Macromix 14

Track/ Rank

1/ 20 Perfume Genius, “I Decline”
2/ 19 Real Estate, “Crime”
3/ 18 Sun Kil Moon, “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”
4/ 17 The Fresh & Onlys, “Who Let The Devil”
5/ 16 EMA, “When She Comes”
6/ 15 Tori Amos, “Promise”
7/ 14 Death Vessel, “Ejecta”
8/ 13 Tennis, “Timothy”
9/ 12 Allo Darlin’, “Bright Eyes”
10/ 11 Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar, “Never Catch Me”
11/ 10 Merchandise, “True Monument”
12/ 9 Young Thug & Bloody Jay, “4 Eva Bloody”
13/ 8 Martin Carr, “The Santa Fe Skyway”
14/ 7 La Sera, “Losing to the Dark”
15/ 6 Kendrick Lamar, “i”
16/ 5 A Sunny Day In Glasgow, “In Love With Useless”
17/ 4 Alvvays, “The Agency Group”
18/ 3 Foxes In Fiction, “Shadow’s Song”
19/ 2 Withered Hand, “Horseshoe”
20/ 1 D’Angelo & The Vanguard, “Another Life”


That comes to a little over 80 minutes, so there won’t be a CD this year. But I’ve still listed songs in ascending order, because (1) there is a Mixcloud playlist, and (2) there could be a cassette. Any takers?

It was a very good year. Read more at Big Takeover. With a list like this one it must look like I’m asking every song to break my heart. Not so, but sometimes it happens that way.

To figure out my Pazz & Jop singles ballot just replace “Another Life” with a certain song from 2013 and condense the rest according to whether or not they were released as singles, preview tracks, videos, etc.

Some other great songs, whose parent albums I feel confident I’ll be able to recognize momentarily, were called “Spit Three Times,” “Sick Talk,” “Bomb,” “Early,” “In Conflict,” “Motion Sickness,” and “Flowers.” How’s that for associative poetry?

Angel Olsen’s “Lights Out” and St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” a.k.a. “Once in a Timeline” were halfway to being my favorite songs this year, but the former was exactly one minute too long and both lost a little momentum every time they recycled the big moment.

Some other songs I loved were Busman’s Holiday’s “Child Actor,” ILoveMakonnen’s “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday,” Against Me!’s “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” Marianne Faithfull’s “Sparrows Will Sing,” Morrissey’s “Staircase at the University,” Dum Dum Girls’ “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” La Roux’s “Sexotheque,” Nothing’s “Endlessly,” Sleeping Bag’s “Hush,” The History of Apple Pie’s “Keep Wondering,” Shamir’s “On the Regular,” Kishi Bashi’s “Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!” and every song from Terry Malts’ Insides EP and, as far as I can tell right now, Azealia Banks’ Broke With Expensive Taste.

List(ening journal)

Being a collection of music-related lists I haven’t gotten around to posting at Big Takeover as the year draws to a close.


Ten more albums for last minute end-of-year consideration

1. D’Angelo & The Vanguard – Black Messiah
The most encouraging message ever delivered in musical form in December, probably.

2. Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty
Deepens the pleasures of Black Up to an almost absolute degree.

3. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead
A full-length showcase for the Kendrick Lamar-featuring track, ’til I can get my head around FlyLo’s speed and technics.

4. Lykke Li – I Never Learn
A voice often frozen in former registers that don’t always work for the new songs, but otherwise Lykke Li knows exactly where to take her sound, starting with the opener’s bed of reverb-heavy acoustic guitar.

5. Alvvays – Alvvays
Haven’t felt so friendly toward a band since Bettie Serveert.

6. Carsick Cars – 3
Only sounds noticeably like Sonic Youth once, but you’d have to go back to classic Sonic Youth albums to find rock music as inexhaustible as this. Clearly these guys are young and/or don’t take the exhaustion of a form for granted.

7. The New Mendicants – Into the Lime
Having Norman Blake and Joe Pernice in the same band is a great thing for its own sake, and better when you realize the pairing is part of a deliberate attempt to craft the best 1965 Beatles pastiche of the current century. Songs sound like “I’m Looking Through You,” or like they could be sequenced immediately before or after it.

8. Marianne Faithfull – Give My Love to London
I’ve spent most of my time with “Sparrows Will Sing,” a squealing, rumbling beauty, with Faithfull surprisingly confident in the future. “I have no doubt they will figure it out someday,” she sings, probably telling herself a lie… but I get it, the belief in human potential.

9. Young Thug & Bloody Jay – Black Portland
Sing it, guys.

10. ILoveMakonnen – I Love Makonnen
I can do without the rest but “Tuesday” reminds me of The Rosebuds so I’ll be keeping it around.




Before & After Shows

Some albums of 2014 that I’ve only mentioned in live reviews of their respective performers. First heard immediately after the show, in most cases (a new trend).

1. Tori Amos – Unrepentant Geraldines
A deluge of new ideas, but calm and orderly in their presentation: “Her self-production is as uncluttered as modern space can be.” Or: “as only modern space can be.” Paul McCartney might’ve liked to record “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with whatever tools Amos used for “Giant’s Rolling Pin.” The winner for me is “Promise,” which has mother and daughter, both with very different notions, perhaps generational, of how a person should sing (like Perfume Genius, the daughter believes that ‘b’ is a fricative), come together for one of the most sublime melodies of the mother’s career.

2. Busman’s Holiday – A Long Goodbye
Similarly uncluttered, but made a little messy with the fever of performance. The songs, almost painfully sweet, warrant such fever.

3. Echo & The Bunnymen – Meteorites
The choruses are mostly one- or two-note iterations of the songs’ titles plus filler syllables (“Holy Moses, yeah yeah yeah, Holy Moses, why why why”) and that doesn’t exactly suggest a creative spark, but in every other way the sound of this record suits them perfectly in their fourth decade.

4. Foxes in Fiction – Ontario Gothic
A masterpiece probably. Check back for my albums of the year.

5. The Fresh & Onlys – House of Spirits
After many listens I was still putting it on and expecting a terrific noise to leap out the speakers after the intro of “Home is Where,” as if I hadn’t been tilting my head just right the previous time. It never arrived, and yet a kind of contained madness prevails, in the melodies, vocals and arrangements.

6. Guided by Voices – Motivational Jumpsuit
I could pick some favorite songs and try to anchor this as a distinct entry among their recent LPs, but that would be a pointless exercise in my aesthetic preferences, whereas the effect of the GBV reunion blitz has been cumulative, physically restorative, a series of 40-minute doses for a long-depleted listener. See below.

7. Kishi Bashi – Lighght
A man of so many talents that album programming can’t possibly be among them. And yet this album basically holds together, if only as a survey of his most dizzying recent accomplishments.

8. La Roux – Trouble in Paradise
Excellent tunes, a bit flat on the disc, needing the right sound system (First Ave) or visual aid (pink, yellow and blue lights, or the performer rendered iconic) to become a dynamic method of emotional exchange.

9. Perfume Genius – Too Bright
I’d intended to continue chronicling my experiences with Perfume Genius albums but wasn’t quite sure what to say about this one. People keep talking about the way Too Bright “destroys any lingering perceptions of weakness or frailty,” etc., a reaction I would’ve found more encouraging if it had greeted his previous album, Put Your Back N 2 It. The new listener craves empowerment. Bending the oppressors to our hushed ways would suit me better. But when I drown out the conversation there’s clearly a lot that I love here, in particular the somewhat uncertain overall design. A transitional album from a transitional figure, and thus complete in its incompleteness.

10. Pure X – Angel
A weird blend, further blended and made immune to analysis by the recording process.

11. Ty Segall – Manipulator
I’ve been on the verge of loving Ty Segall for the past couple years but the affected, emotion-canceling vocals are an obstacle I can no longer ignore. Everyone currently making this kind of music does it that way, so I’m not complaining nor expecting a change, just counting myself out until a different kind of energy or texture calls me back, as it did on Hair.

12. St. Vincent – St. Vincent
A St. Vincent first, the songs never really go beyond what they first seem to be, which didn’t matter during their spectacular live presentation but keeps letting me down gently on record. Makes sense though, that an artist would present her least porous work while taking the throne.

13. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
Song-oriented ASDIG takes some getting used to, but this is still packed to bursting with outlandish eruptions and juxtapositions, and great.

14. Tennis – Ritual in Repeat
Hold on, maybe they do keep getting better. Is there a song on here that doesn’t build to an irresistible peak? No. The music’s for everyone, even as Alaina Moore’s best lines court an audience that can hopefully keep her writing for years. “She works hard, does it all without complaining.” — “Even bad girls can do good things.” — “I knew all the love songs.”

15. Tune-Yards – Nikki Nack
I still feel comfortable leaving it to other people to praise them, but just barely this time.

16. Wussy – Attica!
I want to love them the way I love Yo La Tengo but a sustained interest eludes me. Still, an inescapably great band in any objective sense.

17. Wye Oak – Shriek
Their best one yet.




The Ten Best Albums of … 1994

I spent about five minutes on this and am pretty happy with the outcome, so won’t spend too much time worrying about what I’ve accidentally left out. Please imagine I found room for Blowout Comb.

1. Guided By Voices – Bee Thousand
2. Hole – Live Through This
3. The Notorious B.I.G. – Ready To Die
4. Global Communication – 76:14
5. Massive Attack – Protection
6. Sugar – File Under: Easy Listening
7. Blur – Parklife
8. Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
9. Kristin Hersh – Hips and Makers
10. East River Pipe – Shining Hours in a Can




Heapo: also a place I would shop.


Alternative Top Ten

The best stuff I heard for the first time and/or started seriously listening to in 2014, regardless of original release date. The stacks of used CDs have been piling up, composed mostly of 90s hip-hop (to choose just one: Mecca & The Soul Brother) and art rock miscellanea (remember Disco Inferno, Basehead, and Cranes? Ned Raggett does.), and will surrender only a few of their treasures, below.

1. Aaliyah – Aaliyah
My stunted appreciation of contemporary R&B probably owes a lot to never having heard this album. As lucid and visionary in its sound design as Kraftwerk’s Computer World, it’s a NEW POSITION, albeit one in which I’m still laid out in bed, from which to consider my life and the lives beyond the walls.

2. Barbara Manning – One Perfect Green Blanket, 1212 | S.F. Seals – Nowhere, Truth Walks in Sleepy Shadows
The greatest of all untapped 90s indie rock discographies. A woman who bolsters her albums with so many cover songs can obviously play anything, and does.

3. The Pretty Things – S.F. Sorrow
The other album on this list that begins with “S.F. Sorrow is Born,” continuing to an even more astounding variety of sounds.

4. J Dilla – Donuts | Broadcast – Tender Buttons
Defining albums from my first year of college, except I never heard them until long after their creators had died. Still, at this late date, enough to remind me that we had it as good as the freshmen of ten years prior with their Endtroducing and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

5. The Isley Brothers – 3+3 | Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound
A fruitful, peer-approved trip to the record store, enabling me to push the play button, at last, on songs that have been in the air my whole life, and others that never would have been if Numero Group hadn’t intervened to teach me about my city.

6. The Bats – Daddy’s Highway | Tall Dwarfs – Hello Cruel World
Guilt listening that ended up being for the right reasons, reaffirming the notion that New Zealand rock is always either perfect guitar pop or something totally unquantifiable, often drumless.

7. Missy Elliott – Supa Dupa Fly, Under Construction
Supa Dupa Fly seemed to be playing every time I cut my hair this year, Under Construction every time I was more than usually forgiving of, even in love with, my city.

8. Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat The Factory, Class Clown Spots A UFO
Not only do I not have synaesthesia, I’m tempted to say none have it less than me. But thanks to properties like melody and texture (the latter of which I intend in a purely aural sense; I’ve never imagined I could touch a sound), I still get endless sensory delight from music. GBV, in their most recent incarnation and unbeknownst to me, were dishing out the Properties with an immediacy and generosity that now makes the world of their heirs look comparatively barren, in their renewed absence.

9. Burial – Kindred, Street Halo, Truant, Rival Dealer
I downloaded the last few years of Burial singles and EPs all at once, and these 11 songs and 105 minutes are still a bottomless well months later. Taken together, one great monument to longing.

10. Cornershop – Woman’s Gotta Have It
I’d always meant to venture forward from When I Was Born for the 7th Time but never knew that venturing backward would yield such immediate results. I remembered the melody of “Jullandar Shere,” but not the sustained intensity. Its two parts comprise nearly 20 minutes of the album, but it’s still not nearly enough. I could listen forever.



Shows, 2014

I went to about 50 shows this year (the most ever, simply because I’ve never been in Minneapolis for such a large percentage of the year) and feel like I can justify, for the time, a list of the best live sets I saw. I’ve tried to be very selective, and if you knew which artists I’ve neglected to mention you’d be quite astonished. Here are five acts (originating in the current century) that excited me, another five acts (originating in the last century) that made me feel lucky, and one local act that was a great joy on two separate occasions.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Allo Darlin’
The Fresh & Onlys
Real Estate
Weekend

De La Soul
The Replacements
Buzzcocks
Slowdive
Tori Amos

Kitten Forever (opening for MEN in January and Waxahatchee in April)



Slumberland

Ranking the eight LP/EP releases of 2014 from my favorite label.

1. Devon Williams – Gilding the Lily
2. Allo Darlin’ – We Come from the Same Place
3. Terry Malts – Insides EP
4. Withered Hand – New Gods
5. The Proper Ornaments – Wooden Head
6. Literature – Chorus
7. Tony Molina – Dissed & Dismissed
8. Gold-Bears – Dalliance

Human Sounds, annotated

June 7, 2014 // 8–10 pm

WMCN 91.7 FM Macalester College Radio St. Paul Minnesota

Human Sounds

// Send me a remedy for this thing I’m feeling. It’s hard to be (hard to be!) human again.

During my college reunion weekend last month, I did my first radio show since May 1, 2009 (according to my records). I’ve been under the impression that I’d have a recording of it to share at some point, but as that’s still beyond my control, I’m offering instead this narrated playlist. So, five years later, it continues…

—intro—

Deerhunter – Cover me (slowly) / Agoraphobia

First, my 30-second GarageBand collage of song snippets, forming a semi-coherent introduction as told by Primal Scream (sampling Easy Rider), Possum Dixon, The Beatles, Elvis Costello, The Mekons and The Dils and accompanied by Prince, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Sleater-Kinney and M.I.A.:

Just what is it that you want to do? Radio-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! (There will be a show tonight.) Welcome to welcome to welcome to welcome to HUMAN sounds HUMAN sounds HUMAN sounds HUMAN sounds HUMAN sounds HUMAN sounds. We’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party.

Second, the irreducible (WMCN’s current station manager agrees!) opening 4:43 of the greatest album released during my college years—no competition, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I claim on this night that “Rainwater Cassette Exchange” is the only Deerhunter song I ever remember playing during my original college run, but looking back through my playlists now (all lovingly preserved in Word documents; I’ve considered posting them during various moments of boredom over the years, would that be obscene?), I see that I also played “Never Stops” and, on the aforementioned final show of 5/1/09, “Microcastle,” which probably means I was well on my way to loving the album, Microcastle, by then, this process continuing over the remainder of 2009.

After the music, I prattle on for a while about my DJ resume. My WMCN shows, 2005-2009: Music Biscuit Flower Hour (2 semesters), Human Sounds (2 semesters; name and intro revived on this night), GOBS Original Artyfacts from the Punk and Post-Punk Eras 1975-1986 (1 semester), GOBS II Original Artyfacts from the Western Hemisphere and Beyond 1608-2008 (1 semester), Senior Service (2 semesters). It’s my intention to do some kind of historical overview of these shows, or at least to partially recreate my first ever radio show, from the night of September 30, 2005, when I opened with ABBA’s bullshit-clearing “S.O.S.” and then played a bunch of 80s punk, going so far as to include two Hüsker Dü and three Replacements songs, a sin of redundancy I’ll never replicate. The new albums I was really excited about were by Rob Dickinson and Supergrass. But two hours isn’t very much time, so on this night I never get around to looking back.

Instead, next I offer up a mini-playlist of “my favorite songs ever.” I’ve been meaning to do a blog post, “100 songs to be played at my funeral,” because “favorite” doesn’t quite indicate how serious I am. So, as a preview of that, I frame these next songs in that morbid way, imploring listeners to seek out my survivors when the day comes and ensure my demands have been met. Play these, please:

The Four Tops – Ask the Lonely

The Beach Boys – All I Wanna Do

Ben E. King – I Count the Tears

The Mekons – I Am Crazy

Subsequently, I notice I can also define these four songs in terms of great vocal performances. I’d certainly have included Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind,” except as I look over the previous DJ’s playlist I notice it’s aired within the hour (I marvel over her other selections, a rad arsenal of cover songs by the likes of The Wedding Present, The Feelies, The Avengers and The Stranglers, the latter doing “Walk On By,” the Isaac Hayes song?!). My next set of four begins with another of my funeral songs (which, as it turns out, I played on 2009’s final show; also, little did I know on this night that I’d hear it performed live by month’s end), and then follows a less coherent design.

De La Soul – Eye Know

—PSA: dog adoption—

Randy Newman – He Gives Us All His Love

The Chills – Frantic Drift

Stereolab – Cybele’s Reverie

All this time I’m making few connections between the music and reunion weekend, but at this point I do mention that “frantic drift” is what life has mostly felt like since graduation. And then, eager to play some new music, I devise a three-song set of my Songs Of The Year, 2011-13 (while lamenting my continued non-inclusion in the Pazz and Jop poll), as a way to bridge to 2014.

PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose

Frankie Rose – Gospel/Grace

Marnie Stern – Year of the Glad

I still wouldn’t change my picks, and they sound great together. I mildly note that “Year of the Glad” is “awesomely spirited, to say the least.” Finally, it’s time for the latest and greatest.

Devon Williams – Deep in the Back of My Mind

La Sera – Losing to the Dark

Neneh Cherry – Spit Three Times

Wye Oak – Sick Talk

And then more of the latest and greatest:

Kishi Bashi – Philosophize in it! Chemicalize with it!

Owen Pallett – In Conflict

Withered Hand – Horseshoe

Real Estate – Crime

Zac (my studio guest) and I have just seen Kishi Bashi in Minneapolis, and Zac’s discovered a violin hero in the pop world. Elsewhere, “Horseshoe” is so good, you could pillage WMCN’s record library of mostly forgotten 80s indie rock for days and not hope to find a better song. I don’t have that kind of time on my hands, so instead I begin filling requests.

DJ Sammy – Heaven (requested by Zac Charley ‘09)

The Soft Boys – Human Music (requested by Aaron Mendelson ‘09)

Grant Hart – Morningstar

Julia Holter – Horns Surrounding Me

As new guests begin to enter the studio (friends and acquaintances from my graduating class), I lose my grip on whatever narrative I’ve hoped to “bring home” in the final hour of the show. But exciting as radio always is, initially, I’ve often lost my endurance after 90 minutes on air, anyway. But that’s not to say my cues aren’t still impeccable. They are! I even play “Morningstar” from the 7” Grant Hart gave away at a show last December, as it’s my first chance to play vinyl since then.

Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Silence (requested by Ian Boswell ‘09)

Erasure – Reunion

—PSA: cat adoption—

P.M. Dawn – Norwegian Wood

“Frantic Drift” gives way to “Reunion,” an obvious pick, but given how many times I played it on air and in my sophomore dorm, its relevance, generally, goes deeper than you might expect. Next, a guest asks for Bowie, so, Low being not on hand, I panic and play my other too-reliable Bowie tune.

David Bowie – Ashes to Ashes (requested by Mike Kyslinger ‘09)

The Everly Brothers – Bowling Green

Pete Rock and CL Smooth – They Reminisce Over You

Catherine Wheel – Strange Fruit

I hastily dedicate “Strange Fruit” to my hero/publisher/friend Jack Rabid, Catherine Wheel being one of an infinite number of bands his magazine The Big Takeover has introduced me to over the years, and writing for the BT website being the music-related highlight of my life post-college. Then I say hi to my sisters Emily and Erika, the latter of whom I know to be listening from Indiana. As it’s well past 10 pm and the next DJs have still not arrived, I cue a definitely non-obscene disc for continuous play—Soul Journey, by Erika’s favorite Gillian Welch—until the station manager tells me to switch over to the digital archive of old shows a.k.a. the storehouse of forgotten dreams.

All along I’ve meant to talk about how little the physical space of the radio station has changed in the past five years (although the new sound board is nice, and intuitive!), but it’s another thing I never get around to. Seriously, though, it’s still a heap, and my best of ‘06 playlist is still on the office door, with the graffiti I remember, as is a staff photo ca. 2007, with graffiti I don’t remember, a marker mustache on my blurry young face.

Dang, I forgot to play My Favorite.

Multiple Choice

Which of these should I have fired out onto the internet yesterday as my hasty response to an article that requires limited response, if any at all?

a. Just gonna casually mention that in my household we love music, but the one of us who reads music is not the one who writes about music.
b. How much must a music writer know about neurology?
c. The funniest part is that by dismissing Daft Punk as a gimmick Gioia misses out on an album that would meet his demands for harmonic nuance.
d. Thanks for trying to ignite a debate, but this is a conversation we already had.


It’s been a great couple of days to be a music writer, to watch as everyone rallies with principled responses to irrelevant, powerful attacks on their professions, and then moves on. These people know their stuff. Here are the ones I looked at:

MJ
AS (quoting Mencken; personally I find this line of thinking most helpful)
SFJ (re-linking an old piece, on pgs. 5-6)
MP
JR
KS


I leave you with this excellent parody of nostalgic hysteria from Randy Newman:

Meldrick

…is the name of a new mixtape, er, mix CD I put together for springtime (put yours together here). It’s named for the last of my childhood pets, put to rest last weekend in the presence of my mom (and there he is, reflected in the disc, above!), and though it’s not really about him, it does contain a couple songs that were important to me during his young cathood. He was two and I was 12* when Sleater-Kinney and Superchunk released excellent late-century albums, and to hear these again after a long absence suggests them as foundational albums from a delicate era, one that I’d like to have back for a day. (If I didn’t learn from these bands everything I love about melody and other feelings only found in music, I might as well have.)

I’ve spent a lot of my life in the past, very little of it in the future, so it’s strange to get to an age where it’s become clear, slowly and now undeniably, that there’s no going back there (pets gone, people dispersed, new busy life, less time for reflection, so that by the time I think about what I might be missing it seems very far away). I remember my sister doing the dishes and Superchunk playing on the radio, one summer, Meldrick sitting nearby I’m sure, and for a long time it was possible to recreate a version of that scene, return home and fall back into old patterns, make sure the music referred not to the past but to a permanently renewable mode of life. But now that it’s not possible, now that it doesn’t do that, now that it really does just refer to the past, it’s best to not let great old songs get shut away in a tomb.

So basically this mix is an attempt to imagine something beyond “A Quarter to Three,” a song with the time-suspending poignancy of The Go-Betweens’ “Spring Rain” and the further, to quote myself, exquisite pain of its placement at the end of its album (if The Hot Rock had been their last album, how might I live?), making the task of working past it all the more difficult. But I’m gonna try:

1. Sleater-Kinney – “A Quarter to Three”
2. Weekend – “Rosaries”
3. Digable Planets – “Black Ego”
4. Neneh Cherry – “Red Paint”
5. Swearin’ – “Mermaid”
6. Barbara Manning – “Smoking Her Wings”
7. The Pretty Things – “Death”
8. Black Hearted Brother – “UFO”
9. Raphael Saadiq – “Just Don’t”
10. Guided by Voices – “Islands (She Talks in Rainbows)”
11. Earl Sweatshirt – “Hoarse”
12. Bronski Beat – “Love and Money”
13. Danny Brown – “25 Bucks”
14. Iris DeMent – “Go On Ahead and Go Home”
15. Jimmie Dale Gilmore – “I’m Gonna Love You”
16. Grant Hart – “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Now”
17. Superchunk – “1000 Pounds”
18. Mercury Rev – “Empire State”

79.5 minutes

In every other case, my peak enthusiasm for these songs goes back to a time no earlier than last summer. A few of them come from albums of 2013 that I didn’t give their due (seriously, how I didn’t become more deeply involved in that Black Hearted Brother album is a mystery, it’s just great and pretty much guarantees that the next Slowdive album will be a fourth masterpiece), while others indulge a subdued, melancholic, early spring mood (Earl Sweatshirt’s “Hoarse,” with production that sounds like a David Lynch/Massive Attack collab, does both), until Iris DeMent (the female voice I need to hear after “25 Bucks”) and Jimmie Dale Gilmore make their late entrances and clear the way for the spectacular high of “Empire State.”

p.s. Formerly, mixtapes were a method of organizing my listening, one that’s never since been surpassed (not with writing, radio, etc.). Themes might emerge by accident but really I just wanted to collect everything new, focus my attention, tell myself that I could pick a favorite song by anyone. More recently, my deliberately quasi-thematic approach to mix-making, once or twice a year, with or without access to a fully functional tape deck, is less satisfying but also the only real option when I let so many songs pass me by, uncollected.

*“12 years old, skinny legs…” I don’t think I ever knew that line from “1000 Pounds,” but, God, can it get any closer?

Yet Another Year at the Theater

2013, that is.

January

This is 40
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Zero Dark Thirty
Rust and Bone
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

February

Warm Bodies
Amour

March

56 Up
Like Someone in Love

April

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (1991)
Ace in the Hole (1951)
The Place Beyond the Pines
Night Across the Street
War Witch

May

Upstream Color
Mud
Iron Man 3
The Great Gatsby
The General (1925)
Star Trek Into Darkness
Spring Breakers
At Any Price

June

Frances Ha
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight) (1966)
This is the End
Something in the Air
Jurassic Park (3D) (1993)
Blancanieves
Before Midnight
Monsters University

July

From Up on Poppy Hill
Sunrise (1927)
Pacific Rim

August

The Purge
I’m So Excited
The Way, Way Back
Fruitvale Station
The World’s End

September

The Spectacular Now
Blue Jasmine
Pacific Rim
Despicable Me 2
Husbands (1968)

October

Gravity
Maniac (1980)
Clue (1985)
Shaun of the Dead (2003)
The Heat
Don Jon
Viva Knievel (1977)
Captain Phillips

November

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Criss Cross (1949)
12 Years a Slave
Thor: The Dark World
My Old Fiddle (1970) / A Well Spent Life (1994)
Dallas Buyers Club
Run Silent Run Deep (1958)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

December

After Hours (1985)
Nebraska
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Fear and Desire (1953) / Killer’s Kiss (1955)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
American Hustle
Enough Said
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lolita (1962)

= 70 times

A little off my 2012 pace. I was a much better moviegoer, and enjoyed going to movies more, in Albuquerque. It’s that kind of place. But even now, the theater still accounts for maybe 80% of the movies I see, a figure that’s as absurd as it is unlikely to change.

Brief notes, mostly reactionary edition

Anytime Almodovar gets less than enthusiastic reviews you can bet someone’s wrong. This take on I’m So Excited has the right attitude.

I’m telling you for the last time (for posterity now): The real subject of The Spectacular Now is a secret, apparently, but it’s discoverable (amusingly so, in hindsight) in all those shots in the trailer that show the main character’s giant soda cup. I like the visual weight of a cup as a crutch, and also the way the movie handles its subject, in a non-alarmist way that’s not new for teen movies (recently, The Perks of Being a Wallflower) but that seems surprising when the central issue is an ordinarily adult one.

Dallas Buyers Club makes sense as an Oscar movie, now that it’s become one, but I also want to remind people that two of its key emotional scenes feature Bradford Cox (dancing, then crying), so there are infinities of real-life ways to watch it. Also, Matthew McConaughey in a room full of butterflies, and an early 80s Dallas gay bar – two places the movies had never taken me before.

The “Nebraska condescends” line is routine at best, overcompensatory at worst (for what?), i.e. none of the critics have our backs, really. The movie features some gross caricature, obviously, but that’s also when it’s funny. The rest of the time, I enjoyed its consideration of the parent/child (not father/son!) gulf and its loving mock-deflation of the romantic attitude toward Montana (et al) usually found in major motion pictures (A River Runs Through It, Don’t Come Knocking). Maybe just because I could point to the scene in front of the Billings bus station and say, “I’ve been there,” I got the notion that Nebraska couldn’t have existed before Breaking Bad set new rules for location shooting. Either way, the Jimmy Johns magnet on Will Forte’s fridge – now that’s set decoration!

Probably due to some aspect of the two films’ production schedules, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, for its first half-hour, is as helpless as An Unexpected Journey to show us a single interesting image, but then, sometime around the spider sequence, visual competence rushes in and the effect is sudden clarity (not to be confused with digital crispness), the kind Bilbo experiences when he gets a breath of fresh air from above the forest. Later, Smaug is a magnificent creation, and he’s framed well too, and there’s even a scene in his lair, with Bilbo standing diminished in the center of a wide field of gold (and I think a well-placed eye on the left), that reminded me of Méliès.

Unlike the artist who gives the movie its title, nothing very bad happens to the characters in Gimme The Loot. They’re protected by some invisible buffer, or maybe not so invisible: I was thrown by the title, but it applies, even if its source doesn’t, and it’s probably just something the characters tell themselves, anyway. So, there’s talk of turf but all anyone sells is pot and all anyone gets is mugged (with hilariously devastating frequency, in one case). One character loses his shoes while his friend gains a pair elsewhere, but the movie goes for detail, not for tidy plotting, so the two events don’t converge to offer a solution. It’s very loose, inheriting its sense of vitality and city ambience either from earlier, somewhat better movies (Raising Victor Vargas, maybe) or else its distinctly advantageous amateur quality and hugely appealing “non” actors.

There’s no theory that could possibly unify the various parts of Lee Daniels’ The Butler into a coherent or even incoherent camp classic, a fascinating outsider-as-insider anomaly, etc., but time might clarify. Parts of it really are nothing more than standard and unimaginative historical backdrop drama (though the sit-in/place setting crosscut sequence is particularly imaginative and thrilling). And yet, all the domestic scenes, all the scenes with Oprah, and Oprah herself (so great), these demand to be seen always by some segment of viewers, however small, with whatever various desires and impulses, while the stuff that surrounds these things will probably look like an increasingly odd and irrelevant frame as time goes on.

The Bling Ring:

Older

I somehow didn’t expect much from Run Silent Run Deep as a war movie, but it’s got a death (of a pretty blond innocent, of course) so harrowing, morbid, irredeemable, you’d think it was made ten years later in a spirit of protest.

This time through Barry Lyndon, I just kept thinking of life as a series of connections and relationships that can be shaken off, tossed aside, escaped from under, until eventually they can’t and you’re stuck with those people, that life. Except not really, because even when Barry finally gets in too deep (a family), even then, he ends up disgracefully shuffling back to his earliest existence. After such reflections, the ending “moral” is a doozy.

This will seem a dead point, as history has rightly adjudged the greatness of Eraserhead and the awfulness of Dune, but as complementary programming, I found it funny the way these two Lynch movies suggest the acceptable parameters of weirdness and incomprehensibility for mainstream audiences. That is to say, Eraserhead is much easier to follow on an intuitive level (and anyone who’s ever seen the Little Tramp in action, for example, will be quickly struck by the clarity of the movie’s references and gestures), but Dune gets the money, gets seen, because the faults of its storytelling, however disastrous, can be chalked up to accident. I’m not sure if they apply in the Lynch universe, but there is a kind of audience that won’t take any responsibility for its own viewership, but will forgive any amount of moviemaking laziness, because hey, at least it was supposed to be a ripping yarn.

Ten favorite movies, 2013

1. Frances Ha*
2. Pacific Rim
3. 12 Years a Slave
4. Computer Chess
5. Inside Llewyn Davis
6. The World’s End
7. Behind the Candelabra
8. Captain Phillips
9. The Way, Way Back
10. Enough Said

*As easy a choice as Searching for Sugar Man in 2012, Poetry in 2011, Scott Pilgrim in 2010. What’s the criteria? I could never find the right way to answer or refuse to answer that question re: movies, which might be why my music writing eventually took over.

Oscar favorites

Picture: 12 Years a Slave
Director: Steve McQueen
Actress: Sandra Bullock
Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor
Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o
Supporting Actor: Barkhad Abdi
Original Screenplay: Nebraska
Adapted Screenplay: 12 Years a Slave



/// Until I find more time to write, accounting for my life with lists will be the primary function of this blog. Up next: a new mixtape; the 100 songs of my life (so far).