"The Karate Kid" liveblog

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"

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

[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

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

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

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

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?