going real slow; aside from visiting the dojo, not a whole hell of a lot has happened. And even that was surprisingly anemic.

58:53: Seeing Macchio with Shue, one of Johnny's crew yells "Must be Take A Worm For A Walk week." Heh.

1:02:58: First at the Golf 'n Stuff Family Fun Center. Lord save us. Shue's parents are such stereotypical rich assholes, sneering at Macchio's location and fresh from the tennis court. At that rate, why is Shue even enrolled in public school? Surely they can afford better.

1:03:44: She has to teach him putt-putt golf technique? She has to hold him? Will Macchio's total emasculation never end?

1:09:20: "Man who capture fly with chopsticks accomplish anything." I'm not sure this is actually true.

1:17:40: No one warned me about Miyagi's terrifying bellow.

"Turn It On"/"Cut Your Hair"

2010-05-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: it's 1994. You're moderately fascinated by the whole idea of "indie rock," which is about to crest faster than the hair metal it was allegedly going to replace. Right now, though, it looks like it's about to take over the world; what you don't know is that in five years Pavement will be as dead as Kurt Cobain's about to be and a record contract will no longer be a matter of just seeming alternative cred-ish enough. As a dutiful, zeitgeisty representative of your generation, you're watching MTV. Beavis and Butthead are on, and they're mocking a guy with orange hair who's singing about jelly. That song will become a novelty single, and The Flaming Lips will, for a long time, seem like one-hit wonders.

But realize this: Beavis and Butthead are the audience college rock wants to evangelize, and they're the reason Stephen Malkmus never took over the world. They're aware that there's this thing going on called "college music," and they're appropriately dubious about it. This video's beyond brilliant; it's the final word on the subject. B&B sway along; 35 seconds in, Butthead stops swaying. "Uh-oh," he says, "I think this is 'college music.'" "Yeah," agrees Beavis; "you can tell because that dude has orange hair." Spot-fucking-on; plus you can also tell "because they're in a field." And Butthead comes in one more time for the kill: "How come he keeps singing about these people he knows? Who gives a rat's ass." Beavis starts mocking the song: "I know a guy! His hair is orange! He sucks!" It's about as succinct an attitude as you could have to the most self-righteous proponents of indie rock at the time: why are they singing nonsense? Why do they think their music is inherently special? Why are they on MTV, right next to Metallica?

"She Don't Use Jelly" is a totally decent song as far as it goes, which is to say it should be annoyingly "quirky" but is just crunchy and fun enough to get away with it. As it happened, Beavis and Butthead mocking it was the best thing that had happened to the Lips' career at that point, pushing the band to a new level of fame/temporary record label security. They ended up on "Beverly Hills 90210," and Warner Bros. kept trying to cross-platform them in the oddest places: it's safe to say "Bad Days" didn't belong in Batman Forever (not that anything deserved that fate), nor "Buggin'" in Austin Powers. But it's not the most obvious single on the album; that would be "Turn It On," a better song that's worth thinking about at length. [For the purposes of this argument, I'm basically going to have to ignore everything the Lips did before 1993 or after 2002. Deal with it.]

Generally speaking, Wayne Coyne is a weird but far from impenetrable lyricist; he's singing about superficially outre subjects (girls fighting robots, beestings), but he's always transparently thinking about maintaining mental optimism in a world of mortality and evil; it's Camus for indie rockers. He doesn't normally peddle satire or oblique lyrics. But "Turn It On" is sly mokcery, and thus kind of an anomaly in the catalogue; normally, Coyne is neither oblique nor mean-spirited. It's a kick-ass song, which doesn't hurt, but it's also a promo for the band.

"Turn It On" is the first song on Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. In the first verse, Wayne's just hanging: "Put your face up to the window," he tells his friend. "Tell me all about your gay folks." Fine (whatever that means). But in the second verse, it gets weird. "Put your face where we can see it/Put it on a show on cable/You can really show it all there/Turn it on when you are able." OK, so: there's an alternative music culture spreading on cable (this is before MTV went to hell) and the Lips want their cut of the money. So as a conscientious cultural consumer, right now the best thing you could do is watch TV; it will enrich you, and most specifically this (carefully unnamed) channel (which you watch "when you ain't got no relation to all those other stations") will push culture forward. This is kind of a horrible, cynical thing to say, and on one level Coyne's kidding (no band that had been playing the label game could've been that naive at that point), but he's also half serious: the band needs you to get them put into rotation. And that's exactly what happened: the song prophecies itself. (There's also the slight but real possibility that The Flaming Lips, like a shocking number of people, were generally optimistic about MTV as a force for cultural good in 1993. That didn't last.)

In retrospect, bands like Mudhoney (Mudhoney!) were supposed to be the beneficiaries and heirs of alt-rock, shaking up the record labels etc. In practice, The Flaming Lips — the last band you'd expect out of the post-Nirvana signings bonanza — toughed it out on a major label and eventually became stoner festival favorites and almost certainly one of the more profitable American touring acts. This is weird; no one in 1993 probably could've seen that one coming. And because of the peculiarly snarky nature of "Turn It On," it slots nicely alongside other meta-dispatches from the music wars. Most specifically: "Cut Your Hair."

I'd heard from someone a long time ago that when Beavis and Butthead watched "Cut Your Hair," they screamed "TRY HARDER"; regrettably, this turned out not to be true. Regardless: "Cut Your Hair" is generally considered the snarkiest meta-song about '90s music, what with all the talk about "special new bands" and the death of metal ("NO BIG HAIR"). But "Turn It On" is even more assaultive: Malkmus is being unusually direct (for him, anyway) but Coyne's pretending to invoke Timothy Leary and trippy alt-culture — in the name of cable airplay. This is a good joke, especially now that the Lips are the career band institution they are.

Gawker/HRO/Tumblr

2010-05-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

[NB: I just wrote this this afternoon because it's been preying on my mind for literally years and I didn't want to draft this and then never post it because I'm too lazy to edit it. There's a very high chance I'll be dipping in and tweaking it for the next few weeks. That said: let's rock. Also noted: as Mike D'Angelo points out, I don't "make the case that this sensibility is infecting general discourse," which is absolutely true: this is about some very, very niche stuff that has almost nothing to do with most of what's out there. This is some real ephemeral, micro stuff afflicting a tiny corner of the internet that -- demographically -- happens to be my corner, and frankly if you don't already have a good working grasp of Gawker/Tumblr/HRO I'd stop right now. Also: yes, this is a tad over-the-top and disproportionate. I acknowledge that, but that doesn't mean my vehemence isn't real.]

In the summer of 2007, due to a lot of unreplicable circumstances (long story), I was very comfortable financially without having to do much work. I was living in my very first apartment, a large, hardwood floor, nice-ish set-up in a terrible part of Brooklyn (the Bushwick-Aberdeen stop on the L, which is 13 stops into Brooklyn; I was a block from the projects). Since it was summer and I was still in college, I didn't know a lot of people; most of them had gone back to wherever they were from. So it was just me, my then-girlfriend and my laptop. Which is how I spent the summer of 2007 watching Emily Gould have a mental breakdown online.

Before we go any further, let me say that I don't have any real interest in Gould as a living, breathing human being; I say this because, judging by her Tumblr (which frequently consists of her freaking out about people saying mean things about her), she has the Google Alerts turned on like none other. I'm more interested in the language she helped create, which I personally feel is destroying the capacity for intelligent thought on the internet one listicle at a time. But this isn't really a personal thing; I'm not accusing her (or anyone) of deliberate mendacity/being a bad person. (I mean, she well could be, but that's none of my business.)

At the time, Gould seemed like a force for good. I'd been reading Gawker off and on since 2003 [IT SAID 2000, FIXED]; since I almost never have a TV, it seemed like good mental junk food and it fed into my obsession with New York City while I was still feeling stuck in Austin. Initially, Gawker was fairly phenomenal: they did snarky gossip about Manhattan media non-entities unknown to the rest of the country, creating their own mythology as they went. Then Gawker seemed to be jumping the shark (although in retrospect they weren't even close to their current nadir); it was unclear what they were focusing on (the site basically devolved into reblogging bullet points with commentary), and the schtick was getting calcified. Gawker went from a site with a narrative to a site selling only one thing: its voice. And that voice was, for a while, Emily Gould.

What Gould was doing seemed like a reasonable response to the position she'd been placed in: she would write completely bullshit posts about her personal life (accurately tagged "Emily's LiveJournal"), then she would engage in what seemed like passive-aggressive sniping against evil Gawker overlord Nick Denton (the Rupert Murdoch of New Media), and in the last two weeks -- after giving notice and serving out her term -- she went totally bats. Before Twilight and Teams Edward/Jacob, there was Team Emily in the Gawker comment squadron. The best part? No one in the real world cared at all. It was the most entertaining teapot tempest ever. (Aside: blogging at the pace Denton demands takes incredible mental stamina and the ability to write literately fast, which is one of the harder things you can do day-in/day-out. It's hard to really hate any of the Gawker writers per se; they're all clearly people of above-average intelligence hired to do basically demeaning work.)

With all the fun, I failed to notice the real point: Gould came up with and perfected a house style that Gawker now ruthlessly imparts to all its writers, to a degree that's kind of incredible. It's easier to imitate than explain, but basically it's passive-aggressive finickiness disguised as wit. Contractions are generally avoided, giving the prose an affectedly flat cadence that seems "deliberate" and "not like it was written in ten minutes to meet the insane post quota." Punctuation is soiled with great regularity; question marks are used where there's no question, exclamation points proliferate like a five-year-old shouting. The oddly childlike nature of the prose -- its deliberate suggestion of faux-naivete -- blends snark with tweeness, which is about as bad a mixture as I can think of. Chuck Klosterman got the tone absolutely down: "If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure."

The problem with this kind of writing is that it precludes actually writing anything funny, or surprising, or fresh. It's an updated version of the problem George Orwell nailed in "Politics and the English Language" (which I realize may well be the most overquoted essay pulled out by anyone complaining about bad writing, but it's still the best): "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." This language isn't slovenly, but it's self-satisfied even when it's blatantly terrified. Example: a few months ago, a blogger synopsizing "The Hills" -- apparently mandatory for any website that wants traffic -- referred to it, pseudo-humorously, as a "Pynchonian text." This literally makes no sense, and there's no bullshit analogy she pulls out to extrapolate or justify it; it's just a reference whose sole function is to say "Look! Although I'm blogging about 'The Hills,' I'm actually a serious, literate person exercising my analytical/linguistic skills in the name of frivolous careerist bullshit so that someday I can write about something I care about. Just because I like this show doesn't make me an idiot." Which is sad, but doesn't make it any less annoying to read. And this stuff is all over the internet as a default style. I hate it so much: it makes personal tone a matter of robotic consistency.

Think I'm getting needlessly worked up over nothing? I'm just getting started. (Feel free to get some more coffee/beer; this is going to take a while if you have the fortitude to tough it out with me. God knows I'm sheepish about how long this is.) That, more or less, was Phase I of Language Stuff That Makes Me Hate The Internet More Every Day. (Trust me: no one hates the internet more than people who work "on" it in some capacity, and that goes double for me.) Phase II arrived with Tumblr, the easy-blogging format that actively celebrates incoherence, illiteracy and using loooooooots and looooooooooots of vowels and CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASISSSSSS in the name of "sincerity." The company's public face -- its optimal user, its alpha and omega -- is one Meaghan O'Connell, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice person but whose writing makes me want to claw my eyes out (or maybe just spill coffee on her iPhone, not sure which). At the top of her blog it says "Life is hard. Here is someone," which sounds nice and maybe like hard-earned wisdom -- life is difficult, here I stand with existential fortitude ready to battle it out -- and then comes falling apart with the sub-hed: "My name is Meaghan O'Connell and I am 25 and I live in Brooklyn and work for Tumblr and here goes nothing." All the Emily-isms are there: the deliberate overuse of "and" as a cutesy affectation (what those of us who sweated it out in Latin learned to refer to as "polysyndeton," technically), the conflation of name/location/technology as an emotional statement, the implication that we're just getting someone's bared soul and something brave is happening here.

If Emily Gould made "oversharing" fashionable (or controversial, or at least a buzz topic, or maybe just a stupid word), she was at least trying to write about it directly and clearly. Tumblr ups the ante, throwing every piece of moronic internet jargon and slang into the mix, shaking vigorously and downing the whole sewage cocktail with relish. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time close-reading this stuff or providing examples: it mostly speaks for itself. Meaghano (Meaghano!) would like you to believe that this has a lot to do with David Foster Wallace (a common delusion among Tumblr practitioners). Hence posts like this (there's way more where that came from, trust me), which invite us to contemplate that DFW's polemics against irony/investment in being honest and kind even when it's difficult/unfashionable have finally blossomed amidst a thousand dancing-cat .gifs.

Because that's what Tumblr comes down to. There's a vile sub-section of Tumblr-istas who I'm not going to name because they're crazily vigilant about monitoring themselves and prone to throwing long, maudlin fits about "people being mean on the internet" and so on and I don't need the trouble, but here's what they do: 90% of their posts will contain some kind of image (frequently animal based), LOLCATS-speak and/or songs that are "meaningful" that they have a lot of "feelings" about. (The fact that the word "feelings" has been rebooted as something inherently positive is completely insane, but let that pass.) Or they'll talk about "The Hills." Or whatever. But then -- like an '80s sitcom in sweeps season -- there will be A Very Special Post occasionally, about something that's clearly emotionally important to the person writing, generally concerned with a) a past relationship in its failing stages b) childhood traumas and fears remembered, frequently family-related c) getting drunk and experiencing a mental breakthrough. The prose will often emerge like a groggy, hungover New Yorker refugee: the prose will be "terse" (or someone's idea of terse), frequently in the present tense, laced with heavy doses of the maudlin and faux life lessons wisdom. We are then supposed to applaud the Tumblr person, who has proven that they can skim the tides of crap pop culture without losing their intellectual/moral seriousness; they're just saving themselves for the big moment, when they can speak for a generation.

It's all pretty terrible.

Let me be unambiguously clear, and perhaps unnecessarily harsh: if there was some kind of hypothetical scenario in which the late and sorely missed (we need him more than ever, honestly) DFW was invited to sit down and contemplate the contents of our leading Tumblr-ists/-istas, there's a 99.7% chance he'd be appalled at the spectacle of people congratulating themselves for sharing every last thought they have, especially the heavy emotional ones that they haven't really thought through. Among other things, Tumblr celebrates drunken babbling and deep feelings; it prefers them, because it's "sincere." (In other words: the bloggers may want to be DFW, but mostly they're an even shittier Dave Eggers.) And this is stupid; it's the opposite of rigorous self-contemplation. It's narcissism disguised as something brave and positive, and as community-building. Worse yet: it's actively corrupting the minds of potentially decent writers, turning them instead into little more than riffers of the moment.

Now: am I saying this is Emily Gould's fault? OK, maybe it is a little (although I doubt she thought people were going to be looking up to/imitating her). But this Phase II mixture is way more toxic than her original brew because it's perilously close to being completely incoherent; when you start labeling the paterfamilias "LOLDAD," it's time to pack it up and go home. It celebrates the worst of the internet as its crowning achievement, and it's freakishly self-righteous in the process.

This, finally, brings us to Carles and Hipster Runoff. The Carles "project" basically involves pissing all over everything, all the time; it's kind of hilarious. What Carles does is talk about "relevant" music and what we can sloppily shorthand "hipster lifestyle choices and accessories" in a deliberately obtuse tone, combining newly coined words with text speak and daring you to take it seriously. His biggest weapon: scare quotes, deployed frequently. He knows what he's doing though: he doesn't vomit them up as randomly as the Gould-ites and Tumblrs use exclamation points. What Carles has figured out is that putting scare quotes around even something so ordinary as, say, "going to a movie" points out how self-conscious someone who's invested in a "lifestyle" can be about how every decision and action they take will reflect on them. This is a reasonable thesis. (The fact that Carles predated the rise of Tumblr and accurately predicted what it would develop into is kind of remarkable.) His use of text-speak isn't celebratory; it's openly derisive and vaguely terroristic. It's an appropriately contemptuous response to the state of things; the fact that the Tumblr-ites have appropriated some of his language (especially the practice of using "bro" as a suffix -- cf. "dadbro") without seeming to get the joke tells you everything.

I used to really despise Hipster Runoff -- it seemed unbelievably self-loathing -- but lately it's grown on me, especially when "Carles" (or whoever's manning the helm; he, too, has a house style that can be learned) just riffs on "news reports," taking the logic Gawker has adopted (i.e., that the art of media aggregation and commentary is one of style rather than actually contributing anything to the conversation) to its logical conclusion, refracting everything through one myopic lens. The difference is that Carles' lens is actually funny, while Gawker is just a deeply cynical exercise in seeing how many hits one alleged photo of Britney Spears getting drunk can rack up. This basically destructive attitude has alarmed some people: in a long, breathlessly sincere missive on the subject, Nick Sylvester seems to literally propose that this kind of attitude will filter down to the children of current hipsters and deprive their childhoods of joy (" Why won't you let my kids be kids? They will be the better for it. And you were too--and I'm so sad you don't see that. I'm so sad you don't remember how fucking hard it is, being that age, not knowing fuck-all how anything or anybody works, let alone yourself."), which would be fair if it weren't the case that 99.9999999% of the global population will never come within striking distance of the site. Once again, allying yourself with emotion for its own sake gets the better of a writer who clearly is not without talent.

And so personal internet writing in 2010 is an unholy beast indeed, combining bad slang, sloppy emotions and an alarmingly monolithic sensibility (allowing for regional deviations). I don't have a constructive suggestion for any of this (plus in the Big Internet Picture I'm basically a nobody, so who cares) except the obvious: write often and try to improve, think hard, learn to create unflashy but not putridly functional prose that will allow you to express yourself lucidly. All of which seems to have gotten lost somewhere, which is why Emily Gould haunts my dreams: like Morrissey, she started something she couldn't finish, but other people are perfectly happy to finish it for her.

The National, High Violet

2010-05-15T19:18:00.001-07:00

Last year, The National released "So Far Around The Bend" on the Dark Was The Night compilation; they stated it was a one-off, a musical direction they wouldn't be pursuing any further. With its elaborate Nico Muhly arrangement and jaunty, near-syncopated bass-line, it's by far the cheeriest song they've ever released, flute solo and all. The lyrics firmly sketch out what being moderately successful but constantly depressed in New York feels like; the key chorus line is "Now there's no leaving New York." The song isn't pulling the old trick of juxtaposing something appalling with incongruously peppy music; instead, what it suggests is that getting pumped about your dejection means you're doing it right and are not alone. The National make depression fun. Their shows are the opposite of the pin-drop reverential silence Tindersticks command, with an audience primed for — as Matt Berninger sings on High Violet — the "summer lovin' torture party."

With the exception of their debut album and about half of The Virginia EP, The National have never released an inessential album: they're capable of pretty much everything but happiness. After sublimating the occasional screaming fits of Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers and Alligator into the coiled restraint of Boxer, something had to give. The result is High Violet — their fourth album that's inscrutable the first time you hear it and grows more insidious with every listen.

Tonally, the closest antecedent is the Cherry Tree EP: the stalker-ish "All Dolled-Up In Straps" and brooding "Cherry Tree" are among their most dramatic material but don't even begin to prepare you for the sonic mess here. The difference this time is that the songs aren't concealing their hands the way The National normally do; this is full-blooded maximalism, to an extent that's disconcerting. When they played opener "Terrible Love" on "Late Night With Jimmy Kimmel," they appeared to have taken a page from the U2 playback; the guitars had The Edge written over them, and it seemed way over-the-top. On record, though, those guitars are more of an obfustactory squall than anthemic propellers. "It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders," Berninger repeats — a hell of an opener, and an announcement that the oft-elliptical-but-basically-clear lyrics of The National have finally reached a divide in which very straightforward, potentially embarrassing statements alternate with blatant nonsense. Berninger's coining words like crazy now: "Bloodbuzz," "Lemonworld," "Vanderlyle." It suits him.

So The National aren't interested in repeating themselves. Hence it's a schizoid record, split in half, a journey from confusion to clarity. If it were an LP, the break would come after the reasonably straightforward "Bloodbuzz Ohio"; the weird but clean guitar tone that opens "Lemonworld" (which, god bless them, features something that might quite possibly be a bandoleon) announces we've made it out of the haze. The mix gets a lot less overwhelmed at that point.

The two densest songs are "Terrible Love" and "Little Faith," both of which might give you pause the first time you hear them. If you were already inclined to dislike The National, you might uncharitably deem them "florid." With its swirling cello, minor keys and muttered depression ("Now I'm stuck in New York and the rain's coming down"), it's lushly dark. One of The National's traditionally-blue-blood-named women is present, of course: "Don't be bitter Anna, I know how you think." (Would that be the first album's "Anna Freud" perhaps? But related to Karen and Ada all the same.) The capper to that is a rare straightforward rhyme: "You're waiting for Radio City to sink." The city's drowning.

Water's everywhere on this record: "you must be loving your life in the rain," Berninger tells what I take to be an absent lover on "England." The opposite of water (both bodies of and/or precipitation) is The City — assuredly New York. It's strange to think of this as a "summer record": it's not breezy, or dancy, or celebratory, or any of those other things we associate with sunny jams. But it's an honest reflection of what it feels like to slog through an NYC summer at its worst.

Though some misguided types would have you believe The National are just dressed-up blank rock or Nebraska brooders (the fact that they covered Springsteen confirms some people's worst suspicions), on High Violet the band sounds slightly less sui generis and mildly more attentive to outside influences. Two in particular stand out. One's a certain strain of Copland-esque Americana, where the held notes of horns or woodwinds conveys the infinite promise of a wide open prairie etc. etc. You hear it all over the album, most notably in the horn bursts and undertones of "England." And though Boxer had a lot of arrangements, High Violet always flirts with excess: at times it seems the band is not so much playing with an orchestra as that an orchestra has The National playing alongside. (The "worst" track — there's no true bummers — is "The Runaway," if only for the simple reason that the live radio version that I lived off of for a year is already perfect in its simplicity; the cello on the album version is fine but unnecessary, and Berninger's vocals are inexplicably slightly more restrained.)

The other influence, oddly enough, appears to be the lovely British band Doves, or at least someone like them: the strings of "Little Faith" vaguely resemble the strings (and, more importantly, atmosphere) of "The Man Who Told Everything," while the ethereal "Conversation 16" — with its major chords, back-up singers and vaguely electronic feel — floats like the band at their most stripped-down.

What else? There's the usual depressed zingers, more than you can handle ("Keep my head in the oven so you'd know where to find me" on "Conversation 16" is a particularly good one), and some of the non sequiturs hit the mark with Malkmus-esque accuracy ("We'll play nuns versus priests until somebody cries" on "Little Faith"). There are looped outro vocals, suggesting someone in the band's been listening to Animal Collective. There's "England," which sums up the depressing suspicion that someone you love is having sex with strangers in a foreign country better than anything I've heard. There's humidity, despair and — ultimately — the suggestion that the best rocking comes when you're too depressed to focus on anything else. The National may be the best band in America right now.

Spoon's Transference

2010-04-03T14:49:00.001-07:00

Spoon, Transference -- transference, of course, being the Freudian idea of something reminding you of a past event whose past, inappropriate needs and emotions are transferred to the present. Something like that. Point being, transference is an emotional experience, and Transference is accordingly Spoon's most emotionally direct album, and certainly the most so since Girls Can Tell. The occasional personal interjection aside, Britt Daniel generally prefers being the narrator rather than the protagonist; first-person songs are rare. But on Transference, almost every song is, at least ostensibly, about him. "Before Destruction" has him looking at the girl who walks away: "Just as you're leaving you turn around and take a cold shot." The nature of love is then worked on very literally in the spritely "Is Love Forever?," probably one of the bounciest songs they've ever done but earnest as can be, playing upon childhood fears of being abandoned in the supermarket as a metaphor for every kind of abandonment. Then there's "The Mystery Zone," Britt Daniel's version of Springsteen, 5 1/2 minutes in search of danger in a place "where your dad's not around" (that would be adulthood). The game-changing goes on and on; this makes Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga look staid.

What's constant is the personal emphasis — the "I" that keeps getting rejected and panicky; Transference is all edge, but it's not particularly cool edge. "I Saw The Light" has Daniel especially frayed. It's a tense jam, a nebulous escape from "the walls that tie me down." Most of the time, Daniel's singing about emotional uncertainty and needing love. "Is Love Forever?" is a real question. This, hilariously, led Coke Machine Glow reviewer Chet Betz to bitch about how "it’s difficult to avoid letting rumors of Britt’s mackscapades taint one’s perception of the theme here (CMG’s got friends you never called back, Britt [or just creeped out])." Whoops, though it hardly seems to matter. As always, Daniel's lyrics can be cryptic, hoarse and disconnected: his own personal vernacular is a code that's possible to crack, but where tone is easy to pick up on. (Daniel's been known to say his lyrics are chosen for their slot-filling sound rather than meaning; he's a liar.)

There's two landmark songs for Spoon here. Daniel has for years referred to the "Golden Motown sound" as a guiding influence in his songwriting -- which may well be true, but I've never been able to hear it before now. On the calm, collected "Who Makes Your Money" (a song so implacable the main action is some bass-guitar harmonies halfway through rather than any melody), Daniel practically sounds like he's levitating; he's achieved the serenity he's previously denied himself. (Btw, referring to Spoon as an "experimental" band is stupid. Just because they're careful with their sounds doesn't make them fucking Animal Collective, c'mon.)

But "Out Go The Lights" is the real stunner, the kind of song that could make you cry on a bad day. Daniel's attention towards his crush is heartbreaking: he's lovestruck but not stupid enough to spill his guts. He sees her in fragments — "standing there in my black wig" — and doesn't tell her too much about exactly how he feels; the feeling's overwhelming though. It's as vulnerable as this most inscrutably cool of frontmen has ever gotten. She's a mess too, one of those girls who "made it where most never been, all fixed up outside and broke within," just like "Don't Let It Get You Down"'s Kate; for this unnamed girl, "they fall for you like a brick," but "nobody woos you when you're down and kicked." For all Spoon's cool patina, the loneliness is real. I have a feeling the title will work with me transferring everything from this extremely weird first quarter of 2010 onto the record and having it flash back on me in years to come. This is a major record, not a minor transitional one.

THE MAGUS liveblog

2009-11-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

Context: The Magus is a really annoying novel by John Fowles that took me nearly two months to finish. First published in 1965 and re-issued — in a substantially-ish revised version — in 1977, Fowles' novel is ranked #93 on the Modern Library's semi-reputable 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. It has a fantastic opening paragraph:

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

The first 40 pages are just as precisely written, and would make a perfect, self-contained short story: callow Nicholas Urfe's love affair with your ultimate '60s free spirit from hell. But Urfe conceives of himself as an intellectual/sexual libertine-superman type, and things end badly when he ditches off to Greece. After this there's about 500 pages of tedium as Urfe is drawn into the deranged games of one Maurice Conchis in a set-up that basically resembles David Fincher's The Game except really tedious and laden with Greek mythological allusions. Urfe keeps being a jackass because of his sexual vanity, and eventually he's judged at a trial where lots of Freudian claptrap is spewed at him ("Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject's specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he had evolved" etc. etc.), after which he goes home and becomes a better human being who can maintain monogamous relationships. Aside from the opening, it's all rather silly and badly dated; Fowles is good at anatomizing discontent to early '50s Britain that pre-dated swinging London (and Conchis' narrative of his own life is good fun), but it's all rather portentous and sexually hysterical. But I suppose this is regarded as a classic of sorts for whatever reason.

Having read all 656 pages, I felt it was incumbent upon me to watch at least once the legendarily awful 1968 film, which Fowles despised and flopped; Woody Allen noted that if he could live his life over again, he would do everything the same again, except see The Magus. This should be fun.

1:13 - thrilling opening shot panning about 270 degrees through some truly stunning mountains, plus cheesy ominous music and faux-Greek lettering font, zooming down onto a yacht — establishing both the landscape the game will play out on and alluding to the yacht Conchis keeps the twins on. Neat.

3:44 - "No women on this island." "Good." "Good?" "Good!" Caine in full hard-ass mode. Totally hilarious suspicious old Greek ladies eyeing him.

6:13 - "What's wrong?" Caine stoically kicks a soccer ball instead of saying anything.

8:35 - "I've got everything a poet needs except poems." "I've got everything an air hostess needs except illusions." Twin souls!

11:36 - "Eerie" vibraphone solo. Please.

23:21 - In a flashback, Anna Karina is explaining to Caine that she always takes a paperweight with her everywhere because it somehow consoled her after an abortion three years ago. She is saying this over incongruously peppy Mancini-type music.

35:44 - The actor who plays young Anthony Quinn is ridiculously and unnecessarily awkward. The whole army desertion plot is cut. Young Candice Bergen is, as always, super hot, but a terrible actress to ask to play just with her face. She's way OTT.

36:03 - Anthony Quinn just speared a squid.

37:48 - This is probably the least dramatic way possible to stage a guy running around an island looking for someone. Didn't anyone see L'Avventura before they started? Jeez. It's as bad as Southland Tales' "Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)" sequence.

41:14 - Caine: I can either pinch your bottom or kiss you. Which shall it be?

46:24 - Karina: "Oh Nico, this is life, not an existentialist novel!"

47:48 - She gives him back the paper-weight. "I don't need it anymore." Bad judgment, Karina. Look at that smirk.

49:31 - This is really boring and annoying so far, but I'll admit they did the locations perfectly. No one could possibly visualize them differently. Seriously.

54:22 - First character introduced who has no correlative in the book.

1:03:52 - Anna Karina naked. First thing to justify an R rating in 63 minutes.

1:16:15 - presumably to save time, they've cut the twin sister and made a leap from girl-as-ghost to schizo and then actress, with Caine an unconscious improviser for a script they'll right. Eh, OK.

1:22:42 - as Caine receives news of Karina's suicide, a herd of black goats walk past his window.

12: 09 AM - taking a break to make a late sandwich and read the New York Review of Books. This movie is so immensely dull. Even worse than the book. Under half an hour to go, thank goodness.

Pitchfork live-blogging

2009-07-19T14:35:00.001-07:00

5:35 PM: Hello. Festivities begin shortly.

5:42 PM: So yesterday, sucking up how stupid and odd it felt, I stayed inside, drank up and watched The National play the closing set of Pitchfork, Day 2. It's fair to say it's the only transcendent internet experience I've had. The quality of streaming live sound/video has improved immensely since the last time I checked. So hey: today The Walkmen, Grizzly Bear and The Flaming Lips are being streamed, in ascending order of me caring about the performances. (Would've started earlier, but there were router problems.) Time for some meta-fun with concerts.

Just so the set-up is clear: I live in a three-bedroom apartment with roommates. My particular room wasn't even a room two years ago (I checked with someone who lived here before my time), because it has no windows. Now there is a "window," i.e. a frosted-over pane of glass that can't be opened for ventilation. It's pretty hot. The room's about 8x8 and my speakers are more than good enough for this. I have more beer than anyone at Pitchfork right now, and I don't have to stand in line for the bathroom. Let's rock shit up.

5:47 PM: Every Thermals song sounds the same to me. I love "No Culture Icons" and "Now We Can See," but that's about all I need. I don't how rocking this would be even if I was there. Hutch Harris' pink polo shirt and hair very Stephen Malkmus in 2007. Not really paying close attention right now.

5:50 PM: Wondering who this is for. I mean, I'm dedicated and enthused enough to sit in my room and do this all day, and obviously it's great free advertising for the festival, but it's not even a good time-killer; not too many bored people at work right now. Curious.

5:51 PM: Holy fuck. Green Day. I hate this song (overexposure), but I dig this rendition.

5:54 PM: Straight into "No Culture Icons." Excellent.

5:55 PM: Sounds like a totally different song without the lo-fi scuzz. I actually like it better as a high-compression, low-dynamic range clusterfuck, but this is still pretty awesome.

6:01 PM: "Now We Can See" still rocks, but I'd be cranky if I was there and sat through 35 minutes of songs I didn't really care about to get to the singles, which is all I care about. Still, the Green Day-"No Culture Icons"-"Now We Can See" trifecta a hell of a way to close. Now they're playing 2007's Spoon "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb." Saw this yesterday. Surely they have enough archival footage to last the weekend, no?

6:09 PM: So I've always heard The Walkmen are excellent live, but they're only a second-tier band for me; I'm not willing to pay the elevated prices they command now, so presumably this is as close as I'll ever get. I presume they play "The Rat" last, and hopefully they'll have horns with them? Hamilton Leithauser's always looked like a jock who accidentally sings like Bob Dylan to me. We'll see.

6:13 PM: Sparks ad. Gross.

6:15 PM: Leithauser not remotely amused by the beach ball situation. I don't blame him. Grow up.

6:19 PM: Yeah. Still can't tell most of their songs apart.

6:27 PM: Takes major cojones to launch into "In The New Year" for just the second song. Certainly they don't fear burning out early. Leithauser's practically acting the song out. His right neck vein is just bulging out. Just before launching into every chorus, the rhythms are stretched out a little on guitar; it's a little more expansive and less metronomic than the recorded version. AV Club twitter feeds say the mix is wretched up front, but it sounds excellent from here; another win for the internet. Also, just realized not being there means I don't have to hear Tim Tuten's atrocious intros. (Is he still being inexcpliably invited back?) Internet: 2, Reality: 0.

6:31 PM: Whenever he's not singing, Leithauser looks like he's about to punch someone.

6:34 PM: Did he actually just use a song break to tell a whole group of people annoying him to burn in hell?

6:38 PM: Had to check the song title, but this live "Canadian Girl" is excellent. A little soft-rock in the bassline, which is unexpected. The horns have arrived. They look like refugees from the high school jazz band, god bless 'em.

6:40 PM: Oh shit. "The Rat" isn't last after all.

6:43 PM: Always assumed they'd massage out that tempo slowdown for the middle of "The Rat" live, but it's as awkward as ever. How do they feel about this song anyway? If memory serves, they were "assisted" by the label into making what's easily their most commercial song ever.

6:44 PM: First major internet problems. Missed the end of the song. Fuck.

6:47 PM: Seven horns! More than The National.

6:51 PM: "Dónde está la Playa" now in E-flat major instead of D-flat major. Sounds a lot warmer.

6:56 PM: "Nice having the trumpet players back. We haven't had those in a while." Cue for "Louisiana"? I think so.

6:58 PM: Inadvertent, but post-Katrina, this song is more haunting than ever.

7:03 PM: I misremembered; the album actually came out after Katrina. Maybe it's deliberate.

7:06 PM: Yeah, I don't like these songs enough to be paying close attention anymore. I'm sure it's great there, but unless they play "Long Time Ahead For Us" (which will never happen), I'm basically tuned out.

7:08 PM: Never mind. NEW SONG.

7:14 PM: New song quite nice, vaguely Christmas carol-y, as with much of their material. Set times apparently running so tight Leithauser's unplugging his guitar *before* the song is over. Don't care about M83. Time to make dinner.

8:10 PM: Typos cleaned up. Dinner consumed. Checked the M83 set briefly, seems nice but nothing to reckon with online, still don't care. Clearing head with extremely white jangle-pop more overtly hooky than anything I'll hear for the next two hours. Saw Grizzly Bear with basically rasa knowledge two years ago at Pitchfork 2007, where they completely blew me away. I haven't been the biggest fan of Veckatimest — so dense and hard to sift into its component parts — so maybe this'll clarify things.

8:18 PM: Sound dropped out during those awful Art of Thumb-Fu commercials, which aren't perhaps "racist" per se but hardly much better than, say, this.

8:23 PM: Grizzly Bear open with their opening track. Fair enough.

8:30 PM: Considering how many instrumental/vocal switch-offs there are, their relaxed poise and casualness is remarkable.

8:32 PM: Is that Michael Ivins watching from stage left sidelines? As impassive as ever.

8:33 PM: Two songs in ten minutes. This will be the slow, deliberate set.

8:37 PM: The fact that they're able to play "Lullabye" live at all is amazing. Flute, clarinet, auto-harp...good lord. Watching them work through it really does help you know how to listen to it. Still mesmerizing, but it's still from Yellow House. Still murky on Veckamitest.

8:43 PM: Parts of "Little Brother" (the bridge, if you can even call it that in such a meandering song) definitely sound like Clouds Taste Metallic-era Flaming Lips. That fragmented stomp and the hugeness of their sound, which is amplified so much live (even over the internet).

8:48 PM: Song performance count: Yellow House 3, Veckatimest 2. Mostly this is just proving the former album is much better. These still sound amazing.

8:51 PM: I can't be the only one who's curious how Grizzly Bear's "Happy Birthday" would've gone.

8:59 PM: For whatever reason, "Two Weeks" is kind of flat live. Drums aren't loud enough, keyboards are too thin. It was brave of them to start it while the monitors were dead, but this needs rethinking maybe.

9:03 PM: Need to re-up some supplies before the Lips, and Grizzly Bear are failing to hold me completely spellbound. Brief break.

9:47 PM: Chemical assistance on the roof from neighbors. Perfect mood for watching people bop out to balloons while "Race For The Prize" blasts. 17 again, in a good way.

9:50 PM: Is Wayne just talking endlessly to cover up for the fact that they're not actually going to do a request set?

9:54 PM: Is this a new song? Is this their new sound? Are they now a pounding psych band, back-to-guitars basics? If so, I might kind of dig it.

10:00 PM: Yes, that was a new song. There's a weird hostility in the air tonight; it's like the Lips have reverted back to their mean, surly, unpredictable 1987 phase. Wayne keeps yelling "motherfuckers." Addressing the issue of whether or not they're doing the request setlist, he defensively insists they let the fans write the night every night, then reads off the number of each song before they play it. It's like he suddenly realized the faithful might be getting pissed off at their new incarnation. He's not normally this angry. Or have I missed something in the 5 years since I saw them?

10:18 PM: I dunno. This is interesting, but Wayne seems really angry and weird today. What the hell. Is it just me?

10:22 PM: This endless acoustic rendition of "Fight Test" is horrendous. Is this just for tonight, or is this how they've been doing it live for a while?

10:35 PM: Words are beyond me. I'll insert my Twitter reactions in here later, but this show is either brilliance between the talky patches or a complete meltdown. I can't really tell.

10:41 PM: As Lips enter like the 15th hour of their "Yoshimi Vs. The Robots Pt. 1" rendition, me to friend on gchat:
they're strict about sound curfew at the fest, as i recall
and they have 19 minutes left.
c'mon.
for fuck's sake.

11:47 PM: I have no real clue what to say about that. A gutsy show, certainly. Aside from "Race For The Prize" and Oklahoma's State Song, seems like they did it almost entirely without tape loops, which they haven't done in lord knows how long. Wayne was defensive about the set-list thing all night, notching off no-brainers like "Do You Realize??" while reading their chart position. (News flash: #1). On the other hand, they blasted through "Bad Days" (which they apparently hadn't done in a decade), "Mountain Side" (from 1990!) and an (admittedly terrible) song from Okie Noodling they'd apparently never done live before. Their new (I presume) stripped-down versions of "Fight Test" and "She Don't Use Jelly" were atrocious, and Wayne repeated the chorus for those (and "Do You Realize??") at least two extra times, which massively shrunk the amount of time available for songs — which may have been the goal. In being reduced to just playing songs without pre-recorded sonic help, they seemed anxious to put off each attempt as much as possible. When I saw the Lips in 2003, it seemed like Wayne basically doesn't play anymore and they're dependent on loops to do a "show" rather than merely play. Which is fine, but tonight seemed like a fight for reinvention. Are these new songs an accurate indicator of a promising new direction? Is Wayne Coyne tired of being alt-rock's kindly grandfather?

Adventures In Press Kit Bullshit: MY SISTER'S KEEPER

2009-06-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

In films as disparate as "John Q," "Alpha Dog" and "The Notebook," Cassavetes has investigated the nuances of the human condition, the nature of love and free will and human dignity — all themes that resonate in Picoult's book.

[...]

Whenever possible, the production filmed in practical locations, underscoring Cassavetes' penchant for realism.

This week, 5/23

2009-05-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Movies: Ghosts Of The Heartland, a very brief Hudsucker Proxy note.

Music: White Rabbits [!. I love this album.]

Books: Home Game by Michael Lewis. The comments section is pretty fascinating. Spot the heinously embarrassing typo!

Misc.: Rooftop Films opening night recap

This week, 5/15

2009-05-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Movies: The House Next Door: Summer Hours

Village Voice: The Films of Sergei Loznitsa (at Anthology).

Music: Indie 500. I: Andrew Bird, Bishop Allen, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Animal Collective. II: Franz Ferdinand, Canadian Invasion, Junior Boys, Neko Case. III: Metric, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Doves, M. Ward, Julie Doiron, Dennis Wilson.

Slow week. Next week should be a little heavier on, you know, paid stuff.

2009-05-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Just to be clear: what this is is a place where I will post a Friday round-up of links of whatever I've done that week. A couple of people asked for this, so we'll pretend this is actually something the world needs to know. Also apparently I should have a concrete online presence to hype myself.

2009-05-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Me, Twitter: This is a perverse thing to say, but REVANCHE made me appreciate IMPORT/EXPORT that much more. I'm guessing I'm alone on this. / They admittedly have nothing in common besides one sort-of-similar character, but it threw me off for a while. Good job warping me, Seidl.

Robert Davis: @vrizov Heh, would love to see you expand on this. I wonder what Seidl is working on.

MILD SPOILERS BELOW FOR Revanche AND Import/Export, I guess. Neither is really that kind of movie though, at least in the early stages.

Import/Export was on my mind when I went into Revanche because I've already started thinking about another high-concept top 10 list. Seeing as this is the first decade I've been around long enough to do a top 10 of the decade, I also want to do an alternate 10 Most Zeitgeist-y and starting to realize I may have badly underestimated Import/Export as "just" an enormously accomplished and acidly unlikeable movie when its panoramic ambitions actually come off. Then Revanche starts with a Ukrainian hooker working abroad under unfavorable conditions, and I couldn't stop thinking about Seidl's film for half-an-hour. (At which point, she checks out, for reasons I guess I shouldn't reveal.)

Revanche was OK, but it's obviously not as magisterial as Seidl's movie (nor, to be fair, does it particularly seem to aspire to). I'm sure it's coincidence, but Seidl's unflinching portrait of the cybersex trade makes Spielmann's conception of a medium-class Viennese brothel seem like a joke, even if it's based on research. (I wouldn't know; ask my dad if you run into him in the city. Maybe I'm joking.) Red wallpaper? I got "Twin Peaks" flashbacks.

And, oddly, none of this is actually the fault of the movie, which is just fine. (If, you know, deterministic and not exactly my thing. I'm burned out on both neo-noir and rural redemption tropes, even if Spielmann spends half his time actively subverting them.) It's just that Seidl's movie has come to seem, in my mind, like the definitive pan-European film of the decade, and anything even vaguely impinging on its territory is going to suffer by comparison. I need to see that again, soon.