Reading (b)log

Decay

2012-01-27T19:54:00.000-08:00

Of the self:

[in medias res]

Dark nights trying to sleep stomach on fire
Delusional from hunger so I couldn't get tired
Imagining the equalizer going from green to red
Words that rhyme together just appear all in my head
And I'm sorta like Neo with the Matrix codes
I try to escape it hoping the drugs'll numb my soul
Say I'm getting old, time's running out
Repeating instrumentals trying to figure patterns out
I never leave the house ain't slept in three days
Popping pills, writing, drinking and smoking hay
Weaving kicks and snares, trying to dodge these hooks
Keeping it original something that's overlooked
The way a nigga going might go out like Sam Cooke
Or locked up calling home for money on my books
'Cause if this shit don't work nigga I failed at life
Turning to these drugs now these drugs turned my life
And it's the downward spiral, got me suicidal
But too scared to do it so these pills will be the rifle
Surpassing all my idols, took the wrong turn
But can't go back now so let the blunt burn
'Cause now it's my turn if I fuck it all up
It took a while to get here now I depend on these drugs
I took a while to get here now I depend on these drugs

--Danny Brown, "XXX"
(adapted from the transcription at Rap Genius)

Of another:

Death is on the telephone
I lie and say she isn't home
If only he would make a move, instead
He sleeps in her bed

I waste away my days with you
I'd rather spend them like you do
All skin and bones but in your eyes
I say to you, you're still alive

You can tell me time will heal
But you don't know the way I feel
I never had imagined death
Beyond the vague and cold last breath
But now I see his many forms
The way he builds up like a storm
And all the pain and all the sighs
The world in my mother's eyes
In her eyes

--Dum Dum Girls, "Caught In One"

And yet, two of last year's most vital moments in music. There are some people I'm so glad number among the living. They have music, and we have them.

Mildred Pierce, Todd Haynes, 2011.

"I'm hard to get, Geoff, you just have to ask me."

2012-01-25T21:25:00.000-08:00

Odd Man Out, Carol Reed, 1947.

Ascending to the painter's room: "He will have something in his eyes, something more than any of my subjects ever had!"

Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks, 1939.

The genius of the times spoken line by line: "He's been dead about twenty minutes and all the weeping and wailing in the world won't make him any deader twenty years from now."

"More alive" might seem a more logical choice of words than "deader," but then I guess grief is the effort to make somebody dead even when they already are. Cary Grant won't waste the energy... yet. Only Angels Have Wings, one of the grandest entertainments ever pitched around the grieving process, knows a lot about it.

It also affords more time to consider what makes a movie a Howard Hawks movie. There are those strong diagonals that happen, as if by chance, in the amazing aerial sequence (above), a subtle but breathtaking choreography that aims only to keep a moving airplane in the center of the frame at all times. But I doubt they're talking about diagonals when they call Hawks an auteur.

Instead, maybe it's the way his movies hold, contain, the energy of crowds, achieving a weird clarity in spite of commotion that persists

when the focus shifts to the individual.

Footlight Parade, Lloyd Bacon, 1933.

Not a still from the movie, but a placeholder until I have the means to grab one. The image that accompanies the words differs in one crucial way: As James Cagney seizes inspiration in the streets, the liberating imagination that allows him to turn fire hydrants into mountains is commensurately blinded by the forces that make him turn black into white.

The Utopian Ideal of Gay Sex

2012-01-18T10:53:00.001-08:00

No top no bottom

Image of the Day [1]

2012-01-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

Wendy And Lucy, Kelly Reichardt, 2008.

Portrait of the artist at work in the night. How many of our ideas about nighttime (its colors, lightness, energy, danger) come from film/video's general inability to capture it with any but the softest detail? Did people feel differently about the night before film came along? Or do images like the above capture what was always there? Reichardt's evocation/depiction of night can look a bit like a happy accident of technical limitation, but it's also so precise that it ends up equal parts poetic and hyperreal (the latter maybe only because I've been trained by years of (digitally) photographing the night to think that it really looks that way: brown and yellow smears on slightly blemished black). The brief, beautiful "wandering ghosts" shot works better in real time, as the two figures are only identifiable as such from their movement, but they register faintly in the still.

"Image of the day" copyright the always brilliant and inspiring Glenn Kenny (example, sans vague, unnecessary, contextualizing questions); I hope to do more of my own. Image capture is my favorite feature on my computer--sometimes I feel it's the only reason I own one. Back before my disc drive broke, I was continually frustrated by the fact that image capture is inaccessible during DVD playback. On a whim yesterday, I discovered that the print screen feature in Windows doesn't have the same limitation. Needless to say I'm pretty excited.

Speaking of Mr. Kenny, let me tell you about a dream I had a while back that is actually relevant to this blog. I was reading an imaginary book version of Kenny's Some Came Running blog, and there was an extensive entry about Reading (b)log (it was weird to see the name as anything but a hyperlink--in print), in which he commented on something I'd recently written, took me very seriously while recognizing some of my shortcomings, in sum very critical yet encouraging. It helped me realize (in the dream, and a little bit in real life) I need to take myself more seriously than I maybe do.

But before I change, one more somewhat distant dream: The band Big Troubles places a classified (where? I don't remember) about plans for their next album. They don't like the way they've been written about ("indie rock" or whatever, though aren't they so awesomely exactly what they aim to be, and generally heard as such?) and want fans to help them brainstorm a new hockey-themed album (??) so they can blatantly dash expectations of subject matter, so that definition (as controlled by the band) can precede the music, and not vice versa (i.e. proceed from...) as that's not working for them. Also, the word "gigification" appears somewhere in the classified. I know or sense what it means in the dream, but not upon waking.

A Year at the Theater

2012-01-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

2011

January

I Love You Phillip Morris (2010)
The King’s Speech (2010)
Somewhere (2010)
Vanishing Point (1971)
Magadheera (2009) [left early]
Blue Valentine (2010)
Another Year (2010)

February

The Illusionist (2010)
All About Eve (1950)

March

Cedar Rapids
Kuroneko (1968)
The Pink Panther (1963)
Rango
Touch of Evil (1958)
Poetry
Paul
Certified Copy

April

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Heartbeats
Mildred Pierce [episodes 1 & 2]
Source Code
Vertigo (1958)
Hanna
Meek’s Cutoff
Taxi Driver (1976)

May

Jane Eyre
Pale Flower (1964)
The Face of Another (1966)
Bridesmaids
Hesher
Empire of Passion (1978)
Everything Must Go

June

Kung Fu Panda 2
Rubber
The Tree Of Life
The Crimson Pirate (1952)
Midnight In Paris
Super 8
Tampopo (1985)
Cars 2
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Beginners

July

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)
The Trip
Cave Of Forgotten Dreams
Buffalo Bill & The Indians (1976)
Tabloid
Trauma (1993) [in a parking garage]
Suspiria (1977)
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt. 2
The Tree Of Life
Safety Last (1923) with Never Weaken (1921)
On The Bowery (1957) with Skid Row (1950s)
The Apartment (1960)

August

Sabrina (1954)
World on a Wire (1973)
Bill Cunningham New York
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Future
Our Idiot Brother

September

Terri
Project Nim
Contagion
The Guard
Drive
Moneyball

October

50/50
Point Blank
Warrior
The Ides Of March
Restless
Footloose
In Time

November

Take Shelter
The Skin I Live In
Martha Marcy May Marlene
J. Edgar
Arthur Christmas
Hugo

December

The Descendants
Melancholia
The Muppets
A Christmas Story (1983)
Young Adult
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
The Adventures Of Tintin
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

- - -

From those, and home viewing, this top ten, “I am 60 years old” edition, in rough order of preference: Poetry, Mysteries Of Lisbon, Melancholia, Hugo, The Tree Of Life, Meek’s Cutoff, The Skin I Live In, J. Edgar, Midnight In Paris, Certified Copy.

- - -

For no other reason than that I saw them a day apart, my thoughts about the great Scorsese’s Hugo are inextricably tied up with my viewing of the great Hirokazu’s After Life:
1. Choosing a memory is the latter film’s equivalent of finding a purpose in life.
2. The one who can’t choose/find becomes the storyteller, a young girl in both cases.
3. Movies recreate dreams.

The moment I fell in love: The first glimpse inside Melies’s studio, as he films some strange underwater tapestry of a startlingly vivid blue that his camera of course won’t capture, that will have to be hand-painted onto the film later. It takes so much learning or unlearning before we can know exactly what we’re watching when we watch very old movies; the way Hugo instantly telegraphs a semblance of this knowledge, with eye-popping detail, is heartbreaking.

- - -

Melancholia shook me to my core, as they say, which leads me to believe that it’s a great work of cinema (maybe the only one that dares propose the cosmic irrelevance of cinema), but also to worry that such declarations about its artistry amount to a refusal to acknowledge what the movie depicts, i.e. how easy the end of the world will be. Much as I wanted to think of Melancholia as a huge metaphor for mental illness (like Take Shelter) or as being primarily concerned with internal cosmos (like The Tree Of Life, or an inverse Tree Of Life—I’m having trouble today choosing between things and their opposites), in the end there’s nowhere to hide (unlike 2012’s Great Plateau of Africa). It’s about the dread we share on winter days when the sun doesn’t rise very high above the horizon.

Also:
1. Would the knowledge that the world is about to end render our era classical? I look at the tableaus from the movie’s overture (nothing has captured the movement of bodies better since the opening credits of Tarsem’s The Fall, Muybridge writ large) and the old paintings seen throughout, and what I see is an endangered species, their way of life nearly over (the depicter as well as the depicted). Is that what Justine means when she switches all the abstract art for representational art on Claire’s shelves?
2. I doubt Lars Von Trier cares much about the Kiefer Sutherland persona, but no director has ever made better use of it, or even realized it exists/what it is.
3. Charlotte Gainsbourg is great, especially considering she is tasked with performing the last action on Earth, a little rabbit jump of terror. It’s an indelible (i.e. delible) moment.

That last shot haunts me. I finally understand astronomy. I haven’t looked at the moon the same way since. I even sketched the shot during a moment of Close Encounters-type obsession (spoiler?):

- - -

Let it also be known that I just saw War Horse, and being vulnerable to intensely sentimental movies like I am, got all sorts of emotionally caught up and can’t really offer a sensible reaction. Funny, I groaned at the preview for Disney’s Chimpanzee, which turns the title chimp into an ordinary orphan child looking for a sense of belonging, totally ignoring the impenetrable mystery in an animal’s eyes even though it’s right there in the images, and then, moments later, I’m ready to hail War Horse as a great work of well-earned anthropomorphism. But its motives and methods struck me as pure, and I cried, a lot.

- - -

“I can think and move ice at the same time.”
--ice factory worker in Cold Weather

It’s III: Is Other People

2011-12-31T13:20:00.001-08:00

Favorites 2011

[1] Julianna Barwick, The Magic Place
[2] PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
[3] Real Estate, Days
[4] Death Cab For Cutie, Codes & Keys
[5] Holcombe Waller, Into The Dark Unknown
[6] Devon Williams, Euphoria
[7] EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints
[8] Dum Dum Girls, Only In Dreams
[9] Bill Callahan, Apocalypse
[10] R.E.M., Collapse Into Now

More than usual, there seemed to be a lot of personal stuff to attend to during the process of sorting through the year’s albums and choosing the most important ten. I hope the outcome isn’t too self-indulgent (if that’s a quality that ranking the art of others can even be said to have). But I have to wonder… Does my preference of The Magic Place to Let England Shake say something about my beliefs concerning the usefulness of language? Do Bradford Cox and Patrick Wolf represent the two sides of my personality, waiting for a wealth of experience to validate one and banish the other? Did Real Estate definitively capture the way we inhabit neighborhoods in 2011, or does it just seem that way because I moved to a new town the same week their album arrived?

And again, there was R.E.M. to remind me where I am and what I’m doing, but they provide that service for so much of the world’s population that to continue loving them indicates a hope for humanity’s future, not just my own, right? It was hard to be too shaken up over their departure this year, since I hear their influence more abundantly than ever. They’re all over my top ten, but especially in Julianna Barwick’s intimate, wordless transmutations of the kinds of melodies they unearthed in the American South, and in the timid, wise murmur of their de facto heirs Real Estate. The first song on Days is called “Easy,” and it’s appropriate, but I don’t understand why no one else has remarked an equal sense of uneasiness in Real Estate’s music, a feeling that their lifestyle, careless or not, has no hope of extending as indefinitely into the future as R.E.M.’s once did (sample lyric: “If it takes all summer long / just to write one simple song / there’s too much to focus on / clearly that is something wrong”). My greatest worry is not that R.E.M. is gone but that their replacements might get crushed by evil forces before their three decades are up.

Anyway, back to the personal. To counteract a top ten as memoir, and to “spread the wealth,” I left Patrick Wolf’s Lupercalia off the final list (it’s already quite clear he’s the man in my life, musically speaking), and hereby bestow it the secondhand autobiography award, so closely did it echo my own feelings about life and love this year. There’s no story here, move along… that was the general reaction to Lupercalia, and indeed, if Victorian literature tells us anything it’s that marriage always marks the end of a story. But Wolf’s belief in true love—and not just as an excuse for something else or as dumb reassurance against cosmic loneliness—is what I’ve been waiting to hear my whole life, even if it’s only slightly less naïve than my own belief. And yet… Is music more meaningful when it offers a glimpse of something we want but don’t have, or shares our sense of destitution? Because I already have everything Lupercalia has to give, in a manner of speaking.

Onward to the top ten:

[1]

I was tempted to offer this as the perfect antidote to instant gratification, a dive back into the warm, timeless waters of memory, but even accepting that “The Magic Place” is a tree from Barwick’s childhood, that’s a false premise: no album this year excited me more with the immediacy of its melodic progression.

[2]

A bit like late 50s/early 60s Bergman: white sky, gray to black earth, searingly plain and yet open to endless interpretation. Also, shockingly fun… “Nothing!”

[3]

[4]

Stereolab became perhaps my favorite band this year. Death Cab For Cutie aren’t quite Stereolab, but they took that band’s name as an aesthetic principle and created the year’s foremost experience in total sound. Even the words are sound for sound’s sake, taking the lyrical strategy of Pet Sounds and grafting it onto the lyrical strategy of Dylan or Malkmus. Which would explain the emotional trembles in an album so unwaveringly cool.

[5]

Sometimes it seems like amazing singers are cheating, tricking us into feeling something by nothing more than the naked emotion or simulation thereof they wear on their voices. But Holcombe Waller earns every word he utters, or, I should say, his lyrics earn their preternaturally dramatic articulation.

[6]

The cassette version, I should specify, though I doubt the Slumberland version really gains or loses anything by re-ordering side B and swapping “Don’t Be Fooled” for “Right Direction.” But I must so specify to allow a metaphor: here’s pop music so saturated (with color, emotion, bleeding strings, crying vocals) that it threatens to flood your tape deck. Maybe that’s the persistent shimmer I hear.

[7]

Music this sincere and therefore unfashionable doesn’t usually end up so close to cool. The world hasn’t heard anything like this since Kristin Hersh got hit by a car and started hearing frequencies.

[8]

“Jail La La” was a thrilling single last year, but I never suspected how much of its power came from Dee Dee’s sly articulation of the words. She emerges from the noise on Only In Dreams and reveals herself as a great singer, as confident as Neko Case. But that’s not what I meant when I proposed this as a country album: note instead the degree of tragedy matched by an equal degree of toughness.

[9]

Not since Rimbaud wrote “I is Another” has an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity. I read something along those lines somewhere recently, about Bob Dylan, I think in a book of Ellen Willis writings. No such anxiety on the part of Bill Callahan. For all the soul searching and shape shifting on Apocalypse, he’s not nearly as impatient to unlock the mysteries of identity as his listener is. This is the same man who dreamt “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” and seemed satisfied with the answers it provided.

[10]

Alternately mistaken as a career summary and a pre-planned swan song, Collapse Into Now is, as the title denotes, another gorgeous set of songs that adhere to their moment in time.

There were enough excellent albums this year to make any of them worth overlooking, but here are ten more great ones, and further miscellanea:

Atlas Sound, Parallax
Big Troubles, Romantic Comedy
Bjork, Biophilia
Kate Bush, 50 Words For Snow
Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion
St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
Tennis, Cape Dory
Wild Beasts, Smother
Patrick Wolf, Lupercalia
Yuck, Yuck

Mixtapes

There’s a mixtape out there for everyone, presumably, and I spent part of December listening to some of the year’s most acclaimed hip hop releases. Danny Brown, with his beautifully mannered (or unmannered?) voice and the necessity of its constant exercise to mitigate total entrapment and despair, with his subversions and ironies (his critique of radio songs is funny and spot-on without offering itself as a viable alternative, but it’s so ear-itching that it accidentally becomes one; elsewhere, just when we’re expecting him to brag, he finds no glory in the prospect of dying like a rock star, or even much interest in partying like one), interested me most. I overcame most of my misgivings about XXX by invoking the storyteller theory of hip hop, wherein the rapper’s primary responsibility is to create a plausible first-person narrator, but the middle section of the album, where Brown gets so caught up in penis accommodation imagery that his voice loses a lot of its character, is a tough sit no matter how you look at it. Still, XXX is a model album in terms of its careful, sometimes opaque construction.

Where’s M83?

…you might be asking right about now. I guess they’re just a band so outsized that no human can give himself entirely to their discography. I’m already overextending my meager soul by loving absolutely their previous two albums. But Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is a lot of fun.

Best opening

So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter, now what does that say about me?
--Fleet Foxes, "Montezuma"

I remember thinking that a couple years ago.

Closing thought

I was blissfully unaware of music, because I heard it so much.
--Zac, on childhood

100

2011-12-31T13:15:00.000-08:00

I remember an unusually warm New Year's Eve, driving with my family to the fabric store for some cloth to hang on my bookcases and hide the childish things on their shelves, listening to Swervedriver on a mixtape.

Macromix 11

2011-12-27T09:36:00.000-08:00

Same rules as last year. The unveiling happened here.

Track/ Rank

1/ 20 Wild Beasts, “Loop The Loop”
2/ 19 St. Vincent, “Cruel”
3/ 18 Destroyer, “Chinatown”
4/ 17 Lykke Li, “Sadness Is A Blessing”
5/ 16 Minks, “Kusmi”
6/ 15 Big Troubles, “Misery”
7/ 14 Exlovers, “Blowing Kisses”
8/ 13 Girls, “Alex”
9/ 12 Yuck, “Georgia”
10/ 11 Crystal Stilts, “Shake The Shackles”
11/ 10 Holcombe Waller, “Hardliners”
12/ 9 R.E.M., “Oh My Heart”
13/ 8 Real Estate, “Green Aisles”
14/ 7 Jeremy Jay, “Shayla”
15/ 6 Atlas Sound, “Doldrums”
16/ 5 Cut Copy, “Need You Now”
17/ 4 Patrick Wolf, “Together”
18/ 3 Julianna Barwick, “Prizewinning”
19/ 2 EMA, “Anteroom”
20/ 1 PJ Harvey, “The Last Living Rose”

The only very notable omission is Lady Gaga's "Marry The Night," a totally gorgeous song that wore off some of its urgency over the course of the year and which I'll relegate to the "radio pleasure" category now that they've finally made it an inescapable single. The problem, as always, is whether I think of the macromix as a careful sequencing of 20 songs in under 80 minutes, or as a careful ranking of the year's best moments. I originally envisioned a mix that starts with "Marry The Night," moves into more impressionistic night and the city seductions (M83's "Midnight City"), scales back the synths to a minimum (Big K.R.I.T.'s "The Vent"), and then, from the deep silence that follows a man's musings, fades back in with intricate, powerhouse drumming (The Joy Formidable's "I Don't Want To See You Like This"). But those songs just missed the list. After settling on the final, less blatantly narrative permutation of the macromix, above, I also considered switching St. Vincent's "Cruel" for "Northern Lights," because gosh, what a blast that would be after the hush of "Loop The Loop." But it doesn't really matter, since no one (besides me: I have it as an iTunes playlist and it's awesome) is likely to hear the macromix in its proper sequencing, anyway, and I don't know which St. Vincent song is actually "best."

Also, I increased my beats and rhymes quotient too late for this undertaking, but any of the shorter, stranger songs I've recently heard by Danny Brown or Shabazz Palaces would make for great additions, pockets of unprecedented sound.

Lessons this year: I long ago accepted the fact that I won't read every book I want to read before I die, but I have yet to reconcile myself to the same re: music. Entering my twenties, I thought "real life" would eventually get in the way of my ability to keep up with new music, but clearly that was a flawed premise. Any gap in my listening is mostly my own fault, or money's, but not time's.

Albums list, wherein I "spread the wealth" a bit (sometimes great albums lack clear standout tracks, so I don't bother trying to choose a favorite), arrives in the next few days.

Faces

2011-12-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

(And one pizza box.)

R.E.M.'s Up minus all luxury and maturity.

Born This Way. Get it?

OUTSIDE OBSERVER IT SEEMED
FACATA TO ME AND THAT'S JEWISH
--closed captioning poetry (The Daily Show, 11/22/11)

I don't think of my characters as being gay. They have sex that's gay because that's the sex I know and understand and care about.
--Dennis Cooper in the latest issue of Out

How dare you do something biological.
--

Four Corners States, thanks for letting me walk and drive around in you

2011-12-04T12:22:00.001-08:00

Starting out in the courtyard

Weird things along the highway

Farmington, NM

(I only cared about the color anyway.)

(While listening to Hüsker Dü's "Games.")

Navajo, NM

~Problems of photography~

1. How to render a computer as both an object in a room and a portal to other rooms. I didn't figure that out with the above picture, but it's probably the best one I've ever taken anyway.

2. How to represent women. The above captures one of the central images that guided/haunted me throughout my childhood: the "Barbie in the dirt" archetype. Most of my malformed notions of femininity come from here. Maybe I heard "Miss World" and "Doll Parts" too many times. Anyway, it's amazing I was finally able to realize this image with my own eye, in such an unexpected place.

Toad

Thanksgiving in Provo, UT

A beautiful town. During a mountain walk I finally discovered a place capable of containing the heaven-and-earth drama of Kate Bush’s Aerial, activating its magic (50 Words for Snow, when I delve into it, might have to find a different place). Bush's ideas about and belief in nature and art have always been straightforward, in a way ("lines like these have got to be an architect's dream"; "so all the colors run, see what they have become: a wonderful sunset," etc.), and Provo is a very straightforwardly beautiful place: snowy peaks, distant lake. But the power and longevity of all of this (Provo's beauty, Kate's belief) renders it mysterious, eccentric. I'm quite taken with both.

The next day

Tourist spot near Moab, UT

Winter (ABQ)

The Red & The Brown

2011-11-20T18:55:00.000-08:00

The most misleading picture I’ve ever taken.

As you continue to read this blog, please recognize what a simpleton I am, maybe more so now than ever before. Reading (b)log is not an evolution of thought, but a convoluted word game. And lately, like Algernonian Charlie in decline, I mostly respond to shapes and colors.

You know who else seems to be fascinated by shapes and colors? Michael Stipe. He’s so wowed by them that for every great R.E.M. album cover, there’s a bad one (Around The Sun…). Sometimes the cover art, even sub-par, resembles the music, or lays a film of line and color upon it. “Walk It Back,” which I used to think was the worst song on Collapse Into Now (filler in a way that even the “And Your Bird Can Sing”-style intentionally throwaway genius of “That Someone Is You” isn’t) and which I now recognize as probably the best, is that rare thing, a real sonic cathedral (not the kind often meant in rock writing, a combination of loudness and layering), full of bold, clean lines and warm colors.

Speaking of R.E.M., this is nice. The thesis is correct, so that my own, or anyone else’s, personal details would prove it equally correct.

I had a dream in which I came very close to line dancing with Michael Stipe to the song “Damaged Goods” at some kind of gay social event. I don’t know if that’s the method in which I’d prefer for it to happen, but any personal connection with Stipe would be the validation of my entire life.

A classic panel from The Far Side: A woman screaming in the shower as a tank crashes through the bathroom door. The caption: Psycho III. There are certainly movies as obvious as that in circulation right now, but they’re not these:

Healthy attitudes toward death: In Restless, deny it by getting as close to it as you possibly can; in Chris & Don: A Love Story, paint it, simply paint it.

Che, like Carlos, is that rare biopic that knows the ending doesn’t need to validate the entire film. These people are already dead, they don’t need to be resolved by narrative closure. Isn’t that what biopic means, to show life?

The violence of naming: My mind first started down that road while reading Another Country (something in the way Leona is named and introduced) and has been on it since, through Todd Haynes’ Poison to the perfectly titled Martha Marcy May Marlene (a movie that strips the glamour from the Manson family by bringing them to the present day and showing how vacuous and lifeless cult people are). A movie that takes the lead character’s first name for the title will generally be about how that person created himself or herself, especially if it’s a biopic. But a movie that triples the naming in its title will be about the various ways that person is controlled. Our overdetermined protagonist is very much without freedom, indeed.

With all of this in mind, what about J. Edgar? A title that denotes a self-made man? Sort of. A biopic that ends with validation, resolution, closure? Sort of. It’s a really great script by Dustin Lance Black, and ends up as much gay love story (Edgar & Clyde: A Love Story) as biopic, despite what the critics are saying about the movie not really touching Hoover’s homosexuality. The whole point of the ending, one of my favorites of the year, is the way Hoover’s professional and personal lives finally reach a sort of truce, after death, in a final act of supreme generosity. So there’s your validation of the life of Hoover, though the movie’s too smart for forgiveness, or any other biopic trapping.

Something in the mad, violent rush of Point Blank and its “many years later” resolution (the long awaited sigh of relief) made me consider the enticing possibility of a thriller that begins after the action, and serves as a commentary on the audience’s experience of a thriller. The characters would fill the role of the audience, as they try to account for the storyline (told only in their dialogue), make sense of all the frantic action that so lately swirled around them, let their bruises and cuts heal, etc. Basically, a “what the hell just happened?” movie, with the hell left out of it. Also noted: the inevitable American remake will inevitably get the bizarro police station all wrong, somehow make it too plausible or too implausible; Point Blank is another movie that actively destroys the medium shot, so prevalent are close-ups that any non-close-up has a weird unintended feeling of Coenesque irony or misanthropy to it.

Ebert says the remake of Footloose is “a movie without wit, soul or purpose.” I was able to divine its purpose pretty easily, though maybe it’s the same as that of the original and therefore irrelevant: presenting Southerners to a general American audience as a fairly enlightened bunch, retaining their weird ways and love of school bus racing even as they’re slowly changing their lexicon to include “vegan” and lose “fag” and beginning to recognize the need to separate church and state, but dad gum it (real dialogue), that’s easier said than done. When Ren McCormack finds out dancing is outlawed because certain townspeople consider it a sin, he says, “We’re talking about the law here, not heaven and hell!” But then he talks about heaven and hell in his rousing final speech, because, heck, it’s what they understand, let ‘em have it. This makes it sound like I hated the movie, but I didn’t, and found it to have a small amount of wit and a fair amount of soul.

Normally the interest of a movie like Summer Pasture, which records the daily lives of ordinary people, would be limited to audiences composed of ordinary people who aren’t the ordinary people of the film. But since the movie shows people who have never seen a movie, I guess that makes this a movie for all movie lovers.

I know In Time is great sci-fi, given how long I spent pondering all the unanswered questions about the world it creates. What would this world’s art be like? Would there be any art at all?

The Skin I Live In is sort of like a surgical conjoining of the two sides of Almodovar’s cinematic passion, i.e. man and woman. Some say it lacks passion, but it’s got the invisible passion of a man beholding art, beholding the plasticky paintings that will serve as inspiration for the poreless skin of Vera.

Take Shelter explores big themes (America! Man & Woman! Apocalypse! Paranoid Schizophrenia!) in a modest fashion (scratch those exclamation points, though maybe “apocalypse” deserves one). It’s so perfect, so simple, the way our protagonist’s symptoms are such a complete metaphor for his illness. And the wife comes to know it! (vague spoilers) The movie starts off in the Breaking Bad / Mad Men mode of much of today’s great American drama (a man who won’t confess to the logic behind his strange behavior, and yet we’re meant to forgive his concealment but not his wife’s attendant worry and questioning) but ends in a place where she knows him better than he knows himself, holds the key to his recovery (I’d say literally, but not quite), and retrieves him into a feeling, however fleeting, that his American life might endure. The final sequence is another dream, of course, but its placement forces us to take his apocalyptic visions more seriously than we otherwise would. And it also suggests something has changed, or shifted: he looks to his wife for a nod of acknowledgment (she’s on his side) and then he’s the one who calls her inside (he’s back in control).

I watched the entire Nightmare On Elm Street series and have quite a bit of admiration for it as a whole. The most interesting patterns I noticed: the way the movies avoid the routine of sex plus slashing by maintaining an awareness of their own fascination with teen sexuality, even allowing for an explicitly gay entry (“[Krueger] lives on your fear,” “what’s wrong with Jesse?” and other telling lines in part two); the beyond hideous finales (especially parts four and five), grotesque successions of bile and brown latex tableaus, to Christian iconography what the cover of Born This Way is to shock art.

Gay short film compilations are an emergent Netflix priority. Last time I shared Tumbleweed Town, and this time I’d love to share the romance-via-backwash, peeing-in-nature greatness of a short called Soda Pop, if I could. There’s great untapped narrative potential in soda, no doubt unrealized because writers and artists are under the mass delusion that cigarettes and coffee give pleasure.

Agenda: Did you know Altman made a gay-themed movie? And Dreyer? My full report next time, I hope.

Commencing the year-end list making.

Cream of the Crop*
(*pop crap)

1. Lady Gaga, “Marry The Night”
2. Britney Spears, “How I Roll”
3. Katy Perry, “Last Friday Night”
4. Jennifer Lopez, “On The Floor”
5. Ke$ha, “We R Who We R”

Slumberland’s Banner Year
(of Banner Years)

1. Devon Williams, Euphoria
2. Big Troubles, Romantic Comedy – released, I believe, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of GBV’s Isolation Drills and Pernice Brothers’ The World Won’t End, it’s nearly as melodically memorable as those, and as Days (by current tourmates Real Estate), which is an album about the idea of an album like this one.
3. Veronica Falls, s/t
4. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Belong
5. Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion
6. Weekend, Red EP
7. Girls Names, Dead To Me
8. Brilliant Colors, Again And Again

Parallax, continued (from)

I first heard the album during a moment of mid-morning silent comedy, as my loved one made amusing soundless gestures (thus reigniting my childhood ponderings about how to tell when music is “comedy” and when it’s “drama,” intentionally humorous music being of course relegated to an altogether different category, “novelty”), and a certain lightness in the music made me believe it was created at a similar moment in the author’s life. I started to consider the possibility that Cox and Patrick Wolf had created their own versions of the same album this year, Wolf’s Lupercalia being a seemingly irrevocable concession to true love. Then Cox described Parallax as the loneliest album he’s ever made, and I discovered the evidence upon further listens. But true love can be lonely, so maybe I wasn’t entirely wrong.

Also noted: Cox’s esses have a very distinctive sibilance.

He’s been killing it in these interviews, indeed. My favorite parts from the Pitchfork one:

On his connection to Jay Reatard: We share that anger. Punk. It manifests itself in many ways, and for him it was just there like a neon strobe light. And now it’s not there anymore … I need punk rock. It’s the medicine for me, but it’s bitter and sickening. I feel like if you don’t need it—if you’re happy and healthy—run toward that.

[Not-so-radical honesty: It’s true, but I’ve never wanted to admit it. I don’t need punk rock anymore, except as it helps me maintain a connection to my youth. I’m happy if not entirely healthy, but for my criminally vulgar shyness, any kind of music is as good a balm as any other, so long as it provides the deficient, in real life, human connection. Anyway, I have to sometimes remind myself all of that when in the presence of great music like what’s found on Parallax, otherwise I continue with my miserable, mean aspiration to the art of unhappy, unhealthy people.]

I’m not independent. I’m co-dependent. “Codie rock”—co-dependent rock.

I walk around the neighborhoods and the record stores here in Atlanta, and I just don’t feel like a hotshot—like, “Hey man, I just got back from Japan, high five.” I feel like a nobody, and that’s cool. That’s why I live here and not in New York. I tried that, and it’s just not me.

[Yeah, what’s the deal with people living in New York?]

When money and fame happen too late, it’s like pouring kerosene over a fire of self-loathing.

I have really low self-esteem, and it’s not easy for me to put myself on an album cover like that. My friends give me a hard time about it, but they don’t get it, and I don’t give a flying fuck what they think of it. Nobody else I know is willing to put themselves out there like that right now.

[I suspected as much about the recent album covers. I always come back to the idea that the best music is made by people who need music to live, and then I feel ashamed for listening to and enjoying fashion music.]

When young groups put out albums, they’re always forced to go through this cycle of touring and talking and flaunting and posturing and peacocking. Nobody makes me do that anymore. They’re just like, “Oh, it’s fucking weird-ass Bradford, let him lay in bed reading H.P. Lovecraft for two months and he’ll have a new album.”

I’d call him Dylan, today’s great rock personality, our mythic man of art, if he wasn’t so relatable: his public persona doesn’t seem like a willful creation or a defensive reaction to fame. Here’s one musical figure, if figure is even the word, I don’t need Todd Haynes to help me understand.

p.s. Sorry I never did my Bedroom Databank track-by-track review, I’d still kind of like to.

Year In Song

2011-11-17T10:10:00.000-08:00

Politics / Identity

Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise now.

Hey, buddy, can I borrow five grand? 'cause my dad's in chemo and they want to take him off his plan.

Your mommy suddenly becomes your daddy.

In Gothenburg we don’t have VIP lines – in Gothenburg we don't make a fuss about who you are.

What’s it like to be small town and gay?

How can I feel free when all I want to be is by your side in that municipality?

Alex has a band so who cares about war?

If it takes all summer long just to write one simple song – there’s too much to focus on – clearly that is something wrong.

I write poetry for myself.

II.

I once thought a good name for a band would be orgy
But that’s when I lived in the city
Then I thought a good name would be children
That’s when I looked out my kitchen window drinking
green and raspberry liquids and seeing for a moment
through the hedge a mom and her child
at play

Sources:
I.
Real Estate, "Green Aisles"
Jens Lekman, "Waiting For Kirsten"
M83, "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire"
EMA, "California"
Real Estate, "Municipality"
Girls, "Alex"
Real Estate, "Younger Than Yesterday"
Destroyer, "Blue Eyes"
II.
Thurston Moore, lost verses from Demolished Thoughts

Days: supplemental

2011-11-07T09:06:00.000-08:00

Days: Past the Train tracks, all ancient as a stone

2011-11-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

Quotations:

Art ~~washes away from the soul~~ [is] the dust of everyday life.
—Pablo Picasso [corrected]

A nation that forgets its past has no future. [So written on the side of the seemingly abandoned State Records Center and Archives building in Santa Fe. I failed to get a picture of the freshly painted quote above the faint outline of the word ‘archives,’ sad, because it could serve as a great first panel in a comic book of whimsical, or meaningful, irony.]
—Winston Churchill

What a beautiful day: the sun is shining, the birds are singing!
—A young boy in the square at Old Town in Albuquerque [the smartest one of all]

There are six things I need to find before a new place can feel like home: a library, a convenience store, a record store, a (gay) bar, an art museum, and a scenic nature trail. The first two must be within walking distance of my domicile. I’ve found most of these things in Albuquerque.

A library: the main branch is downtown, a 15-minute walk.

A convenience store: the 7-11 on Lomas sucks, but a little further is the very inviting G-Mart, whose owner continues to tell us the benefits of their DVD rental system (new releases available before Redbox!) even after we’ve rented from her.

A record store: I think I went to most of them, minus the still eagerly anticipated Krazy Kat (if it’s real), in search of the new M83 and Real Estate albums. The notable ones are Charley’s (huge!), Mecca (close to home, and with hilariously random hours) and Natural Sound (the oldest, I think).

A (gay) bar: Still working on the parenthetical (and hope to be a Social Club regular once I pay my dues) but downtown’s Blackbird suffices as a place to sit in the dark and listen to really loud 80s dance music.

An art museum: All the great ones are in Santa Fe, so we took the train there. After the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Chuck Jones Gallery, I realized what I’ve probably always known, which is that I prefer both artists when they’re painting the Southwest. Did they ever cross paths? Does my regard for Jones’ palette diminish the same for O’Keeffe’s, which is profound? The New Mexico Museum of Art had all sorts of amazing pieces by New Mexico artists whose names I neglected to write down and have already forgotten.

A scenic nature trail: We walked near the Rio Grande, and three days later in the Sandias.

Home

I find our courtyard beautiful, and not just accidentally beautiful (as there’s nothing decorative about it), but helplessly beautiful, in the pattern of the region, and ready to go unnoticed against other more commanding scenes nearby. A closed courtyard, even a rudimentary one, is a great idea simply for the way it frames the world above, separates it from whatever might exist beneath it. I like to stand outside our door at night and look at the faint glow of the city, a halo around the courtyard tree. Anything from a Mennonite community to Krazy’s Coconino County could exist beyond the walls.

Inside is coming along too. After receiving new (old) furniture today, these early triumphs of interior design:

And, for all these photos I’ve taken, some others I wish I’d taken, or still need to take: the neon sign of Dog House reflected in a window across the street; the nearby fire hydrant; shirts hanging in a car, seen from the passenger side window; two big dogs sleeping on the back of a couch, seen through and framed by a living room window; the neon bail bonds sign in the bottom window of the square building that Mt. Helena perfectly frames, from the right angle; a red-brown pitbull, a beautifully lit art object and yet totally my equal in its aliveness.

These last four won’t be getting taken, as I saw them in Helena in October, the bulldog on the 11th of that month, while taking a very sentimental fall stroll around the block of my youth (’95-’98), along six foot tall hedges and walls (always such a calming sensation, to walk near something the same height as you) and listening to Yuck’s awesome album-closer “Rubber” (the perfect song for the occasion, as it’s the sound of my youth but in a new form not available to me at the time). All this seemed conclusive proof against music videos, there being such a complete, yet accidental, convergence of sound and vision that beat anything that could ever be planned. And that pitbull: it was amazing, sort of like in movies when two different types of creatures are shown to acknowledge each other’s existence with silent regard, but it was a real feeling, not a cinematic one, though it did have a certain camera panning momentum, the dog sitting on a low wall and me passing at eye level, with a steady, panoramic view of his proffered majesty.

- - -

Back to Albuquerque: What is the music that is helping to solidify all these new connections, you ask?

I should acknowledge the local New Age flute duo Amauta’s version of “El Condor Pasa,” and not just because it was the first live music I heard here (in Old Town). Also because it was an element of a certain atmosphere.

Real Estate’s finally located (at Hastings) Days is the album of these months.

I’d like to think it says something about Albuquerque that the pieces its Philharmonic Orchestra chose to perform last night were so breathless and strange. Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments was mere overture for Alan Hovhaness’s Fantasies on Japanese Woodprints, as instantly overwhelming as the first time I heard The Soft Bulletin or “Haitian Fight Song.”

Also

Two pop philosophy books conceived during city rambles:
Mannequin: The City Scarecrow
Our Bodies: Temporary Galleries of the Soul

Dreams: I’m able to rise from lying down to standing, without bending, like Dracula from his coffin, by flexing the muscles in my feet; I’m filled with anxiety about pending or overdue math homework (at least six times in the past month); I’m planning to move across the country, every room I’m in is all a-clutter (also numerous occurences); the apocalypse, again, this time via frogs raining down from the heavens, like in Magnolia, only during the day; same dream, I escape into an apartment at the top of a tall building, it starts folding in on itself and then expanding, like an accordion.

Last: Here’s a video that doesn’t have as much to do with my experience of the Southwest as it does with general childhood fantasies of stop-motion animation. But, recently seen, and dizzily great:

Tumbleweed Town

Movies, music, and more, next time.

Municipality

2011-10-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

The second picture I took upon moving to Albuquerque:

Some others:

UNM duck pond:

Waiting for the bus on Lomas:

Mecca:

Three pillars of strength:

Count on the birds:

View from our door:

By Two's

2011-10-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

Purse

Backseat

Dreams

I.

A psycho has shot a bullet through your sternum, but it must be a thick bone, there’s not much blood yet. He fled, but says he’s coming back soon to finish you off. Unthinkingly we wait, as if your murder can’t be avoided. Then someone suggests that we could take you to the hospital, that no force holds us here in silent resignation, that he might not even come back. I run downstairs to get dressed for the drive. As usual it takes an eternity, there are many complications, my shoes become all the way unlaced and I have to lace them again. But I rush and fumble only for the dream’s sake, and not because I anticipate a second gunshot above my head.

II.

A tornado forms in front of our house, in winter, on a snowy street. It spins in place and then evaporates in the cold air. But while it lasts we think of the terror (without feeling the terror) of remaining inside, listening to the roar of the unseen tornado and not knowing which of our walls it will come crashing through. Some birds find a gap in our window and escape inside, lining up on our windowsill, away from the cold and the wind. When it’s safe outside again, they leave as miniature people, carrying playing cards larger than themselves. We help them balance the cards, fighting the impulse to crush them underneath.

Classic Boys

Models: Charlie Korsmo in What About Bob? / Joseph Mazzello in The Cure

Great Movies

Mysteries of Lisbon starts with an orphan at a boarding school, and spends four hours unraveling how he got there, how a handful of players aligned and realigned over many years to reveal his fate. The boy’s moral guide as he discovers his past is Father Dinis, skillful transformer, who shows him his room of assumed identities, calling it his “temple of sincerity” and speaking of his “solidarity with all men.” He’s the anti-Carlos: he too understands history as a set of shifting alliances, but chooses to use the knowledge differently. As for the movie, it’s as spellbinding as any great long film I can name. It’s amazing anyone has the energy to undertake an imaginative work of this kind in the current century.

I hate to fall to invoking “the real” when discussing movies, but Parting Glances really got to me and seems to have demanded it: I haven’t been so dazzled by plausible real life since Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax. Which isn’t to say either movie achieves perceived realness simply by observation, or without a careful application of cinematic technique. The centerpiece of Parting Glances is a long sequence at a party that takes up nearly a third of the film and could go on forever, so assured are its rhythms. Add to this the fact that the movie is populated with smart people, and is smart about everything it thinks (knows) it’s smart about. Somewhere in the depths of that party, two characters look at an old painting of a servant delivering a letter to a concerned woman. They ponder what news the woman might be receiving (her female lover, dead?), and then one of them, an artist, points to the woman’s hand, says there’s more painting happening in that bit of space than in all the paintings of her New York contemporaries. The movie, too, has more intelligence in the way it frames this moment than I’ve seen in quite a while, and has the boldness to imagine the lives of people who receive messages with their own particular sets of restraints, whether defined by being gay in 1980s New York or by some unique quality partly hidden from view, like the face of the turned-away woman in the painting. A great movie in every way that can be named.

Crispin (with flash)

YouTube

Kanye West rescues bad lines

That was a little joke, voila.

That’s a pretty bad way to start a conversation.

Skype

Future life

Spontaneous rendering of Albuquerque

Land of opportunity

Cathedral

2011-10-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

Helena, Montana, three days ago.

Green

Gold

To the tune of "Harvest."

Rhetoric 2: Totally At All

2011-09-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

The mixtape has shipped! I won’t waste any more words on that enterprise. I hate all those songs now!

UP TO...

Having intense dreams, including a few of an unusual (for me) end-of-the-world variety. My dreams are traditionally labyrinthine, full of Millhauserian architecture, and therefore the opposite of apocalypse: worlds without end. But this new strain isn’t all that alarming, as it’s still mixed with the infinities of old, and still a pretty cool dreamlife. I often wonder: Are even those artists most in command of their languages sometimes pained by the awareness that their dreams are their greatest creative work, and, further insult, creations that can never be art, because dreams are not translatable to any waking language and can never be shared? But there must be some language, some gnarled syntax that not only describes dream events, but also accounts for their sequencing and motivation and the sleeper’s passive acceptance of their most startling dislocations. Until that discovery, here are notes on some of my recent dreams, as nothing would be gained by telling them in complete sentences.

flood: water rushing over a glass roof ~ why is it dry in the low areas while we sink in the highlands? ~ low, dark clouds

apocalypse: a friend tunnels up through the kitchen cupboard, to where? a portal? ~ minutes to go, I’m making noodles & eating, in the event we survive but are long without food ~ someone says “my face is wooden” (meaning he can’t feel anything about the end, but it must mean he can) ~ fire colors outside

Hawthorne elementary: alone in dark crowded rooms ~ past the gym, like a nearly empty army hospital, limbs/sheets

new apartment: large bedroom with non-partitioned, non-working shower ~ still hiding in bed waiting for Z to be bridge to other rooms

a mountain path: a dark, desolate beach at one end, an impossible courtyard at the other, with ponds, rope bridges and trees, the bridges leading to alleys leading to an old downtown of warm lights ~ I converse with a spirit: when we lock our buildings at night the spirits lock us out ~ of course! ~ white paper in a frame confuses, until the light makes the glass a mirror

Reading old entries from the Deerhunter blog, which famously served as Bradford Cox’s diary back in 2007, when it would have helped me to know what an engaging personality existed behind the sort of forbidding Cryptograms (I found that out later). Well, diary + time = literature, so I’m just as pleased to start reading it now, when it’s tinted by the sadness of something past and irretrievably validated by artistic growth. Ah, that he was my age once, impulsive and not-yet-adult.

Most illuminating so far is the confession of his childhood wish to be Barret Oliver (a classic boy, for sure, but I always aspired more to Joseph Mazzello, Charlie Korsmo, and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), made really sad if you read it right after you find out about his horrible 16th year and the meaning of the song “Hazel St.”: “…kind of like a jack off fantasy about what it would have been like if i had been the person i wanted to be physically (i.e. healthy, cute, whatever...) and lived on Hazel St which is this quaint little street of the town square in downtown Marietta, Georgia.” In the same Cryptograms explication he says about his teenage best friends Sarah and Chrissy, “I always felt genderless around them.” Wow! Long-term honesty usually pays off, and it does here, with so much that’s relatable housed in so much that’s solitary.

I was always torn between aspiring to boyish perfection and the sort of messed-upness that would have made heartsick, tragic notions mine by natural right, though of course I know it’s mean and stupid to aspire to the trauma/art of others.

LISTENING TO...

As men continue to pass into obsolescence, I’ve been enjoying:

Rather than becoming more remote (as the album covers suggest: first she looked straight on, then she turned her head away, and now she’s denoted by a white latex ripple), the method of St. Vincent/Annie Clark becomes more recognizable with each release, which, far from making her boring, explainable, circumscribable, makes her more exciting (all Strange Mercy lacks is the symphonic element, which isn’t too much of a bummer) because it tells us she owns a force (brainy effusion?) she can wield. (The same could be said of the new Wild Beasts album.)

I think a new geographical region needs to be designated to account for music from America’s Northern corridor, or Empire Builder zone, as it shall be named. South Dakota’s EMA will be among the accounted for. She (Erika Anderson) excels in the music of boredom, the music of self-imposed violence and of living, inadvertent time capsules. Why does she sound like a mid-90s Hole fan? Well, here in Montana, Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” is our favorite song. There was never a time in the past 20 years when it wasn’t. We don’t know nostalgia. Time just doesn’t move here. So there must be areas in this land where Hole is similarly revered.

Also keen on

No Age’s “Common Heat,” “Valley Hump Crash” and “Chem Trails”
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ “No One Is (As I Are Be)”
Neil Young’s “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown”
The Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” and “Baby, It’s You”

They warned me: once you’re hit by Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, everything else is in danger of not even sounding like sound. It just sounds so good, every sound so carefully separated: it zings (a buzzier kind of singing), a headphone album that strangely wants to carry you between the rooms of your home, from lying to standing, from inside to outside, slowly along sidewalks and back again.

If they ever make Care Bears: Legacy, M83 will have to do the soundtrack. My future love of M83 was certainly latent in my childhood love of the Care Bears: all that is bright and happy threatened as the dark clouds gather, but still glowing under electric skies.

So far in 2011, seven albums demand to be top ten’d. If you take the first letter from each, you can spell “cat lice.”

READING TO...

More Hate, which in an interview Peter Bagge refers to as the space he needed in order to look at his past objectively. That’s key, especially in comics, the notion that style doesn’t negate objectivity.

I know on an intellectual level that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz lacks the psychological element of the MGM movie, that Oz being a place not got to in a dream, but horizontally along the earth, changes everything. But I still found it psychologically intense, full of the anxiety of Dreams and/or Separation and the endless work required to return one to the balanced, real world, this work deemed necessary by the hideous mutations of dream logic, or the more hideous mutations of waking hopelessness. On top of that, the scene of the Scarecrow’s birth is so amazing that, if the ending of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” made Tobias Wolff feel like he was levitating, well, this sequence of Oz made me feel like I was everywhere and nowhere all at once. The best moment:

“‘Now I’ll make the eyes,’ said the farmer. So he painted my right eye, and as soon as it was finished I found myself looking at him and at everything around me with a great deal of curiosity, for this was my first glimpse of the world.”

God Almighty.

I shouldn’t speak so soon, but I’ve already been disabled after two pages of James Baldwin’s Another Country, a novel so great so early that it’s almost impossible to read, every paragraph turning toward another of America’s deep, persistent failures, with language so precise in its attack, so general in its referents, that it’s hard to tell which round of failure he’s documenting. Must be today’s. Take a look:

[1] “Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes.”

[2] “The music was loud and empty, no one was doing anything at all, and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction in which not even those who hated most deeply any longer believed. They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after.”

Jesus Christ.

But even if nothing so great as society is implicated in our speech, if we manage nothing more than our interpersonal relationships, we should all speak in constant view of the moral and the philosophy, like they do in Pride & Prejudice.

WATCHING TO...

After his triumphant return, post-surgeries, Roger Ebert could write no wrong, but then, rather than drown in the deluge of his writing, I swam for shore and generally stayed there, as I didn’t think I could maintain a healthy critical stance toward so much writing, and suspected that writing so voluminous couldn’t maintain its own critical stance. But he still does write amazing things, like, the other day: “Man on Wire is about the vanquishing of the towers by human bravery and joy, not by fanatic terrorism.” There’s nothing too surprising in the idea, but the use of the word “vanquishing” jolted me. Actually, the idea is surprising, because that word makes it. Well, here are some movies I’ve seen recently in which something gets vanquished.

There’s a scene halfway through Brick that finally tells us how we got to this world. High schoolers settle life or death matters at a kitchen table; the mother of one stumbles in and offers refreshment, embarrassing their delusions, but they wait her out until they can be adults again. At some point these kids started thinking of themselves as gumshoes, baddies and informants, but then the real world faded from view, they lost their sense of irony, and it became for real. That makes Brick satire-free, except for that one scene, which is more like an authorial admission of the premise’s genesis.

I like to keep a mental list of things I will have to share with my imaginary future students. The only one I can remember at the moment is Frans Masereel’s The City, but now I can add one more: the Spike Lee joint Passing Strange.

The best things about Our Idiot Brother and Contagion happen to be the same thing, ellipsis, though in the former it’s used to avoid obvious, overplayed scenes, and in the latter, sort of for the same reason, but more to solve the problem of condensing and pacing a long-form disaster. I always expect audio-visual assault whenever I go to the multiplex (even if it’s pleasurable assault) but on these two most recent trips the movies very determinedly avoided berating me.

Of all the musical cues in Carlos (primarily Feelies and Wire songs, always cut short, a further refusal to resolve an unresolvable tension) the one I like best is The Lightning Seeds’ “Pure,” which, in keeping with the general strategy of the movie (letting events speak for themselves), is employed totally without irony. We all deserve days defined by such featherweight melodies, even if we’re lying about where we’re going and where we’ve been. As for Carlos, he does qualify as a megalomaniac, I suppose, but I wonder if critics who take pains to point this out have been insensitive to the charms of the Edgar Ramirez performance: megalomania needs charisma (or money) to fuel it, and I was mostly as willing to concede to Carlos as any of his associates. Until his surgery priorities became known…

You can always test whether a movie is real (that is to say, really up to something) by losing the story, mentally isolating frames in which the actors aren’t particularly recognizable, and determining if these would have any compelling mystery as photographs. In Terri: a crazy-eyed, shirtless rail in long shot, facing away from the camera, some devil in the skin of his back or the darkness in front of him speaking the ways he’ll try to break out of his body; three people sitting on chairs in a graveyard, because even if we don’t know why they’re there, well, the world demands they sit somewhere. Pretty real.

Police, Adjective is a film of the Romanian new wave, though I still find that a weird name for it, as the systems of oppression these films depict have to be vanquished before a new wave can roll through: no art wave could itself be strong enough to crush these government nightmares. That said, Police, Adjective has a sense of humor, and while it’s a little sad the situation is such that the filmmakers have to expend their cinematic revolutionary joie de vivre in undeniable arguments against the most boring, bureaucratic evils, it and its ilk are doing a great job of it.

The guys in Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control aren’t mad, or even obsessed, really, just amazingly self-aware, having early realized the world’s strange variety and how to choose a profession that best expresses it. This is the rare documentary in which the meaning isn’t provided by the subjects, or even by their interactions, but by some crazy, unpredictable triangular force of subject, montage and viewer.

Days of Heaven gives us a narrator for whom the adult events of the movie present only a delight of the senses. These are her days of heaven, but no one else’s. The last line of the movie is a great joke: “I hope things work out for her,” she says in voiceover as she follows along beside a wandering girl; our narrator is just as desperate in fact, but not in spirit.

Some of the great things in Chang-dong Lee’s Secret Sunshine, some of which were also great things in his Poetry: the attempt to represent real-world colors and refusal to color-code emotions; the way it allows characters to ask obvious questions (“where/what is God?” replacing the other movie’s “where/what is poetry?”); the way its characters find meaning in groups (impossible in American movies); the inclusion of a character whose pathetic actions mirror those of the character who finds them so; the way incidental lines suddenly have overwhelming moral implications: “You might have killed someone!”; the way it takes place in a realistically populated world.

But more enjoyable and more time consuming than any of those are these:

Mad Men (season four)
Pride & Prejudice (miniseries)
Louie (season one)
Project Runway (season nine)

PLEASE LOOK FORWARD TO...

Construction of my JGL shrine.

Coinage of a new word that is sort of like beauty and sort of like genius, but different, naming a quality we will admire in others once we have a name for it.

Ponderings about whether there is more humanity to be found in a large, sharp image or a small, grainy one.

Psychoanalysis of my compulsion to turn all photographs into album covers. Is this artless reduction? Test any resulting hypotheses with ten alternate covers for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, to be produced by cropping my best photos and putting the words “born this way” somewhere on them.

The bourgeoning arts of scan-art and trace-art.

- - -

I hate when people say that something is the proper subject of something (excepting Bergman’s “the human face is the proper subject of cinema,” which is probably true), but if anyone ever asks me what is the proper subject of literature, I will have this answer prepared: the relationship between body and soul, and the sad things that result when one is healthy and the other is not.

I’m working on two stories that go nowhere near that proper subject. I confess this here only because creating expectation might motivate me to finish them. One, about the arts of color mixture and set decoration, is called “Lady Daydream” and begins: “He calls me Lady Daydream, and tells me it’s not the right green.” The other has to do with all those implicit daily confessions of mortality we all experience (I think), and the fear of making them explicit.

- - -

I have no talent for self-promotion, but I’ve been brainstorming ways I might re-brand this blog to get more visitors. A few ideas:

Hot For Malkmus: Confessions of a Gay Indie Rock Fan

Life & How To Live It: A Mother and Son Discuss God, Life, & R.E.M.

Not Hot For Barlow: More Confessions of a Gay Indie Rock Fan

- - -

Through the completion of all these promises and future plans, I will keep in mind some fairly obvious things that are nonetheless worth remembering and/or putting in one’s own words:

Eras in history only happen once, but this is per person, not per eternity. For example the punk rock era happened (it really did, vividly) in my head a decade ago, and it’s never coming back. But that was sort of a general overview, so I might get pieces of it back via overlap, like if I have a really heavy Jim Carroll phase and his life happens in my brain. (Tip: Neil’s “Words”)

There can never be a description of something that replaces the thing it’s describing.

If you want to move outside the realm of dreams, sadness and love, and finally learn about things that have exact technical dimensions, begin by reading food labels, and discover that food’s content is nutritional, not emotional.

When we start listening to music, we’ve never been in a city, been on a plane, done anything sexual, etc. so you can imagine what a mysterious outside world music represents. That, too, isn’t coming back.

The three stages of growing up, in terms of attitude towards music made by twenty-somethings: finding it impossibly adult; resenting its accomplishment; being proud of its humanity.

It’s hard to say anything and know with any certainty that the opposite isn’t the truth, but if you try, and talk long enough, you’ll eventually hit on something that sounds right for at least that moment, and your listener will appreciate the effort. If your brain is slow, you might never say anything smart in front of an audience, but you can compensate by saying a lot, and save economy for solitary thought.

EMBARRASSING...

I was looking at an old blog post where I used the word “repertory” but meant “repertoire.”

Everyone will return to the weather of their youth

2011-08-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hi from Montana!

Upon further reflection, I have no interest in hosting mp3s on this blog, so, having new means to make tapes, I’m sticking to my original scheme. Here’s another taste of what you’ll be missing if you don’t act now… “Great songs expertly arranged, a mix for the seasons and beyond the seasons!” –R.H.

it’s so good to see you again … King of Everything … the warp and the wooze and the subterfuge … what’s inside a girl like me … as the sky gets nearer so does time … self-indulgent details … all the girls with broken hearts dancing to Orchestral Manoeuvres … [vow] … strangest Autumn heat … oh, if you stay … the house we never owned

Green trees call to me … one single sheet for cover … swept into the cast of a past December … bury us with our ships … I wanna write my whole life down … looking in my mirror took me by surprise … pillow for the bad dreams … as far as I’d seen life was endless … a lock of your hair … all the tales, mythic noise … purple and red and yellow and on fire

steep waves breaking the only sound … it could all be a dream, Green … passing time in ninety-nine degrees … the sea rushes up my knees like flame … eating at McDonald’s for lunch … your death at sea is obvious and fascinating to me … we were only young … you’re still her friend … feeling like a woman, looking like a man … the way I’ve seen it written in the clouds … give out your number now!

Notes:

Despite what I wrote above, mp3s for Side 3 will still be made available to mixtape subscribers.

Photos inspired by the ones on display at Confessions of a Michael Stipe, a casual, accidental, non-professional ("complete with beach camera smudge!"), flash-happy and artful series of observations. I love summer, too, and hope to find that loving seasonlessness is the same thing, or similar.

Midsummer

2011-08-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

I guess I like living in this upside-down time when you can only show respect for a moment by not filming/photographing/documenting it. Inaction feels like progress.

We sat in the grass and thought about the movie we’d just seen, and the wind and the dark made it live for a few more minutes.

Fill in the blank

1. Breaking Bad __________
2. Buffalo Bill & The Indians __________
3. The Naked Kiss __________
4. Rise of the Planet of the Apes __________
5. Sabrina __________
6. Safety Last __________
7. White Material __________
8. World on a Wire, __________

a) proceeds inevitably, as an origin story should.

b) justifies its title in the dreamy first reel, during which we (1) hear her voiceover narration; (2) follow the direction of her gaze; (3) read her suicide note; (4) inhabit her dreams; and (5) witness her beautiful performance in a rocking chair (back and forth and back and forth—long pause—and back). Also, did the film originate from a desire to know what Sunset Boulevard might have been if Norma’s estate hadn’t fallen into decay?

c) looked at another way, is not nearly long enough, considering it requires that a man re-learn what it feels like to know he is real. And yet, does it matter if we are data or atoms or irreducible? Whatever the case, we still have to confront the fact of living.

d) divides us among those who try to catch up with dreams and those who let dreams catch up with a resolute inner peace.

e) divides us among those who want the status quo and those who want change, both of which can be desired honestly, or dishonestly. The film is dedicated to the honest ones.

f) divides Americans into good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. But the people in bad neighborhoods are free to live their bad lives; the only truly dangerous people are those who might try to unite the two worlds, or suggest evidence of cross-pollination.

g) has great fun in the big city, with its architecture and crowds and transportation, in ways that moviemakers haven’t cared to do since the invention of sound. Sad.

h) confirms with the episode called “Fly,” if it wasn’t already sufficiently evident, that it is the greatest TV drama of all time, and finds Walter White asking, “At what point (how many seasons ago) should my life have ended, before I started to make things so much worse?” A few days later I found my iPod had magically been left paused on De La Soul’s “Eye Know,” and decided during my walk that if Walter’s question was to be expanded to all of human civilization, then “Eye Know” would be his answer.

answers: 1. h; 2. d; 3. f; 4. a; 5. b; 6. g; 7. e; 8. c

Music

Mercury Rev – “Endlessly”
Mary Margaret O’Hara – Miss America
(American music, undoubtedly, but I still
can’t figure out what it’s referencing)
Mojave 3 – Ask Me Tomorrow
Yo La Tengo – Painful

Stereolab
(the latest “all I like,” to quote Radio Raheem)

Volcano Suns – The Bright Orange Years
No Doubt – “Sunday Morning”
(this really is the best song on Tragic Kingdom;
I was a pretty smart 8-year old, in certain ways)
Britney Spears – “How I Roll”
Kate Bush – “Deeper Understanding”
(more prescient than World on a Wire)

Title purge

Arch Among Us
Brainiac Amour
Everywhere is Oz
New Observations of Threadbare Morality
Metro Gnome
The Moon’s Reaching For Me
Not for Bobcat Haul
Paint Tables, Cover Screens & Net Purses
A Person Is Not A People
Thorough-Bass & Human Nature
You Zapped…

…tell me your favorite and I'll use it for the next post!

To celebrate the imminent onset of double summer, I’ll digitally reseminate April’s mixtape. Technological setbacks (i.e. the circle button on my tape deck doesn’t do what its depressed status indicates it’s doing) kept physical copies from ever being made (this can also soon be rectified when I reach double summer’s Montana fulcrum), but from the perspective of many months later, the 33-song sequence of Skies still has an obvious non-ephemeral integrity that I dare not forget just yet.

Reasons I’ll miss the Twin Cities

#47

#18

Angel Grove to Moon Palace

2011-07-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

...

[Insert the prettiest picture of a McDonalds ever taken.]

[Insert diptych of dusky, humid Kansas City intersections.]

[Insert green ripple, though I suspect it turned out much too dark.]

[Intersperse other vacation photos with tales of Kimberly.]

Kimberly and Trini look after a mischievous little girl named Maria.

Kimberly and Trini gather signatures to close down
a nearby dump site while convincing their teammates to
work together more.

Kimberly's day goes from bad to worse when
the Samurai Fanman captures her.

Kimberly is in trouble when her uncle Steve succumbs to a
sleeping potion in the middle of flying an airplane
with her on board.

Kimberly helps her younger cousin try out for the
Angel Grove Junior High cheerleading team,
while Rita sends the mighty Lizzinator to Earth.

Kimberly's deaf friend is the only hope to rescue a group of girls
captured by the Gnarly Gnome and his hypnotic accordion.

Rita and her evil Spit Flower monster set out to ruin
Kimberly's design for a float in the world peace parade.

Bulk and his gang seek to ruin the food festival, while Rita
sends a gluttonous pig to eat everything on Earth.

The Hand Of The Spirit Is Drawing Now

2011-07-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

I would like to be thorough in my readings of women and gay men (most recently, Kristin Hersh and Gore Vidal, the two most ardent admirers of Betty Hutton, for different reasons), but honestly I am not reading much, an artless condition I have sought to improve by looking at photography books. I’m starting off big, as I usually aim to do with new canon endeavors:

[a] Robert Frank’s The Americans
[b] Garry Winogrand’s Figments from the Real World
[c] Atget’s Paris
[d] Friedlander, Harry Callahan
[e] Arbus, Avedon
[f] The Book of 101 Books

[a] As fine a way as any to spend the Fourth of July. /// I recognize a lot of my own instincts in Robert Frank, and in one particular image of a barbershop seen through a window, the blurry reflection of the author looming in the center, so large and abstracted as to be mere visual noise, a sort of impersonal reminder of subjectivity and half-invisible way to divide the image into three sections of light and shadow. There’s some relief to be found in self-reflexive picture-taking (that moment after the click when the compulsion to stop time briefly dissipates), but I’ve always lacked the courage to take pictures of strangers, which is the crucial quality for a photographer to have.

[a/b] I wonder if a similarly expansive and keen-eyed documentation of the world today has been undertaken, somewhere, and I worry that my not knowing is an implicit and wrong-headed acknowledgment that there’s nothing left worth photographing. But I’m thrilled to be able to look at a half-stocked replica of the former present. Like most things I do in private, encountering it mostly serves to make me cry in wonder. Who are these people rendered in shadow? What do their bodies tell, besides capture? How many more snatched moments were they allowed before death? Should they be allowed the right to be lost to the past? I’ve long wondered if characterization is a sin (to pretend to know someone, and build a lie from them), but maybe documentary representation is no better. A person shouldn’t have to carry all their humanity on their body, or anywhere it can be seen. (Well, sometimes I think that, but it’s just as easy to shut it off and take the visual world for myself. But strangers still scare me.)

[c] I had an initial impression that Atget shares something with Frank and Winogrand, but couldn’t figure out why his Paris streets are so empty (unlike their American ones) until it occurred to me that he is working with such slow exposures that all human subjects blur out of existence (unless they stand still, in which case they render as half-human fog). Loneliness begot by technological limitation. Of course there is loneliness in any photograph no matter its proximity to the human face, but Atget is accidentally lonely in his own particular way. Art is a product of chance, and photography is, at its best, pure accident.

[d] Note to self: Spend more time with these men. Bold extrapolations of and movements away from the grain of humankind?

[e] I am generally more interested in accidental portraiture than in portraiture, but have re-familiarized myself with these two, the meaning of whose work it is generally considered is already known. But what we think we know we know even less.

[f] A helpful guide to sort through all of this.

[g] Note to self: Travel often with a camera (digital is okay). Already lost is your most dramatic night: a storm cloud over Riverside Apartments (seen from Washington Avenue near the Love Power church), downtown bathed in imminent apocalypse, and even before then, an evening of weird light, office parks, strangers, wary poses at streetlights, declarations of “yes I am, with a capital G.” G for what?

The best things I saw at John Waters’ Absentee Landlord exhibit at the Walker Art Center on June 23:

-There is more implied movement in Lee Lozano’s hammers than there could ever be actual movement in an actual hammer, which is why I shook just looking.

-Speaking of Lee Friedlander, his Galax, VA proves my theory that the best, most alien pictures are always taken at home.

-Mike Kelley’s map of spatial relationships at Stevenson Junior High is just about the cleverest and funniest thing I ever saw. I wish I’d had the idea, but if I had I probably wouldn’t have figured out that a middle school would serve best as the conduit for such academic pathos.

-I’m never sure if there’s quite enough story in visual art or enough visual art in story for me to be permanently satisfied with either, but there’s a lot of both in Larry Johnson’s widescreen literary passage about jumping in a car with a Hollywood stranger.

-Gregory Green’s elaborate construction of a Minneapolis bomb-maker’s workspace creates yet again that a-ha moment that somehow never diminishes: of course, a Roundy’s paper bag will look like art in museum light!

-But the most compelling thing on display is quite obviously a 20-minute film of a McDonalds slowly filling with water, called Flooding McDonalds. I came and went, and the ensuing closure indicated that it proceeds at the pace of quiet doom.

The nearby Voyeurism & Surveillance exhibit is a lot less fun, clearly. Except for the room of horror (whose power mostly registers during the act of looking away), the unconsentingly captured moment is only interesting to me if it’s also, in Cartier-Bresson parlance, a decisive one. But I appreciate my introduction to his possible disciples: Frank, Callahan, Winogrand.

Also, at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, in early June:

-Stephanie Frostad's Sudden Gulch is what they might have come upon next in Meek's Cutoff.

Notes on the modern cinema:

1. Jane Eyre – The movies haven’t given us such fine verbal sparring leading so inexorably toward love in quite a while; the sparrers fall even as they win.

2. Bridesmaids – Gross-out humor has never been tied so closely to actual physical sensation; this must have to do with the fact that the characters are women, generally more likely to pay attention to their bodies and go to doctors.

3. Hesher – Please note the dual (or double) protagonist. Hesher is not the vital center of this movie, but somewhere left of center, the force unleashed to bring the child’s nascent teenager into view.

4. Everything Must Go – I like the “Janie Jones” sequence of my own adaptation, but applaud this one for scattering the man’s lawn with similarly good records and other well chosen items Carver’s prose is too spare to list.

5. Kung Fu Panda 2 – Every action director should have to make an animated movie to prove that he knows how to coherently block and cut an action sequence, as these guys, freed from practical filming concerns, certainly do.

6. The Tree of Life – The moment after the first cosmic sequence when the man listens to his wife’s pregnant belly and by extension a murmur of the mysteries just shown; and then we see a boy swimming through a bedroom and out the door, as if already in the womb exists the promise of future rooms; from there, life and the movie is all learning, trembling.

7. Midnight in Paris – States its themes pretty clearly, so I won’t repeat them, but they are synonymous with all my ideas about life and art. Also, it seems Woody’s greatest golden years woe is that he does not rank with novelists (given his recent fascination with the aspiring and failed among them).

8. Rubber – The most original aspect is also the most serious, the way the movie ponders the aimless life of a tire, not yet killing people, just time.

9. Super 8 – Novel development amid nicely detailed nostalgia: boy has already learned the movie’s lesson via dead mother and imparts it to alien, not vice versa.

10. Cars 2 – Hey, this is pretty good! There’s certainly no defect of story here, and if there is one at all, it’s maybe just one of pace, or emotional degree. These are the only Pixar movies not set anywhere adjacent to the human world (though the cities look like ours), which might explain the twinge of dissatisfaction you feel.

11. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – But if art isn’t accident, then it’s a deliberate attempt to organize time. The greatest solace of film/books/music (for me, lately) is the way they force the beholder to succumb to another’s sense of time. Boonmee is downright noble in that regard, almost makes Cars 2 look evil.

12. Beginners – I love any movie that dares to imagine the real lives of our parents, to think of their hopes and desires in relation to our own.

13. The Trip – Philosophical question that could have been the point of the not-so-philosophical Joaquin hoax: Because this is Coogan playing Coogan, do we laugh at his misery? If he’d been entirely fictional, or, conversely, the real Coogan, we’d despair for him.

14. Cave of Forgotten Dreams – Art across time! We love the individual artist, but his canvases can never be as large as those of a collective humanity anonymous even to each other. And yet that beautiful panel (slab? chunk?) of four horses is the work of one hand and almost begs to be seen as apart.

Ideas for poems:

-Everything that’s left to do, like: a concert movie without sound.

-How when someone says, “In the grand scheme of things,” they should not say anything else after.

-Things implied in correspondence sent and received: the barely manageable cost of a stamp; everything you want to say but can’t.

-A transcription of such beauty in its enjambment and punctuation that it, and not the thing it transcribes, must be cited.

-A conversation between the figment and the stand-in: “How would I know how things work? I’m only a figment of the author’s limited imagination, while you, of course, are his stand-in.”

-An erratic dog near traffic as the owner desperately tries to keep it safe, unresolved: but whatever happens, we know he will love the dog more than ever tonight.

-How I keep track of my thoughts (index cards, envelopes, twice-folded printer paper, quilt as poem or poem as quilt).

-Graffiti that still packs a punch: Looting Is Survival.

The best music I’ve heard since last we met (What Is Folk Music Anyway? Edition):

-Mary Gauthier’s The Foundling
-Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse

Coming soon to the sidebar: I’ve been writing for The Big Takeover for nearly a year now, and will maintain a list of links to those articles, as they are the reason that sightings of me have been rarer here in recent months.

Vegas to Africa

2011-06-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

Soon: more photos + trip commentary, interspersed with thoughts on all the latest in film!

Update 7/6/11: A little bit more, as promised, but only a little, as I still feel defeated by the corrupted memory card that contains many of the best pictures. Movies in the next post.

grass, Gallup

sand, Window Rock

rich neighborhood, near Scottsdale

homesite wash, near Navajo

canyon shadow, Window Rock

parking lot tree, Tempe

more trees, Tempe

snowy mountain, Provo

Dispatches:

The light in New Mexico is such that I’d never seen before; all is bright color and nothing is ugly in its equal glow, even prefab franchises so dismal and embarrassed in any other land.

[Insert the prettiest picture of a McDonalds ever taken.]

Probably better than meeting a famous person is the honor of entering these piecemeal cities and conjuring the dead, crushed humanity that made them possible.

[Insert diptych of dusky, humid Kansas City intersections.]

I predicted we’d emerge from the gray, soupy Midwest somewhere in Kansas, and we did, as we skated along that vast piece of rippled green paper, presided over by an orange sun. The Midwest will celebrate the barely perceptible fluctuations in its topography (all dales, woods and waters), but unpretentious Kansas is truly exciting land.

[Insert green ripple, though I suspect it turned out much too dark.]

Epilogue:

Is it necessary to conquer one’s fears of irrational behavior that other people consider normal? Re: highway driving: probably, because I don’t like the idea of going somewhere new except by land.

May 20/21, April 6

2011-05-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

In the wrecked future world, we reached the land of office telephones.

Queen Asphalt / Queen of Variation

Citizen Kane - Is It Terrific?

Lout Sis / NYMFOS (acronymically)

But this is all beside the point of the main story, or should I say the story is beside the point, as it lies not with his point nor its intact sheath, but somewhere else, adjacent maybe, if you believe our bodies make us in even such unseen ways.

And here I am talking about "when my son was born" when what I mean to say is "when I gave birth to my son." That was action, truly, and all on my part.

What were the skies like when you were young?

2011-04-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

UPDATED 5/22/11: Join me as I move beyond the theoretical! If you’d like to subscribe to my annual mixtape series, or request a cassette copy of this year’s mix with no further obligations or appeals to membership, send an email to gstueven@gmail.com with a succinct description of your childhood skies in the subject line. Since too many great songs merited inclusion this year, each cassette will come with a download link for newly added Side 3. If either Side A or Side B is not up to your standard, a simple Side 3 overdub, easily effected on any cassette player with recording capability, will make this a mix that can’t lose! Please note that each cassette will include personalized cover art—based on my limited knowledge of the recipient’s morals and interests—in place of the image seen below. Please also note that I make no guarantee of timely delivery. But take comfort in the knowledge that the beauty of these 33 songs is in no immediate danger of expiration. Lastly, follow me here, where I'll explicate the relevance of each song (maybe).

Here, on this day of amazing sky, it feels appropriate to unveil this year’s springtime mixtape, still only theoretical and therefore open to revision, but soon to take on a form as physical as the imminently softening outside world.

The Aislers Set – “Chicago New York” [2.23]
Veronica Falls – “Stephen” [2.26]
R.E.M. – “Every Day Is Yours To Win” [3.26]
The Geraldine Fibbers – “Swim Back To Me” [3.25]
Pale Saints – “Babymaker” [3.26]
Little Black Dress – “Robin” [4.09]
Minks – “Kusmi” [2.47]
Julianna Barwick – “Vow” [4.39]
Weekend – “Youth Haunts” [5.33]
Suede – “The Wild Ones” [4.51]
Patrick Wolf – “The City” [4.15]
.....total [41.20]

Jeremy Jay – “Shayla” [2.50]
The Chills – “Double Summer” [3.14]
Crystal Stilts – “Silver Sun” [3.03]
Lower Dens – “Tea Lights” [4.40]
Kurt Vile – “On Tour” [5.26]
Michael Jackson – “I Can’t Help It” [4.29]
Twin Shadow – “At My Heels” [3.37]
Stereolab – “Wow & Flutter” [3.08]
The Secret History – “My Life With The Living Dead” [3.51]
The Amps – “Bragging Party” [4.32]
The Orb – “Little Fluffy Clouds” [4.27]
.....total [43.17]

Tennis – “Long Boat Pass” [2.59]
Twin Sister – “Lady Daydream” [3.22]
Iris DeMent – “Hotter Than Mojave In My Heart” [2.33]
Patti Smith – “Kimberly” [4.29]
The Dictators – “Weekend” [4.02]
Lilys – “The Hermit Crab” [3.33]
Simple Minds – “Big Sleep” [5.03]
Robyn – “Call Your Girlfriend” [3.47]
Grace Jones – “Walking in the Rain” [4.30]
The Wipers – “Wait A Minute” [3.04]
Women – “Eyesore” [6.25]
.....total [43.47]

The featured songs from the 1990s are my response to the title question, originally posed to Rickie Lee Jones. I’ve included her answer, concerning little fluffy clouds and Arizona skies that go on forever, as well, in the hopes of a double summer—one in syrupy Minneapolis, and a later, drier, autumnal one under her childhood skies.

If I had to narrow my childhood dreamings of an expansive radness in the great elsewhere down to one person, then there was no one cooler than Kim Deal, so her own ~~“Dedicated”~~ "Bragging Party" dedicates this mix to her. Supposedly I get to see her tonight, which is insane.

Original tracklist is in the comments for this post.

Realm Of The Senseless

2011-04-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

Three lines from an unmade movie, halfway imagined:

One day we’ll look back on this and wonder why they didn’t just teleport.

Pool is a metaphor for billiards.

I wouldn’t know how to make it meaningful.

Three lines from Meek’s Cutoff, halfway remembered:

Here we are again, working like n***ers.

You can’t imagine what we’ve done, the cities we’ve built.

This was all written long before we got here.

Which I think give an overall impression of the way this movie is able to state its themes literally and yet retain its mythic force. But there’s one question, the big one, that never escapes the lips of the characters: What are we doing here? You see it first on the minds of the women, whose real homes are far back in the East and who find nothing worth replacing them with in the West, but finally no one is immune to recognizing the absurdity of the westward compulsion or absolvable of the guilt of living out an unseen design. One character wonders if Stephen Meek is ignorant or plain evil, and probably the only sense in making a period Western anymore is to ask that question about the people of the past, to try to remember the wrong and inevitable ways in which we came to inhabit this country.

And the last shot: Something about Kelly Reichardt’s sense of time gave me the impression that not very much of it had passed, so I wasn’t able to predict the final fadeout. But when it came, it was a punch to the soul, unsettling any hope that we might be able to read the signs of our own destiny, our doing and undoing.

A second viewing of Vertigo taught me that a man following a woman in her car through the streets of San Francisco is the same as him tracing the random sputterings of her brain with his halfway seeing eyes. Hypnotic, the ways we try to follow each other.

A second viewing of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World reminded me that the movie is, more than anything else, an extended commentary on modern music, sometimes literally (genre headings in an oft-frequented Toronto record store: Gabba, Math Rock, Gloom Rock, Sadcore), sometimes implicitly (when Wallace swaps the gender of all of Scott’s pronouns as Scott tells about the most amazing girl in the world, he’s simultaneously doing the same thing to every love song ever written).

According to City Pages I live on the edge of the best neighborhood in the Twin Cities, but of course the best places are always wherever you’re not, and really the only thing that might keep me in Minneapolis would be if I could get a room in the Commodore, in the Loring neighborhood, also home to the Walker, Loring Park, 19 Bar, Rainbow Road (which must only exist because people like knowing it’s there, and not because anyone really needs what it’s selling), my early morning walk-throughs, and a singular enchantment beamed straight from my idle imaginings of out of the way spots in NYC.

All the devout colors and faces and figures at the MIA were a bit too much for my lightly troubled stomach today, but…

The colors in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pedernal, ill-making perhaps if less softly arrived at, were an exception. There’s one stray curve in this painting of curves that is precisely the place I’d like to live inside when I get to New Mexico/Arizona.

I find it humbling that a painting called Before And After Being Young was completed in the year of my birth. Fittingly, it looks like a door to the place that exists beyond a womb or a coffin’s satin lining.

I uncovered the heretofore-unseen erotic/romantic element in Walt Kuhn, which is unmistakable in the rendering of his softly masculine circus performer, a lot less so in his sad clown, though now I can see that the gaze (on both sides) is the same.

I usually find more to love in the MIA’s early American art section than in its Modern Art section, but I groaned when I saw that Clementine Hunter’s beautiful The Wash has been removed from the latter to the former, as if it’s been downgraded to mere Americana, as if Hunter was only accidentally great. I hope that’s not part of the new designation.

One more thing about Just Kids: I hate the realization at the end of memoirs (especially ones in which a person succumbs to AIDS) that even a life lived within the past isn’t infinite, that it eventually brushes up against the present, or death. But that’s why I read memoirs, for this beautiful meaning that’s built into all of them, good or bad. Is this partly what’s implied when Gore Vidal (or Myra Breckenridge, rather) says, “More than ever am I convinced that the only useful form left to literature in the post-Gutenberg age is the memoir: the absolute truth, copied precisely from life, preferably at the moment it is happening…”? So written in a novel.

Two songs for Easter Sunday:

Everybody’s wondering what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worrying ‘bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever, and some say you’re gonna come back.
Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior if in sinful ways you lack.
Some say that they’re coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Some say they’re going to a place called Glory and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact.
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory and I don’t like the sound of that.
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.
But I choose to let the mystery be.

Iris DeMent, "Let The Mystery Be"

I am the spring, the holy ground,
the endless seed of mystery,
the thorn, the veil, the face of grace,
the brazen image, the thief of sleep,
the ambassador of dreams, the prince of peace.
I am the sword, the wound, the stain.
Scorned transfigured child of Cain.
I rend, I end, I return.
Again I am the salt, the bitter laugh.
I am the gas in a womb of light, the evening star,
the ball of sight that leads that sheds the tears of Christ
dying and drying as I rise tonight.

Patti Smith, "Easter"

For Gore Vidal

2011-04-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

My review of the disappointment of missing the Owen Pallett performance (happening right now).

I listen to "Keep The Dog Quiet" through the clatter of the projector and muffled sound of movie dialogue and swelling score, through my light head and dripping nose and faintly feverish ears and long refusal of sleep, and imagine walking into a dark theater where all my best future acquaintances sit in expensive coats. They watch my shadow find my seat, and from somewhere in its silent center I look out and watch the strings gather in a fountain of light, with the Great One, O.P., standing on its rim, echoing his voice in every corner of the hall, more echoes and more surfaces than my bedroom walls and CD player have ever allowed. Or these tinny bits of plastic that have lately made all S's so sharp, but they will do, because they are only made for imagining, and the lobby needs an attendant like a man needs a man, and anyway memories are as elusive as anticipations and nothing ever gets resolved. It is snowing.

Plantation Of Daisies

2011-04-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

FIRST

[1] Julianna Barwick’s The Magic Place (whose beautiful cover image of trees is guiding me through these post-melt, pre-leaf days, the way the whispering foliage in Japanese folktale fantasia Kuroneko guided me through the last of the pre-melt days) is my favorite album of the year so far, just a (long) hair (from a female mane) ahead of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake (another album about a magic place, and an equally elusive one). But this ranking is not really objectively defined, probably just a symptom of my belief in wordlessness over words.

[2] Pop music: The seeming equation of gayness and hedonism (or casual inability to differentiate between the two) in Ke$ha’s “We R Who We R” bothers me on a very deep level, but I’m still well enough able to separate the lyrics from the human imperative of an unspooling vocal melody that makes this one the sickeningly innocent and beautiful heir to “Just Dance.” I've referred to Ke$ha's "valley girl cackle," and it persists here, but this time the song privileges the cackle's human vitality. Meanwhile, “Till The World Ends” is the first Britney Spears song I have ever derived the least bit of enjoyment from, probably because it is a Robyn clone. And while I don’t know if I’ve heard “Hold It Against Me,” the other single from "avant garde" masterwork Femme Fatale, I must stop to celebrate its title, somehow clever but not vulgar.

However: For all pop music’s attempts to communicate something universal, there has still never been a truer song than “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Even if you're living a turbulent life, there must be truth in the irony.

[3] Two seemingly contradictory things I have written recently.

2/21/11: I can’t think of another band right now that so strongly believes in music as the beginning and end of everything. I realize now I can let them get away with the “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” refrain of “Where I’m Going,” among other clichés, because capital-M Music is a grand occasion for such things.

12/21/10: I never got music for music’s sake.

The plan: To figure out how capital-M Music is different from music for music’s sake, or to issue a retraction. Maybe I will do so in my forthcoming review of Cut Copy at First Avenue, but while you wait for that, you should certainly read these.

[4] What is this Kraftwerkian ringtone I keep hearing everywhere? And, for that matter, the CAUTION CAR APPROACHING warning at the exit of the parking garage on La Salle between 10th and 11th is a circa ’93 Orbital looped sample in the making.

SECOND

[1] I worry that it might have seemed I was romanticizing hunger in my inadequate closing thoughts on Patti Smith’s too-wise-for-lazy-gloss Just Kids. I hope I didn’t mean “starving” in a physical sense, but if I did, let me add: Origins so fleeting and lived inches from despair have an infinite and noble quality in their telling that stability cannot. But, alas, this is one of those books where it would take more pages to say something meaningful about it than it takes to tell itself.

[2] I never got around to summing up Dennis Cooper’s Try, partly because I can do little more than try for insight... True love is necessarily remote, and can only exist in a safe space where a person retains the right to not be penetrated, to not be loved in return, to share his essence with someone who doesn’t revel in it. There’s also some powerful statement in that recurrent tick, tick, tick, which is the book’s way of continually counting down the moments to acts of irreversible violence and self-destruction, or, conversely and finally, fragile union. Gay sex, if it’s to be a real alternative to anything, should not be a matter of tops and bottoms, but of mutual exchange, and Try (which contains no actual gay sex, just everything it is not) ultimately imagines an ideal form of exchange, merely in essences, in impermeable alignments of bodies.

[3] Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is valuable primarily for its opening chapter, in which young Patton sits in the ticket booth and listens to R.E.M. The chapter ends. Hilarity ensues. Much as I wish he’d worked it longer, the piece so efficiently creates an infinite realm of 1985 in its couple dozen pages that Oswalt earns his props to Cather.

[4] Jeffrey Brown’s Cats Are Weird, like most things animal-related, is not so much about cats as it is about people, their weirdness and wondrousness reflected in the behavior of the animals they keep. And I say this as a person who likes cats more than people.

[5] Tennessee Williams’ great short story collection One Arm could have been called Strangers, as it’s a meditation on his favorite theme, and even includes a line as key to his world (comfortingly mindless when dimmed by the glow of another’s eyes, unbearable when confronted in the absence of that glow) as the famous one he penned for Blanche DuBois. The one-armed death row inmate of the title story writes in a letter: “If I had known then, I mean when I was outside, that such true feelings could even be found in strangers, I mean of the kind that I picked up for a living, I guess I might have felt there was more to live for.” There’s an ironic edge to this statement, of course, but what unites One Arm’s panoply of characters, whether living in a figurative world or a real world, whether deluded or resigned or optimistic or realistic, but always lonely, is their deep need to be recognized, and to return the favor. The lovers at the end of “The Important Thing” look at each other with “sorrowful understanding, unable to help each other except through knowing, each completely separate and alone—but no longer strangers.”

THIRD

[1] But even that “knowing” can be hard work, and the characters in Mike Leigh’s Another Year—eternally looking at surfaces, unable to peer into that remote place where Mary and Ken are hopelessly trapped—have been much on my mind since seeing the great, great, great, great Poetry (so good it made me feel flushed with a fresh, young movie love, a little sad I’ll never be able to see it for the first time again). Poetry seems to assume Another Year’s notion about people’s insensibility to help, but then, in the astonishing unfolding of its final five sections (as meticulous but unexpected in their arrangement as the ending scenes of No Country For Old Men), permeates all surfaces: An interrupted game of badminton; a silent moment of writing at a desk; a farewell poetry class; a mother’s return to an empty home; and a recitation, in which an old woman speaks for a dead girl, using her final months of lucidity to offer up a hope that the pleasures of her former girlhood go on and on, that even in misery something good is transferable.

[2] But I don’t blame the characters in Another Year, or the audience that stares along with them. Still Walking helped me forgive them. Its characters are self-serving, mean, but with so many sadnesses needing correction that it would be equally mean to begrudge them their blindness.

[3] I don’t even care if Catfish is real or not, because it doesn’t even pass the test of fictional plausibility. People just don’t act this much in the movies, and never have.

[4] Mildred Pierce, by our greatest intertextualist Todd Haynes, seems proof (thus far) that imaginings based on old Hollywood dreams of crime novel iterations of real life can somehow approach a vivid reality of the past (imagined), more real than any of the intermediary imaginings. But you would not want to live there, not even in the movie past. And yet it’s all very rapturous, some so much so that I’d like to watch it on a loop forever: Kate Winslet introducing herself in the restaurant’s changing room—“Mildred Pierce”—and the door closing across a close-up of her face; shadowplay in the corner of a beach house guestroom while she changes into a swimming suit (residue of an older epoch’s modesty); Mildred in close-up shouting “Stop!” over her dying child’s hospital bed, one of the movie’s most momentous psychic schisms (thus far).

[5] Lord Love A Duck also arrived late enough (the mid 60s) to be based upon, and not native to, the rapture of Hollywood soft focus black-and-white, and builds a baffling teen parody around some exquisite shots of teens in cars on dark streets. Rango, unexpectedly weighty but also terrifically kinetic, literalizes the type of movie love that is perhaps only briefly felt in Lord Love A Duck. The vast white desert where Rango wanders before the busy denouement—that emptiness where Clint Eastwood can be found driving through in an Oscar-laden golf cart—is very literally a blank movie screen, ready to be filled with our collective memory of the plot of Chinatown, etc.

[6] I still can’t put Certified Copy into words, but I entertain myself with the notion that I felt its meaning, as I was able to correctly predict which would be the last shot, a while before the credits rolled (one of the greatest pleasures cinema has to offer). Maybe I was just responding to the rhythms of the editing, but this is not an obvious movie, and it has no blatant signals. Perhaps an analogy… Original : copy :: the ideal of love : the disappointments of marriage?

[7] The 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much proves that a great director’s lesser work can often be doubly valuable, as it will still reveal much about the director and his world, and can be seen without the burden of expectations. Some finds:

[a] There’s a popular notion that our personal information is much more vulnerable today than it used to be, so I’m interested lately in pre-Google movies in which innocent characters unwittingly tell bad guys more than they ought. [b] A great, desperate turn by Doris Day, who I think was the Michelle Williams of her era, in addition to being Doris Day. [c] Hitchcock capitalizing on the weirdness of London, where he didn’t spend enough time during his Hollywood years: a taxidermist’s workshop and the nightmare hilarity that transpires therein, a bland and foreboding chapel. [d] The movie is at times an even more disturbing depiction of a man’s relationship with a woman than Vertigo. James Stewart’s remaking of Kim Novak in Vertigo is child's play compared to the scene here in which, upon Day’s emotional reaction to the news of her son’s kidnapping, he restrains her and forces her to take some unidentified pills. [e] Much could be learned about 1950s moviemaking by a careful attention to the scenes that seem to be shot on location, and those in which the players act against a backdrop of canned footage. Or you might at least learn something about the shooting schedule of The Man Who Knew Too Much. [f] “It’s not a man, it’s a place!”

[8] I wonder if many people will recognize the cruelty of Nicolas’s response to Francis at the end of Heartbeats ("How could you think I'm gay?"), or follow Francis in sympathy to his delayed response in a later scene, a sort of wordless reptilian hiss. How we come to love that Francis (right?), his sad anger or angry sadness! the discomfort and romance on his face! his inability to have more than one friend! It’s amazing what a vivid character develops from the movie’s precious beginnings.

[9] Duncan Jones seems to have a knack, two features in, for turning a central existential dilemma into beautifully efficient SF plots, in which an isolated man trapped in a claustrophobic space clings to the delusion that he is in communication with the outside world. Given the similarity of the setups of Moon and Source Code, to measure the progress of Jones's thinking, we would have to look at the difference in the two films' resolutions, and the loophole Jones has found out of his dilemma.

[10] Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed, a.k.a. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is one of those movies that’s so psychologically precise, most of its characters could be said to not really exist, except in the mind of one person. In a closing scene, they all gather in a hospital waiting room like conflicting impulses wandering the shores of an exhausted woman’s beleaguered mind. See also: Panic Room, Identity (in which the characters really are embodied mind phantoms!).

[11] “However, you do have Nikolai’s body, and that’s the part I want to kill.” This line from the boundlessly clever fifth season of Futurama (a sort of ticking off of every great premise that occurred to the writers during the show’s absence) reminded me of something I think about pretty often, which is that all bodies are alike in their aversion to pain, and it’s therefore so, so cruel to take advantage of the body’s vulnerable, nondisguisable, physical existence and do violence to it as a means to harm the soul it houses. Clearly the robot interlocutor from Futurama feels otherwise.

FOURTH

What I liked best at the Walker Art Center on March 31.

[1] The cracks in De Koonings are starting to get to me.

[2] I can see now (from nothing more than a second photograph at a second museum) that Cindy Sherman is major, isn’t she? Her photo in the Walker’s “Midnight Party” exhibit is as sharp and vivid as the aforementioned self-portrait-with-funny-nose: phallic fruits and vegetables and condoms strewn on a carpet, near a sitting woman, who must be practicing, or confused, or subversive.

[3] Jeffrey Vallance reminded me of a notion that is probably fundamental to all artists, but that I often lose track of, especially on closeted, claustrophobic days of laze-addled futility: an idea is only good if it’s executed, and without the execution it is equal to nothing. I firmly believe that the stories behind Vallance’s Blinky Bone and bloody blanket were acted out in all their insane detail, but even if not, the artifacts and the prose on display are still, in their combination, the vivifying of good ideas. I’ve started saving paper bracelets from concerts and labeling them, and while this is probably just insanity taking over, it might well yield interesting results when I line them all up on my wall.

[4] Jim Shaw’s drawings seem to mean something very specific, seem to accuse society of some inexcusable excess, but it’s unclear what. A man eating a microwave…

STUEVEN
S E C R E T S
(a la the old Conan bit)

I have not loved Edward Gorey as much since he became the patron saint of gift shops.

Closed doors have always made me a little nervous.

Oh, crap, I’m going to get old.

Would paying for everything with cash be the first step toward liberation, or the first step toward madness?

My love of cleaning and tidying started as a question: Human life is a fight against nature, so what’s the point of doing it halfway?

Cats walk, cats breathe, cats’ hearts beat, cats bathe in time to the music, so cats must know something about rhythm.

Is it sillier to hear a happy, flippant sentiment amidst misery, or vice versa, and what does this say about the nature of the world?

Why is it often necessary to see the world as slightly artificial (i.e. in an imaginary rectangular frame) in order to see it as beautiful?

It can be hard to continually make new connections with the music of youth, rather than grasp for what it was. But it’s not impossible. Tori Amos’s “Winter” meant things to me at the end of 2008 that it never meant when I was young.

I’m the age I used to know so little about, but whose past inhabitants transfixed me (thought I, while looking at a picture of Dolores O’Riordan).

Sometimes it feels like: To understand something is to have created it.

I’ve always wanted to be a warm presence; I think I would have to gain weight.

I’m not a very serious person, really. I haven’t thought about anything serious in years. I like everything, and never ask why.

If anything really bad happened, everything I write here would cease to be true. Even this.

I dreamed Brainard had been a Minneapolitan, but all his haunts were gone. I was striving for poetry, but didn’t have the words. Is it enough that the images were beautiful? Workshop streets, a glass penthouse, a train of light.

-----------------------------------
Today's post title taken from a line in De La Soul’s “Eye Know,” from 3 Feet High & Rising, an album I play during the first warm spell every spring, and which I was doubly justified in celebrating this year, it being named during said spell to the National Recording Registry.

Other titles I considered for this post:

The World Of Men & The World Of Man
Willimantic, Wyomissing

Note: There is a fine distinction between phrases that make for good blog post titles and phrases that make for good band names. Forthcoming in my next unveiling of new album art, 7-inches by:

Bookstore Windows
Ethnic Dress
Chimney on a Segway

The Way You Say Cheapie Night

2011-03-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

It's so awful to meet magical people on the town and then not be able to remember what they looked like a couple days later.

A ranking of all the bars I've been to in the Twin Cities:

1. 19 Bar
2. Turf Club
3. Townhouse
4. Gay 90s
5. CC Club
6. Jetset
7. The Cardinal
8. The Hexagon
9. Gladius (defunct)
10. Groveland Tap
11. any I might have forgotten; I was not wooed

19 Bar wins for a number of reasons, primarily its jukebox. If I'd ever given it much thought, The Magnetic Fields' "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" is how I would've imagined the great gay life of the city when I was 13, so the fleeting minutes during which this song played from the 19 Bar jukebox on the night of March 10, on the promise of my dollar bill, were like the past's unseen future suddenly visualized and validated. I've also been so lucky to hear Yaz's "Nobody's Diary," Belly's "Feed The Tree," A-Ha's "Take On Me," and, I guess it goes without saying, La Roux's "Bulletproof" on rare nights of social, musical and beery alignment. The name "19" may suggest some exclusive nightclub, but it's merely the bar's address on 15th Street, a reminder of its dismal and triumphant origins as a hidden gap on the sidewalks of the 1950s. There's still no sign, only a number on the door.

I'll try to mash together a new long post soon, but I at least wanted to make sure that March 2011 shows up in the blog archives. Have I mentioned how much I loved Poetry (the movie, and, on the occasion of the pure seeingness of its cinematic language, the form)? Well, I will.

Yes!!!! Cry cry cry*

2011-02-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

*Okay, I lied. This was already ready to go.

*Title taken from the best text message I ever got.

*I’m pretty tired, having not long ago
excavated my roommate’s car from
leagues of snow. I’ll proofread this
tomorrow. Sorry if nothing makes sense.

-Haven’t we survived this winter already? Is there more to survive?

-It would seem there are just as many good justifications for not reading as there are for reading (like: this book will last, but never again will I be able to people-watch this particular group of people on the bus, or ponder their precise and exquisite Altmanesque arrangement throughout the bus’s widescreen length), but this is in itself NOT a justification to NOT read.

-I never feel more alive than when I am walking slowly toward a large building from a great distance, with nothing to obstruct my rapt view of its deliberate and shining immensity. (I walked to the steps of the state capitol for the first time last weekend.)

-I’d never thought of a church as a primarily functional building before, but those small steeples you find in small neighborhoods seem perfectly designed to accommodate the modest tumescence of a gently ascending spirit.

-There is a place on Hennepin Avenue, south of Lake Street, called the Health Recovery Center. Its orange and blue fluorescent sign, seen from the windows of the 6, suggests you’re living in the darkest, infinitely latest small-town night, the way it fades in the middle of its second word into perfect black: HEALTH RECOV

-Imagining UPTOWN as an acronym, the best I could come up with was: Ugly political tricks obliterate waxy nostalgia.

Twin Cities people:

-Terry Blue was one of those fellows who’s least supposed to die, because he had so happily fastened himself to an element of life at the expense of all others. What point is there in new movies being made if he won’t be around to see them?

-The lead violin in the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra serenaded us with Bach partitas, etc., but I know they were mostly for Zac, because his joy was for me. She told us some things too, about life’s hardships, but I think they were told in private.

-Is it weird that I save his text messages in a Word document? He’s not a writer, so how else should I make a record of the ways he uses language?

-“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s true. Every time I go to the downtown St. Paul public library, I get tractor beamed toward their Rolling Stone archives, the best place to go if I want to immediately recall the sum total of my youth, found equally within the issues’ actual contents and those Columbia House catalogs stapled somewhere in the middle of each issue, comprehensive lists of every band I was aware of in the 90s, like webcode from the darkest recesses of my brain, deep, deep structure. (Upon request, I found the “Backstreet Boys with their pants down” issue in no time at all—year-end issue ’99, of course! You would have been so impressed…) The way music proliferates and wedges itself into my head is different now, but some things you never forget. I could go back so easily, shake the shackles of connectivity, replunder mystery. There’s a channel we get on our converter box that plays nothing but music videos. I can’t understand why, but I caught an old White Zombie video the other night and remembered how it was when such messages were the only message.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids speaks to my present phase, but I imagine any reader will latch on most strongly to its origin story, their first apartment together and those longest nights. As in the Joe Brainard memoir, the starving days are the best days.

Dennis Cooper’s Try is just fine for reading in public, really, but maybe I’m a lesser being, because I continually worry people will misjudge my motivations. Wrongly so, as this is a sweet book full of the saddest love. Cooper does a whole slew of things that no one else in fiction does—weirdest, most brilliant, the way he tells us things that no one in the world of the story knows or will remember: “…to nobody’s knowledge—not even Calhoun’s, since he never remembers his dreams…”

After his reading at the Southdale Library in Edina, Paul Harding said he reads for moments of recognition: things that are true, and that he’s always known, but that he’s never seen put into words before. He made some statements that would qualify as such for me, in particular that his years as a drummer in a rock band attuned him to the rhythms of prose, and that the writing of a story reaches critical mass when the process of writing it becomes synonymous with its content (re: Harding’s Tinkers, his physical rearrangement of its fragments into a coherent whole).

The MIA’s new exhibit of photographic portraits of photographers is full of curiosities: a Cindy Sherman self-portrait that initially seems to be “ruined” by her grotesque fake nose, until you realize that this is the thing that emphasizes, by contrast, the amazing formality of the pose and the crystal detail … such real hands!; Alec Soth’s expired Minnesota driver’s license; pieces from the insane and idly-constructed notebooks of rich boy Peter Beard, weird amalgamations (not unlike the unreadable and yet endlessly interpretable monstrosities I could create if I took the time to collect all my life’s directionless scribbles and notes) of snatched fleeting thoughts, drawings, diary, collage and somehow unifying page decoration and desecration, the kind of thing all artists would strive to create if they had Peter Beard’s time and weren’t so stupidly (sorry!) rigorous in their pursuit of purity of form, mode, field, etc.; and the eyes of Robert Mapplethorpe in the year before his death, staring at you as you enter from expanses of gold-leaf paper, with an entire room reflected in his right pupil, vague but a place I’d like to get to, if not for the stress of disease visible in the skin and eyebrows that surround it.

1. Patrick Wolf, “The City”: I never expected a reward for following Wolf into the dark depths of The Bachelor (where many people neglected to go), nor did I expect that the emotional flipside he promised even before that album’s release (did he find love during The Bachelor’s recording, or did it go without saying that a charming boy who despaired so hard inevitably would, with Tilda as his guide?) could be as triumphant and life-saving as this song. And those are qualities I even, of course, expect from him.

2. Cut Copy, Zonoscope: “Blink and You’ll Miss A Revolution,” they warn, and of course they’re referring to their own music. I can’t think of another band right now that so strongly believes in music as the beginning and end of everything. I realize now I can let them get away with the “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” refrain of “Where I’m Going,” among other clichés, because capital-M Music is a grand occasion for such things.

3. Weekend, Sports: To the extent that I have any kind of mental anguish left over from my teen years, I’m always looking for a piece of crazy rock ‘n’ roll that best reflects it. This is a band of varied youthful fever, and surprisingly so, as I’d thought they only do haze and bluster in combination, and not also in alternately spooky and raving isolation.

4. The New Expansive is a phrase I’d like to coin to describe those artists who mine disco for its luxe velvet backseat lining and deep contentedness (Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round,” Twin Sister’s “All Around & Away We Go”) and/or whose riffage is almost more lazily grandiose than the best of Pavement (Avi Buffalo, Girls). Everyone seems so relaxed nowadays.

5. Chillwave is a dumb name because: it’s supposed to describe artists who are in fact actively engaged with the physical world. The same argument could be leveled against “shoegaze,” but we’ve gotten used to that word, and something about its twin fricatives separated by a bouncy velar stop sounds right.

Queer As Folk has the barest plotting I have ever encountered in my life, maybe, but I forgive it, because that bareness seems like a symptom of the show’s sweet worldview. It’s a “character-driven” show, as they say, and even if the characters’ obstacles continually dissolve into pure meaningful resolution, they (the characters) somehow remain unusually vivid. It’s almost like the superhero comics that our (or my) sympathetic entry point Michael loves so much.

My Oscar favorites in the top eight categories (with only Rabbit Hole and Biutiful left unseen, and not because I’m unwilling, and definitely not because I don’t admire John Cameron Mitchell or Javier Bardem):

Picture: The Social Network
Director: David Fincher
Actress: Michelle Williams
Actor: Jesse Eisenberg
Supporting Actress: Jacki Weaver
Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush
Original Screenplay: The Kids Are All Right
Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network

And since I didn’t record my thoughts on these fine features and other nominees as I was seeing them fiendishly a couple weeks back, here is, briefly, what I liked in some of them:

The King’s Speech: All the pretty wallpaper, and its prominent display in those beautifully off-balance compositions.

Animal Kingdom: A crime movie of perfect scope and ambition. Whoever called it sprawling was lying. But then it starts to display symptoms of a “blue” movie, where the hues turn cold, the soundtrack turns ambient and bleary, and everything slows down—supposedly cinematic shorthand for generalized sadness and tragedy, but which has the opposite effect, stopping drama dead in its tracks.

Blue Valentine: The precision of its close-ups, so rare. Ryan Gosling and daughter suck up cereal from the kitchen tabletop, and it’s not just some quick snatch of vérité, but a family’s universe in totality.

Another Year: These characters too, like the ones in that spooky moment from Make Way For Tomorrow, briefly peer toward the camera, eyes slightly averted, afraid of being caught in their lives. It’s even spookier in Mike Leigh’s iteration, coming after an earlier scene where Mary and company critique Ken from across the yard with the same vocabulary we might use, the first moment we realize how sadly on display these people are.

Dogtooth: Science fiction indeed, because so scarily plausible. We have the power to make anything we want of the people created in our image! Best is how the eldest, having been programmed to repeat back everything that goes into her brain, goes around reciting dialogue from Jaws and Rocky, and then, in a Great Moment, quotes a line not just because its succession of words is stored in her neural pathways, but because she perceives its relevance to her situation. (There is hope for us too! We can transcend the ways our minds have been trained to process information—develop new contexts and higher truths!) Later, in the Great Final Shot, she becomes a ticking bomb in the trunk of a car (Touch of Evil homage?), and it’s sad to think that her movie lesson has been scarcely enough training for the big world.

Enter the Void (not an Oscar nominee, thank God) lost me sometime around the moment the character through whose flitting, dying mind we witness the action draws a connection between his lover’s breasts and his mother’s (hmm, very salient, and the closest thing to an “idea” in the movie), and then I spent its remaining few hours in ever-increasing agony. This is the least gay movie ever, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing of course, but in this case amounts to a total lack of imagination. The only origin story this film can fathom is the ecstatic union of a man and a woman begetting a painful birth into a dim world. If that’s not supposed to be a universal condition, then the story’s particulars need to be less bland. (Sorry so mean, but I have to somehow justify those hours I’ll never have back.)

I’d been thinking that the plural voiceover narration of GoodFellas was a reference to An American in Paris, but I forgot that All About Eve has it, too. What a great technique! Pure screenwriter.

Psychological Methods To Sell Should Be Destroyed

2011-02-21T19:08:00.000-08:00

I want and maybe even desperately need to scrounge together a new real post soon (but God, when will there be time?), but while you (all? two? no one?) wait for that, here’s a post of recycled material, just for the sake of keeping this techno-diary going, and for another sake…

1. That is to say, the sake of posterity. Back in the summers of 2006 and 2007, I wrote movie reviews for a free weekly paper in Helena, Montana called Queen City News, after bringing to their attention the fact that their syndicated Christian Science Monitor reviews didn’t really represent a local perspective. QCN, basically the one-woman operation of notable Helenan Cathy Siegner, ceased publishing last December (a sad event, as it was the only alternative to evil conglomerate Independent Record), and I’m a bit worried that its website will disappear along with it and that the number of results a Google search of my name yields will be accordingly depleted. So from time to time I’m going to republish my old movie reviews here, sans editorial retrospection. Mortified as I am by most things I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, my movie reviews seem alright and sufficiently publishable in hindsight, probably because my only intention in writing them was to get as close to the writing style of my then-even-more-so-than-now idol Roger Ebert. I really spared no effort in that pursuit, and it shows.

A Prairie Home Companion
July 20, 2006

She sees the president speakin’
On a flat screen TV
In the window of the old appliance store
She turns to see her brother again
But he’s already walkin’ past
The flags of freedom flyin’

So goes a verse from Neil Young’s new protest album Living with War. With a nod to modern technology, Young inserts a 21st century lexicon into the tried-and-true tradition of the folk song, and the result is no different than when Woody Guthrie sang about ten dollar shoes to fit his feet. Well, A Prairie Home Companion is kind of like that, an exquisite union of old and new under a grand banner of American tradition.

For those who have missed out on this peculiar and much-loved piece of American tradition, A Prairie Home Companion is Robert Altman’s film adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s long running radio show of the same name. But as those two iconic names can guarantee, it is more than just a filmed version of a radio show. It is a seamless blending of fact and fiction and comforting Americana, a patient and loving film.

The show is based out of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, that singular state where stubborn people cling to the cold earth, living for those rare moments of humor and song. Keillor, lovingly called GK by his cast and crew, provides those moments for many with his show. Altman does the same for a potentially larger audience with his film, and it is a layered piece of work in which in one is never sure where reality ends and where the film begins, or where the film ends and the radio show begins, for that matter.

The film finds GK and his cast in the midst of the last show of their 30-year run. It seems they’ve just been bought out by a humorless businessman with lots of money. The cast of characters includes Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, a bumbling detective who recalls an even earlier and just as beloved time in American radio. Other actors, Meryl Streep and John C. Reilly in particular, prove themselves impressive singers and performers, on top of their already established screen presences. Lindsay Lohan shines as Lola Johnson, the daughter of Streep’s Yolanda, who could possess all the talents of her mother, but opts instead for a busy and cynical life. Once again, we are witness to a certain down-home tradition ending and a new era beginning.

The film is chock full of Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue and cluttered sets. Now in his 80s, the director takes his time, letting his camera linger on a scene as we soak in the abundant humanity and slowly let our eye drift to where the real point of interest lies. Another Altmanesque element is the character of the Dangerous Woman, a sort of ghost/angel/femme fatale presence, played by Virginia Madsen. Like the bird man in Brewster McCloud or the third woman in 3 Women, she is the mysterious entity who unites the film’s diverse elements and gives it another level of reality. She is one of our entry points, if only because we share her genuine and somewhat removed fascination with a little subculture putting on its show.

There’s a joke in the movie that goes like this: Two penguins are sitting on an ice floe, and one says to the other, “It looks like you’re wearing a tuxedo.” The other says, “How do you know I’m not?” That’s the joke. A character responds not with laughter but by asking, “Why is that funny?” and GK doesn’t quite know. That’s a good analogy for the film in general. It is warm and lovely and charming, and it’s not my place to go about explaining why. I can only say that if you’re the sort of person who responds to such things, you’ll love it.

Ocean's Thirteen
June 10, 2007

[This one went unpublished for some reason—probably a good one, as, judging from the original Word document's properties, I spent only an hour and 58 minutes on this flimsy-ish prose.]

Ocean’s Thirteen is yet another threequel in a summer dominated by threes, but this one is actually wise to its sequel status. The financial success of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s franchise has always been modest enough to leave open the possibility that he’s not merely in it for the money, and here’s another entry that is good enough on its own terms to justify its existence. One character says, “You can’t do the same gag twice. You have to do a new gag.” The movie is not only full of new gags, but it also has a fresh approach to a familiar genre.

By this point, George Clooney can phone in the charm and still give a good performance, and in Ocean’s Thirteen, he’s back with his gang of likable criminals for another heist. This time he’s up against Las Vegas hotel owner Willy Bank, played by Al Pacino with equal amounts genuine threat and self-parody. It’s a fun performance, but his very name suggests that he’s more symbol than character, so he can never be taken too seriously.

Some critics have called this film the death of the heist movie, but it’s not really a heist movie at all. It uses the possibilities of the genre for its cinematic sleight of hand. Nor is it much interested in its characters except as pawns in its well-oiled machine. The whole thing plays like an extended opening sequence, seemingly indifferent to its audience, building texture upon texture. At the outset, there’s an inexplicable malaise of shoptalk and cinematic tricks.

It takes a while to warm up to what the movie’s after, to notice that conversations span scenes, or to soak in the beautiful interior spaces of the hotel, which flash by too fast for us to admire their grandiosity and absurdity. The film may rely a bit too much on bright colors, funky music, aerial shots, following shots, dollies in and out, but it’s not a case of style over substance: its style is its substance.

The movie understands that the traditional heist picture doesn’t really fit in today’s world. Take a movie like the 1955 French caper Rififi, which certainly stands as the best heist movie I’ve seen. Its centerpiece is an entirely wordless 20 minutes in which four men break into a bank in the dark of night and take off with the loot. The scene is thrilling in its enormous patience, the men so diligent in their occupation that we applaud and root for them.

Ocean’s Thirteen, on the other hand, probably lacks any scene longer than a minute, but this is not its deficiency. Ocean’s men are up against the digital age, and a casino that’s constantly monitored by an artificial intelligence. Their heist is not one large action, but an infinite number of small actions. It’s also encouraging to see a summer actioner where the characters get what they want not with guns and violence but with confidence and intelligence. Ocean’s men are wisely pegged as “analog players in a digital world.”

That’s not to say that the film has a conscience. The heist is an entirely selfish act, without even a Robin Hood morality to its credit. One particularly funny scene shows Ocean and Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) tearing up at an episode of Oprah, even as they plan their next move. Their social consciousness is extremely fleeting, and the movie is never more than pure escapism.

Sure, it’s as fun as ever to watch attractive famous people having fun, which is primarily what these movies are about. But more than the first two, this is art cinema masquerading as a summer blockbuster, using a familiar formula as a backdrop for its bag of tricks. In the words of one character, “It plays.”

2. I found dozens of old unused album covers—made between April and June 2005 (you can imagine how much I cared about the end of high school) with the great obsolete Microsoft program Picture It!—on my family’s dusty hard drive back in January. Here’s a sampling of my past work, as curated by my present self.

3. I can never figure out what makes me the person I am today as opposed to the person I was then (like, is that era of my life really over? is that situation less me than this one?), so I consider this post relevant.

A Carnival Of Lost Souls That Shines In The Dark Of A Forgotten Harsh Kindness

2011-01-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

I started a new record label. My talentless artist friend Blip Plimpton is our in-house album art designer, for better or worse. Here are our first nine releases:

Layaway "Meldrick" 7"

The Foil Rosemakers, s/t

Tracing Paper, s/t

Plastic Sheets Certainty LP

Italic Fog, s/t

Catholic Hydration Metal Detector 69 cassette

High Speed Dubbing Tyler LP

Ambient Mauve, s/t

Birdhouse Antediluvian LP

The unlikely name of the record label is AE Pods Arcade Sict Food Is A The Ox.

If any of this actually existed, it might sound like some of the bands I mention in my…

SONGS OF THE MOMENT

The aforementioned freak-pop & lo-fi fops
& weirdo manufactories of melodie
of yesteryear (literally) (+2)

(Tip: Ms. Stueven; the internet)

Twin Sister, “Phenomenons”: “I’m in a clear room; everything is making sense.” So go the opening lines, and it’s funny, because that’s exactly the image I had when I first heard this band. But if you hear the word “sense” as “sound,” that works too, because it really sounds like the singer is doing a little dance with all the bright shiny objects in her room.

Tennis, “Baltimore”: Some of the most precise lo-fi production I’ve heard since Bee Thousand (what in the world is making that delicious counter-melody/rhythm, and is that thing that sounds like a tropical wind a human voice?), so I hope they leave it as-is when it’s featured on debut Cape Dory, out soon (now there's a great album cover), and don’t pretend the original version is a “rough cut.”

Veronica Falls, “Found Love In A Graveyard”: Well, “Stephen” is better, with its blissful guitar peeling off everywhere, but it’s also nice to hear this cute band go ever-so morbid and dangerous, the way Beat Happening did on “Bad Seeds” and intermittently forever after. I try to maintain a healthy skepticism of whatever Anglophilia’s latest sunny garage pop crush happens to be, but these last two bands are undeniable.

Women, “Eyesore”: More ’66 than ’66. I assume all the best pop bands from back then sounded a lot like this live, sort of insane, but that most weren’t allowed such free reign in the studio.

Crystal Stilts, “Shake The Shackles”: Pretty much the same band as Women, now that they’ve rebalanced the treble and bass, written their best melody, and seem to be playing at nearly the correct RPM.

Lower Dens, “Plastic & Powder”: Even For Against haven’t dirged this hard in recent years. A Charlie Brown shuffle along an arctic sidewalk.

Sambassadeur, “Days”: I can’t figure out if that’s a boy or a girl singing, and I’ve decided to leave it open for now. There is a certain person-ness to pre-gendered people that can’t be gotten back once you find out.

Patti Smith, “Elegie”: The most purely despairing song ever? This is a bad night when there’s absolutely nothing in the world to distract from watching the slow, slow minutes. Is that even possible anymore? My love for Horses used to be not much wider than “Redondo Beach,” but I think I “get” it now after all these years.

Anyway, I (Blip) wonder if my recent foray into album art amounts to a kind of reminiscence over my past (those are pictures from my early history I’ve been using), or if it’s the sort of accidental and environment-defined creativity (hey, I am back home right now, and such pictures proliferate here) that is the ultimate form of living-in-the-moment. Because I’d hate to think I’m already in the “reminiscence” stage of life; I don’t have much to reminisce about! But I do love having access to old family photos and a scanner.

There are others who have plenty to remember, however, and it seems all I care to read anymore are their memoirs. E.g. I’m nearly as crazy about John Waters’ memoir-of-sorts Role Models as he is about the topics expounded upon in its pages, and I’d like to think that if my blog was a book, it would look something like Waters’ diverse and voluminous enthusiasms. I guess I find Waters more interesting as a person than as a filmmaker, though I can’t say I’ve gotten through life without accumulating a fine layer of his filth, as his Serial Mom was one of my absolute favorites when I was a kid (oh, the things I was allowed to watch). Anyway, it’s nice to hear a live-life-to-the-fullest type like Waters speak so often of his “bedtime” and confess things like, “I have, as of the day of this writing, 8,425 books, all cataloged but no longer in complete order on my shelves.” It’s possible, after all, both to live and to catalog.

But: I’d like to be just once the sort of reckless youth I imagine Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe will reveal themselves to have been when I end up reading Just Kids, the type that doesn’t look back even once until it’s all totally over and done with.

LOOKING BACK
(on recent history)

[a] Tron: Legacy is mostly bright lights and tepid one-liners, which is perhaps why my favorite line of dialogue (Jeff Bridges’ enigmatic utterance, “Your old man’s gonna knock on the sky; listen to the sound”) and favorite image (a really vivid close-up of a dog’s face, with that dark 3D tint, in the “real” world) stood out so much. I have to wonder if The Grid, the film’s techno-world, is intended as some kind of metaphor for modern human civilization (a noble pursuit devolved into a video game). But, rendered as a Daft Punk-scored light show, such gloominess is in fact an entertaining prospect.

[b] Say what you will about Black Swan, there are probably more ways to watch that movie than any other from 2010. I only watched it once, in a state of breathless glee and perhaps without a great deal of intellectual acuteness (does that mean I watched it as a horror movie?), but I could probably go back for tears or laughs or some other more obscure ecstasy anytime. Everyone has their points of comparison, but the film struck me as sort of a cross between Jeanne Dielman (in its relentless depiction of submerged psychopathy) and Panic Room (another movie where the premise is sort of self-fulfilling and of questionable reality, i.e. does Natalie Portman get the lead in Swan Lake only so she can play out her too-long-dormant psychodrama, and does Jodie Foster end up needing to use the panic room only because it’s taunting her with its existence?). Black Swan also has the best dance club scene since Babel and the most presumptuous final line since Inglourious Basterds.

[c] Solitary Man is my least favorite of the “Man” trilogy (if to be serious is to be Jewish and to be single is to be gay, then to be solitary is to be generally sleazy), but somehow Michael Douglas has never been sleazier and yet more likeable.

[d] Conan, sometime during the week of the giant inflatable chicken sandwich and the Holiday Punch Bowl Bowl-Punching Kit, finally reached the crazed heights of the long-missed Late Night, another show with, at its best, never a dull moment in its absurdist onrush.

[e] Patton Oswalt is one of the unsung greats of contemporary film and music criticism. The evidence seems to be everywhere these days, but I was especially taken with his description in Spin magazine of Kanye West’s “Runaway,” which is, to paraphrase, “like the first time you get drunk and soliloquize into a mirror while listening to David Bowie. Kanye West never got past that phase, and that’s sort of awesome.” I’ll transcribe Oswalt’s exact phrasing the next time I come across that mag, as he’s a much more careful and clever wordsmith than I.

[f] Would it be a shock if it was discovered how sentimental I really am? Sometimes my mind will just flash upon something, like the relationship of Portia and Ellen DeGeneres, and I’ll get an unanticipated surge of joyful dew in my eyes.

[G] My two cats have as many weird daily interactions with each other as I do with other people. You’d think that humans are so doomed because of their language capacity, but all the time I’m seeing Meldrick and Crispin just standing and looking at each other, as if talk has failed and they’re looking for a chance to escape from a social situation.

It’s II: Seemingly A Result Of Radness Overdose

2010-12-30T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Head on the Door

Another year, a thousand more attempts by commentators to declare the album dead, and a thousand more opportunities for me to decline into irrelevance by not being able to abide the newfangled sounds these young people are making. But you’d have to be deader’n shit not to have noticed this was a great year for albums, and I responded as well as I was able. So I’ll go ahead and celebrate with typical comfort and complacency: a top ten!

[1] Owen Pallett, Heartland
[2] Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest
[3] Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me
[4] Laura Veirs, July Flame
[5] Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
[6] The Radio Dept., Clinging To A Scheme
[7] The Depreciation Guild, Spirit Youth
[8] Robyn, Body Talk
[9] Lower Dens, Twin-Hand Movement
[10] Jeremy Jay, Splash

[1]

I have the same needs as anyone else, but I guess they express themselves differently. Imagine a club where “E Is For Estranged” plays while the patrons stare silently into each other’s eyes. That would be a joy greater than talking or dancing!

Anyway, I think I’ve made the mistake of emphasizing (in my mind) this album’s technical accomplishment over its effectiveness as a great pop album, but still I don’t understand how even a genius like Owen Pallett has time for this undertaking.

[2]

Please don’t call it haunting: No album made me feel closer to real living breathing people this year. Even the dead ones (Dima, Jay Reatard) sound yet alive, not just a-ghosting. Call it instead: Sundays = Youth.

[3]

Slow down, people. Even geniuses need time to mature. This is the year even the Newsom skeptics came to love her, and she gave herself in such abundance. There was a time when she didn’t believe she could be a singer, and now, at 28, she’s giving words, in her phrasing, more meaning than they have in their entire etymology: “hotter’n Hell,” “duration,” “my love for you,” “lawlessness” (standouts).

[4]

A lot of people made the albums they were born to make this year, none more convincingly than Laura Veirs. That “born to make” designation is especially compelling in her case, ever since I came to the conclusion that July Flame might be a conception album. But even if the apocalypse doesn’t happen soon and Veirs’ newborn Tennessee doesn’t become our John Connor, this album can still be a reminder of how good and unfettered life was as recently as 2010.

[5]

I’ve got no beef with the Kanye album, but we all know (don’t we?) that it’s not nearly as exciting as Sir Lucious Left Foot (in its rapping) or ArchAndroid (in its weirdness, epicness, thorough tangling with music history), and that it’s doubly inadequate when you add those two together to get the best OutKast album since Stankonia. Or ever? But, nay, Monae’s brilliance and weirdness are entirely her own, and she has better taste than anyone right now … Whoa, I just went into a mini-reverie trying to think of something to say about her, but all I came up with is that she is the best person ever.

[6-7]

Two honey-voiced men—one is Kurt Feldman, whose sadly defunct Depreciation Guild has internalized as much of the best music of the 1990s as has his other band, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart; the other is Johan Duncanson, who, being Swedish, has of course internalized all music—awash in warm digital and analog environments, respectively, as delicate as themselves. Though your definitions of honey and delicate might be different than mine.

[8]

Any single installment is excellent enough for placement, but since “Cry When You Get Older” is on Pt. 1 and “Hang With Me” is on Pt. 2, let’s just consider the whole 21-song, 82-minute aerobic mastercise for inclusion here. OMD’s Andy McCluskey, who knows better than anyone, says: “I don't think that Robyn is interested in making history. She is too busy loving, hurting, singing, and feeling. But she is making musical history. This is Ibsen and Munch set to a metronomic beat.” Yikes! But he’s right. It’s always a mistake to not take Robyn seriously.

[9]

A new addition to my listening, so I’ll elaborate… I wrote the other day that “I feel myself turning away this year from the dreamy and hazy, the half-formed and half-heard,” and in my recent listening bands continue to be edged out in favor of, in the words of last year, “faceless musicians serving the visions of individual artists, bringing to life the singer’s ideas about himself or herself.” So that I’m currently so high on a Band playing Essential Psychedelic Patterns of American Rock ‘n’ Roll, while Jana Hunter lisps and mumbles half-heard phrases through the compost heap, is proof of some kind of personal salvation. And let’s dispense with the rumor that Hunter sounds like PJ Harvey. It’s not only wrong, it’s irrelevant: This is as much an instrumental band as The Feelies, which is to say not entirely, but essentially.

So let’s let Lower Dens stand in for all the great freak-pop bands (my coinage!), lo-fi fops and weirdo manufactories of melodie I’ve been hearing in the fourth quarter: Women, Weekend, Tennis, Veronica Falls, Twin Sister, the refurbished Crystal Stilts. Lower Dens are from Baltimore, the home of John Waters, Frank Pembleton, and the Beach House/Wye Oak contingent, but that album cover looks a lot like Montana, so (to tear myself from deadening bedroom listening and remind myself that this music-loving business doesn’t pause for retrospective December but continues year-round) I took a stroll with the music through a wintry Montana dusk and, lo and behold, it really brought the landscape alive. The only thing that qualifies this album as freak-folk is the ripe possibility that it was recorded outside. (The totally indescribable) Twin Sister, on the other hand, seem to record in an overstuffed bedroom in which all the objects give off tiny frequencies. (Can you even call them a band?)

Anyway, I wonder if this is all happening too quickly. For example: I heard Deerhunter’s “Like New” sometime in 2007, and liked it well enough, thought it a nice foray into a mode of American music that was perhaps played out. It was another year before I heard Microcastle and realized all they were capable of, and then another year before they became absolutely essential to my life. Lower Dens are no Deerhunter, not yet, but I fear I’m exhausting them too soon. But no, there will always be more: More walks, more rooms to crank these waves in.

[10]

I guess I’m like that guy who discovered The Modern Lovers in ’76 and then never gave up on Jonathan Richman, telling all his friends about how great Richman’s ninth solo album is when they didn’t even care about his eighth. But Jeremy Jay will never be just coasting (I’m sure that’s true of Richman as well, but I wouldn’t know), and Splash, a real rock ‘n’ roll record, couldn’t be more unlike the austere fireside croonery of last year’s sublime Slow Dance. No one’s playing guitar more cleanly, and yet with greater attack, than Jeremy Jay right now.

Special Jury Prize

Beach House, Teen Dream

So awarded to an undeniably classic album that failed to make the cut for no reason other than my own fickle nature. You know I consider sobriety a virtue, but my prejudices don’t extend to music, and I don’t even know if this album counts as drugged out, since even a teetotaler could access these deep, deep feelings. Anyway, I feel safe letting this one go and entrusting it to the ages.

Audience Award

Twin Shadow, Forget

So awarded to a nearly perfect album that is, in the final estimation, perhaps a bit too labored over. Break-up albums have never meant much to me, but this is a great one, and the only one to ever make me feel what might be at stake in losing someone, how much there is that’s worth saving. But even though these songs might sound like attempts to get her back, I think they’re more likely a final purge of all the music that reminds him of her.

Lifetime Achievement Award

The Joy Formidable, A Balloon Called Moaning

So awarded to an awesome collection of songs that belongs just as much to last year and next year as it does to this year. And I don’t just mean that in some spiritual sense. This shot of brilliance was self-released in 2009, re-released in 2010, and some of these songs will find new life on major label debut The Big Roar next month.

Problems for the future

[a] How old am I again? Before college (6-10 years ago) the majority of the new music I listened to was simply the latest releases by all my 80s and 90s faves (Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Stephen Malkmus, Ken Stringfellow, Guided By Voices, etc.), and I thought that stuff described my life perfectly. Today I make a real attempt to keep up with new bands, whose members are barely older and sometimes younger than me, and I feel that the premature maturity of my youth never happened. I feel I’m aging in reverse even as I’m aging forward.

[b] Why am I so uninterested in this century’s IDM and electronic music?

[c] Should I feel bad that most of the new music I listen to is American? There’s an amazing amount of creativity in this country, considering that its musicians have access to everything they could ever need to be inspired by and can’t really feel a great sense of discovery on a daily basis. If North Korea ever eases up on its bullshit, even slightly, that’s going to be a place of art like we’ve never seen before.

[d] You know my life is good when I’m able to do a blog post like this. The year I don’t is the year you can start worrying about me. And, with a sigh of relief, I’m off to listen to some old music again, but first a roll call:

Twenty-five more

(these are all really good)

Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
Belle & Sebastian, Write About Love
The Besnard Lakes, Are The Roaring Night
Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty
Darker My Love, Alive As You Are
Das Racist, Sit Down, Man
Field Music, Measure
Girls, Broken Dreams Club
Glasser, Ring
John Grant, Queen Of Denmark
Harlem, Hippies
Let’s Wrestle, In The Court Of The Wrestling Let’s
Perfume Genius, Learning
Pernice Brothers, Goodbye, Killer
Emma Pollock, The Law Of Large Numbers
Rogue Wave, Permalight
Sun Kil Moon, Admiral Fell Promises
Superchunk, Majesty Shredding
Surfer Blood, Astro Coast
Teenage Fanclub, Shadows
Toro Y Moi, Causers Of This
Twin Sister, Color Your Life
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Wild Nothing, Gemini
Zoo Animal, Zoo Animal

The rest

(I like all of these too)

Atlas Sound, Bedroom Databank
Best Coast, Crazy For You
Broken Bells, Broken Bells
The Chemical Brothers, Further
Das Racist, Shut Up, Dude
Kristin Hersh, Crooked
How To Dress Well, Love Remains
jj, no 3
jj, Kills
Liars, Sisterworld
The Magnetic Fields, Realism
Matt & Kim, Sidewalks
Matt Pond PA, The Dark Leaves
The New Pornographers, Together
Procedure Club, Doomed Forever
Quasi, American Gong
Shout Out Louds, Work
A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Autumn, Again
A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Nitetime Rainbows
The Thermals, Personal Life
Weezer, Hurley
Wolf Parade, Expo 86
Wye Oak, My Neighbor/My Creator

Macromix 10

2010-12-26T10:54:00.001-08:00

Same rules as last year. The unveiling happened here.

1/ 20 Atlas Sound, “Mona Lisa”
2/ 19 Big Boi, “Shutterbugg”
3/ 18 Panda Bear, “Slow Motion”
4/ 17 Perfume Genius, “Mr. Peterson”
5/ 16 Harlem, “Prairie My Heart”
6/ 15 Robyn, “Cry When You Get Older”
7/ 14 Shout Out Louds, “Walls”
8/ 13 The Radio Dept., “David”
9/ 12 Beach House, “Zebra”
10/ 11 Real Estate, “Out Of Tune”
11/ 10 Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
12/ 9 Owen Pallett, “Keep The Dog Quiet”
13/ 8 Surfer Blood, “Harmonix”
14/ 7 Deerhunter, “Helicopter”
15/ 6 Janelle Monáe, “Oh, Maker”
16/ 5 The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, “Lost Saint”
17/ 4 Laura Veirs, “July Flame”
18/ 3 Teenage Fanclub, “Sometimes I Don’t Need To Believe In Anything”
19/ 2 Joanna Newsom, “On A Good Day”
20/ 1 The Besnard Lakes, “Albatross”

Technicalities: This year’s top seven are among my very favorite songs of all time, as are The Besnard Lakes’ “Chicago Train” and Joanna Newsom’s “‘81,” both of which would’ve been in the top four if I was being totally honest. I also neglected to include The Joy Formidable’s “Austere” and Quadron’s “Slippin,” as it seemed both more accurate, and easier, to consider them among the belatedly heard crop of 2009’s finest songs.

My intension is always to make a good 80-minute-or-less mix CD more than it is to make an honest list, so I’ll sometimes sacrifice integrity (if that’s even a quality that the fickle art of list-making can be said to have) in favor of the former pursuit. I didn’t have to do that so much this year, and still I find that Macromix 10 unfolds with atypical drama and narrative flow, especially in the final fifth.

This is an amazing era of new music we’re living in. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise (does anyone?). Albums list sometime this week.

Man of the Year

2010-12-21T07:33:00.000-08:00

Mondo Guerra

I’m listening to Rufus Wainwright again and oh, gee. This is a dangerous thing, since the music of my late 90s youth often sounds in retrospect much more sophisticated and mature than anything being made today. I think this has more to do with my age circa 1998—old enough that I was beginning to realize that music could not only sound “cool” but could also communicate important adult themes, but still too young to understand what these were, except maybe wordlessly—than with the quality of the music. I hear “adult themes” today, in the work of artists my own age or a bit older, but it’s the same boring stuff I deal with in my own life. The mystery just isn’t there, yet it persists in a song like “April Fools,” which I still hear as an expression of a much more profound maturity than I can ever know, one so advanced that it can even play at youthful folly without debasing itself. It’s so good I laughed when I heard it again. I’m sure it’s been said before, but Rufus was the Frank O’Hara of ’98, the difference being that O’Hara was a new name in the New York of the 1950s. It’s amazing when the sons of prominent people arrive so fresh on the scene. Remember his Gap commercial?

But this year has a Rufus Wainwright, and if it’s not Owen Pallett then it’s John Grant. I’m surprised and pleased that Mojo magazine has named his Queen of Denmark their album of the year, as it strikes me as one that might’ve been doomed to niche gay album status, a thoroughly ironic, despair-in-your-underwear, redemption and damnation via beautiful men fag blues sort of affair. So that it has such wide rock critic appeal is pretty hopeful. Its classicist bona fides are firmly in place (Grant fronted the orchestral rock band The Czars, and he has the fine nostalgists Midlake backing him here), but the lyrics are sometimes so silly that they almost make a mockery of the 70s piano balladry mode of the songs, e.g. "I feel just like Sigourney Weaver / When she had to kill those aliens / And one guy tried to get them back to the Earth / And she couldn’t believe her ears." The imprecise conversational nature of the words and the grandiosity of the music create a nice tension. And if the British critics can’t relate to Sigourney Weaver, then what I think they must cling to on this album are its admissions of weakness, as on the Nilsson-esque smash “Silver Platter Club”: "I wish that confidence was all you could see in my eyes / Like those interviews in locker rooms with talented sports guys." I tend to think of the British press as a dominant, masculine bunch, but they’re probably as lousy and self-doubting as John Grant, hiding inside their love of records like his, proud of him in his musical world where he can be the strong one.

(Maybe you could say the same thing about all the American critics who love Kanye West and his musical world, but West is still the popular kid to Grant’s last-picked. I pause here to wonder what a comparative analysis of the preferences of today’s British and American music writers might reveal. If we used Mojo’s and Pitchfork’s top ten albums of 2010 as our sample British and American data, respectively, we’d find that somehow, in the age of the internet, hardly anything makes it across the ocean anymore. So long, 1990s.)

Anyway, I like the up-front humanness of Queen of Denmark. I feel myself turning away this year from the dreamy and hazy, the half-formed and half-heard. No more hiding from and/or inside ourselves, let’s aim for the fullest expression of our aliveness! Maybe I’m just following the musical tendencies of Deerhunter (“Helicopter” is a song you can only sing if you’re fully awake), and I certainly haven’t yet put my own tendencies into meaningful practice, except in ranking my year-end favorites. But that’s where I am. And yet I know that lo-fi is always inherently philosophical, a surrender to the gods of impermanence, not just recourse for people who don’t want to try hard enough, and that the digital fuzz on How To Dress Well’s Love Remains is today’s equivalent of analog burble. I’m not sure if How To Dress Well has arrived at the beginning of a new lo-fi movement (to hell with chillwave) or at the end of a decade of R&B genre-melding, or vice versa, or what, but that question is too academic anyway and doesn’t really cut to the heart of the matter, which is that Love Remains, all half-heard 38 minutes of it, is an accurate portrayal of many people’s experiences in love. I don’t find its leagues of digital fuzz nearly as haunting as the ghost trails and forlorn melodies they conceal (the same generally goes for pixelization, the video analogue; there’s just no poetry in it!), but I will admit that the album’s emotional world, even if born of musical philosophers, is convincing.

So I understand Love Remains just enough to realize that what it represents is a significant development in the history of recorded emotion. But I can’t figure out where we’re going with recently lauded tracks like Crystal Castles’ “Not In Love” and Girl Unit’s “Wut,” because I never got music for music’s sake. There’s nothing in these but sound and newness. It seems impossible for anyone to describe either one without relying on some of my least favorite critical shorthand, like “reptilian brain” and “pleasure centers.” I don’t know what these things are, or whether all reptilian brains have the same pleasure centers. That seems unlikely.

NEXT TOPIC

Some Came Running (a.k.a. Gosh Frank Sinatra Has A Flat Stomach) is Peyton Place with pure motives and an ending later stolen by Chinatown. There’s no muckraking, no dark secrets suddenly exposed, only the weaknesses of small town people, hidden for a while and then unhidden, rendered not as scandals but as personal problems. At the tragic denouement, I almost expected its inheritor’s climactic “It’s only Chinatown” to be replaced with a solemn, ironic or indifferent uttering of the film’s title, something like, “Some came running; none cared.” Not so, but then it goes one step further, more genius-y, to a cemetery scene that I still can’t get my head around. Why (why!) does the camera single out the characters in that order? Anyway, finally, it’s the rare movie where a woman realizes that she lets her man get away with being a jerk because he’s “interesting,” and, knowing there can be no phony ending where he reforms, she resolves to end it and doesn’t look back! (I don’t think.) Vincente Minnelli is the greatest director of all time.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is a ticking down of the clock, an inexorable sorting of the good guys from the bad guys that would play out easily even without the participation of the main characters (well, there’s quite a bit of effort involved, but ultimate justice is a foregone conclusion). So we watch and wait, but it’s a good movie because that’s how Lisbeth Salander spends the final hours too. She’s never boring, especially not when you’re her partner in silence.

I couldn’t help but view Inside Job as anything but a story about mental illness.

I couldn’t help but view Temple Grandin as anything but a story about kindness!

I couldn’t help but view Exit Through the Gift Shop as anything but real, and if a hoax an entirely plausible one. The art world doesn’t need satire or fictional character studies of weirdos when it has itself. Our weirdo in this film has a lot of charming psychoses, and some beautiful ones, like his compulsion to film every moment of his life and save the forever-unwatched tapes in boxes. I do that too, with lists and notes, my own version of “life as it happened and as it will never be known again.” Why are we compelled to save anything?

And with that, let me unveil the movies I liked most this dismal-relative-to-most-but-maybe-not-so-bad-after-all year:

Non-fiction: [1] 45365, [2] Exit Through The Gift Shop, [3] Sweetgrass, [4] Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, [5] Restrepo

Non-non-fiction: [1] Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, [2] Greenberg, [3] The Social Network, [4] The Ghost Writer, [5] Life During Wartime, [6] Fish Tank, [7] Winter’s Bone, [8] Mother, [9] Toy Story 3, [10] Shutter Island

Non-non: [4] I’m Still Here

But there are many left to see, including the Coen Bros.’ True Grit. I’ll try to take it on its own terms, but so far I’m filled with nothing but ire from all the reviews that describe the 1969 original as some kind of campy trifle and don’t appreciate it for the heartfelt ode to lesbians and outcasts that it is. I liked it enough to name a blog post after it, and in memory it’s become one of my very favorite movies, so I’ll direct you back there for the time being, and hopefully have more to say when all the facts are in.

NEXT TOPIC

When I start reading John Waters’ Role Models (soon), it’ll be the fourth book I’ve read from the publishing year 2010. I’ve collaged the covers of the other three I read (two of these by former teachers of mine) into a single master-book, which I will designate the “book of the year.”

The Age of Innocence is an extraordinary thing, but I find I can read no more than 10 pages per day, probably because it is so rich with motivation. Wharton can trace every action in the novel to the feeling and societal pressure that triggered it, and I’m taking pride in painstakingly following her logic. I’ve gotten finally to the really heavy self-abnegations, when it becomes clear that this is a love story after all, not (as I previously suspected) a story in which a character chooses a mode of existence by choosing a lover.

Where have you been all my life, Peter Bagge? Your Buddy Does Seattle is a veritable comic book anthology of the grunge scene that so captured my imagination many years ago. But maybe it’s best I’ve only just discovered the beflanneled apathetic Buddy Bradley (in a way not so different from Newland Archer, but stuck in a different time and different place), as my younger self could no way have recognized any relation between him and my beloved Nirvana. I was in it for the music back then (case in point: I loved the Singles soundtrack but never saw the movie). So it’s funny now to find myself in the sub-prime of life that Buddy Bradley so perfectly represents, while the music of his era seems so remote. What a reversal!

1ST ANNUAL (B)LOGGY AWARDS

The trophy looks like this: @~~| (on its side)

Album of the Year (sneak-peek)

When audiences of the 19th century went to a new Beethoven symphony, did they feel despair equal to their sense of beauty, as they witnessed the evidence of so much talent contained within one man that they collectively lacked? _________ too is a work of such genius in all its parts (the singing, the playing, the orchestration, the lyrics) that you might despair, but eventually you have to throw up your hands and realize that we only receive such a gift every so often.

Video of the Year

Deerhunter, “Helicopter"

(The only other ones I remember having seen are Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair,” Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” and, worst of all, My Darkest Days’ “Porn Star Dancing,” so there wasn’t much competition.)

Album Cover of the Year

Album Title of the Year

Doomed
Forever
(Procedure Club)

To be doomed, that’s a horrible, heavy feeling, but doomed forever… there’s something quietly celebratory about the word “forever,” like taking that doom and making it your own.

Record Label of the Year

Slumberland, and its mp3 generosity.

Arrival of the Year

“Forget the second coming, I need you in the here and now.” (Surfer Blood, “Floating Vibes”)

Fatalist Lyrics that Should be Sung
with a Bit More Conviction of the Year

“Our lips won’t last forever and that’s exactly why I’d rather live in dreams and I’d rather die.” (Wild Nothing, “Live In Dreams”)

1992 of the Year

The Radio Dept. and their Foxbase Alpha moment, “Never Follow Suit.”

Paul Westerberg “I Hate Music” Hall of Fame

“Baby, let’s make music, it’ll make us feel better and worse at the same time.” (Zoo Animal, “Baybee”)

Still to come:
Next Sunday: Macromix 10
Next week: It’s II

FINAL THOUGHTS

I could see The Nutcracker every year for the rest of my life and still never quite figure out what it’s all about. Its wordless narrative is as bewitchingly obscure to me as the best of Jim Woodring, giving me plenty of time to think about such things as: [1] The Nutcracker is best seen from very far away, so that the people become as miniature and toylike as possible. Perhaps movies tend to favor medium shots and close-ups to avoid this effect. [2] Ballet makes more apparent than most art forms the collective mind of humanity. People to write the music, people to play the instruments, people to conduct the players, people to dance to the music, people to make the dancers’ costumes, people to make the sets, etc. And the people aren’t just doing these things out of obligation. In each role there is at least someone who is fulfilling a passion. And a passion fulfilled is only meaningful if every passion is fulfilled, and a full ballet results. [3] What obsessed Tchaikovsky? Simple-minded me likes to imagine he wanted only to write music that men with nice legs might dance to, but who knows what kind of rare and indescribable visions might have moved this man. [4] Sometimes I forget what it’s like to see.

I sometimes feel that our life’s work is only the result of an attempt to make do with whatever set of mental disorders we happen to have. I have some strain of OCD that is linked to my mania for music; it can only be calmed with music, but music also agitates it, with the need for more and more (carefully catalogued) music! So I write reviews. I wish I was compelled to write fiction, but I’m not (except when someone is expecting to read it). I’m only compelled to write reviews and the kinds of things you read here. Actually I don’t know if any of this is true, but I do know that the keywords in the preceding paragraph are relevant to my life.

Ariel Schrag says something amazing in Definition about an older girl she has a crush on, to the effect that since her idea of who this girl is exists only in her head, what it amounts to is being attracted to her own mind. This is an uncommonly wise thing for a person of any age to say, and I think it can be extended to other realms of the mind, in particular: I’ve sometimes felt nostalgic for my own mind. I think about this often in terms of music. The world defined by my listening has always been very small in scope (my bed, my mom’s car, my sister’s room), so most of my memories of songs aren’t really linked to events in my life, but simply to the way my brain processed each song the first time I came to love it. So my nostalgia for songs is self-referential and all within my head. I’d like to believe this is the purest form of music love, since it exists almost entirely without context. But what do I know? I keep to my bed.

Maybe the reason our brains are so scrambled is that all the information that beams down into our laptops from above in areas with wireless signals is really in the air (because really, where else could it be?) and our minds are busy clicking and scrolling and browsing this digital ether even when we’re just sitting eating banana bread.

Geoffrey Is The New Geoffrey

2010-11-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

i. Some notes written after a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on November 10, exactly three months after my move back to the city. [With commentary.]

I don’t know where my manic scribblings of every thought and sensation end and where my blog posts begin, but here’s some stuff.

I had a moment at the MIA when every piece of art suddenly seemed the same (in a good way), all of them become the same expression. [Which is what? Let us keep the void at bay… Let us celebrate the world when it is pretty and decorate it when it is ugly… We cannot help ourselves, we must do, do, do, and we love you… ???]

Too inspiring. Sometimes I’m bored at museums, but sometimes I’m overwhelmed and have to leave, to get away from beauty. [That last part is boringly similar to a monologue by Wes Bentley in American Beauty, and I should clarify now it wasn’t beauty I had to get away from, but the creative impulses of countless dead people, made equal by time!]

I liked:
-Clementine Hunter, again
-African masks, posts (these really make me want to do something!) – [Not to mention the figures, doors, etc.] – [And here I wanted to make some correlation between these things and the cover art for the new Kanye West album and its accompanying singles, but I’ll get into that later.*]

I’d call it [all the preceding observations] an epiphany, but I’m always eager to ascribe grand narratives to my life that I don’t have the patience to make real.

[Here’s where it gets really precious:]

This year is finally taking on some kind of shape. They always do in the end.

[Update: 11/12 – You have to go home again, to bookend an era when life was shapeless.]

Let me tell you about my neighborhood. (It takes at least 3 mos. to start to get a grip on these things, which is why I never quite understood my existence on Summit.)
-I’m wild about the stretch of 1st Ave bet. Lake and 24th. [Desolation row, Halloween-y.]
-N: Treehouse, NW: Cheapo, NE: Fetus, S: Roadrunner. Is this possible in the year 2010?! [I was referring here to the existence of four great record stores that can be walked to in under 30 minutes from my home. I remember when good record stores used to mean long journeys out of town.]

[Oh me.]

ii. Band names

I’ve always meant to keep a comprehensive list of my best ideas, but never have, so maybe I’ll make this a regular feature. Here are the first six:

Ambient Mauve

(From Frank O’Hara.)

Italic Fog

(From the amazing liner notes for
Deerhunter’s Cryptograms.
Who wrote those? Such great
poetry for an album that
deemphasizes lyrics.)

Layaway
High Speed Dubbing
Tracing Paper
Plastic Sheets

(These four from my
childhood, the last only
symbolically. I once intended these
as titles for a short story cycle
chronicling my adolescence.)

iii. Music (all filler no killer edition)

Read what I wrote about new albums by Glasser, Belle & Sebastian and A Sunny Day In Glasgow, live performances by Teenage Fanclub, Deerhunter and Retribution Gospel Choir, and some other things I’ve liked in 2010.

It might also be worth noting (retrospectively) that Zoo Animal are perhaps the only galvanizing local band I’ve seen during my time in the Twin Cities, and (preliminarily) (full review soon) that Mavis Staples and her band put on the best live show I’ve seen all year.

I feel it would be a proper expression of my love for Atlas Sound to do a track-by-track review of the four-volume, 49-track Bedroom Databank. It’s a daunting task, but nothing compared to the feat of actually writing and recording the thing in a single autumn! I'll get to work.

*Well, not really. I’ll just say that I quite enjoy My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as a pop album, and that’s the only way I really care to approach it, because (1) as far as great rap albums go it doesn’t seem to contain a whole lot of great rapping, and (2) I don’t find Kanye West’s foibles nearly as charming as those of other male artists who don’t understand women. So the best bits are the horns on “All of the Lights” and the screechy thing on “So Appalled” (a rouser and a downer, respectively), plus I really like the interlude to the former, as it sounds like a grasp in the dark for creative illumination, followed by the brilliant flash.

iv. Komix Roll-Kall (plus prose)

Awkward and Definition, the so-called high school chronicles of Ariel Schrag, written during the summers following her freshman and sophomore years, respectively, have got me wondering why I don’t often read the work of America’s youth. Answer: these are the rare books good enough to be published. They are an amazingly coherent vision of the world (as they can’t help but be, I suppose, being diaries), and one I understand: the world of cultural obsession (L7 and Juliette Lewis, primarily), gift-giving, smiling ugly people, sexual confusion, general confusion. Especially great is the way elements in the background “react” to the characters (e.g. Mom gives Ariel a bass guitar for her 16th birthday and is shown wearing a button with a musical note on it, all of her squandered dreams represented in that extra little splash of ink!), more and more as Schrag gains in confidence as an author, and one of many things that tells me she is a natural-born comics artist whose artfulness preceded her artistry.

The glorious color of Charles Burns’ X’ed Out ought to be advertised with the same pomposity as the early Technicolor triumphs. The style is partly borrowed from Herge, and at times the story seems like a response to the challenge of finding a convincing way to bring together the world of Tin Tin and the teenage psychodrama of Burns’ own Black Hole.

Joe Matt’s Fair Weather takes a character flaw (brattiness, greed, buttressed with fear) and magnifies it until every panel is subordinate to it, but the book isn’t full-tilt old-fashioned, because it maintains its skepticism of pat resolutions and lessons learned, in favor of delicious irony and the pleasures of slackerdom.

I’m also reading The Age of Innocence and wondering if May is being fairly portrayed, but I think I paid enough attention during my critical readings in Scorsese to know that she’s not, quite, and the author knows it.

v. I watch movies

Whit Stillman was sort of the Edith Wharton of the 1980s and 90s, and The Last Days of Disco is for now his final statement about the necessity of focusing on a power elite when attempting a sociological overview of a city and an era. You never get the feeling that Stillman is ignorant or naïve or narrow-minded, despite his subject matter, but then his elites are self-appointed, and neither rich nor powerful, so…

Hereafter takes place (unspectacularly) in the unspectacular spaces where most of us live: an adult cooking class where the middle-aged try to fill up their desperate evening hours, a book fair where Derek Jacobi (as himself!) gives a reading of Dickens. No place is off limits, and the movie’s inherent lack of drama is sort of touching.

I left Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar convinced only that it is a sin to waste food. The applause from the crowd at the Walker Art Center freaked me out, as if it was naively saying, Yes, your pursuit of self-sufficiency and denial of charity is noble, just look how well off we are! I know I was overreacting, but I had to get out of there, so I left before the Q&A session.

I don’t pretend that Danny Boyle shows the greatest tact in the way he presents all of the events in 127 Hours, but some critics, in their gross overreaction to his directing style, seem to be calling for a cold, deliberate staging of the action in a static frame. The premise is that we would then have a full sense of the man’s entrapment and the clicking down of the minutes, but I can think of no approach more foreign to the way the world is actually experienced by real people. Don’t you know how much our eyeballs move around in their sockets? How unmoored in time we truly are when we have access to memories and plans for the future? I sometimes get dizzy just sitting in this chair.

The Wrong Man, a.k.a. Guilty Of Being Poor, ponders the sanity of a world where our faces are synonymous with our identities. There’s a great dissolve from the wrong man to the guilty man late in the film, and shortly after they meet face to face: even while the wrong man shouts, “You ruined my wife’s life!” deep down he’s thinking, I’ve lived your life, your guilt is my own.

Speaking of poor people, the pathos of the Little Tramp, as played by a wealthy celebrity of the 20s and 30s, still astonishes me. Esp. the ending of City Lights, which is the “Don’t Worry Baby” of cinema (in a different key). I’d never noticed before that a big part of the ending’s greatness lies in the fact that, at first, an invisible shop window separates the two lovers, so that the flower girl’s words are as inaudible to the tramp as they are to us. This moment (total genius) transfers all of our emotional capacity to our eyes; when the truth is revealed to the girl’s seeing eyes, we are right there with her.

The best sequence in the otherwise baffling Kikujiro…

reminded me of this…

I like this kind of frontal framing, usually best suited for four people.

vi. Final thoughts

If you’re embarrassed by what you’re buying, you can arrange the items on a grocery store conveyer belt to tell any story you like (the masters of this form have yet to emerge). Place that bar of soap on top of the 32 oz. bag of generic Frosted Flakes. (Very disorienting for the cashier.)

I wish I felt a great pressure to make beautiful things as gifts for the holidays. But I don’t, because I’m not known for that.

Braindfoard

2010-10-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

When I look back on my 20s, the two most important men in my life (and by men in my life, I mean artists whose work and lives I admire) will have been the two whose names I’ve jammed together in this post’s title. I’ll start this month’s entry with one and end with the other, and come to no kind of understanding about anything in between. I’ve realized that the way I think about things will probably never change. I’m trying to make the most of it. (Am.)

PAGEAGE

I’ve been much better about reading. Keeping my computer off. Happier? I find I can only read with my whole being or not at all, which I imagine could be alienating to others.

I had a major fling with Joe Brainard back in January, while reading his great life-chang— life-clarifying book I Remember, then a quick affair in March on the cozy pages of his collection New Work, and now we’re starting all over again on account of the memoir Joe, written by his lifelong friend Ron Padgett. Lately I spend most of my waking hours wondering things such as these: What was Joe Brainard doing on the equivalent day of his young life? Am I failing his example? Do the great number of our shared personality traits even mean that he is setting an example I ought to follow? Some of the answers lie within, though of course no book can be as good as having the real person next to you.

Meanwhile, I am filling in some gaping holes in my barely-well-readness (the book of interviews between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, which at this early stage is still working toward illumination, and the poems of Frank O’Hara, which even at a similarly preliminary stage are really wonderful, and which give me pause: I’ve never disliked poetry, only felt inadequate to the 90% of it that I find alienating, and unable to find the 10% that I don’t), reading some comics (Boy Trouble #5, an issue from a series of gay comics, including many stories that are expected and a few that are transcendent, especially a wordless 16-panel heartbreaker by series editor David Kelly, and Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft, the latest Frank story, this time centering on Manhog, and with a supposedly clarifying Q&A on the dust jacket that only serves to exacerbate the lurid mystery of the happenings in The Unifactor), and can finally report that William Kennedy’s Ironweed is a masterpiece of world literature. You knew that.

LITERARY INTERLUDE*

“I had to believe North Branch was better than the frozen plains of Quebec, but it was just as empty on that Sunday afternoon. Everything was closed and the streets were completely bereft of humans. I walked my bike over the cobblestones looking for HELP WANTED signs in the shopwindows. My nose had been running for the last hour, and my eyes were sore from crying. I tried hard to ignore my numbed feet and my hunger, and imagine a bright new life for myself instead.

“The diversion only lasted so long. Hope dissolves quickly in the cold. I passed the dark windows of The Record Collector and Small World Paints. Neither advertised the need for an unskilled teen. I passed a drugstore and a jeweler’s. Finally, I rounded a corner and immediately spied what I thought was a mirage. A neon pink OPEN sign in the window of a hole-in-the-wall cafeteria. The Canteen, it was called. I counted the odd two dollars and coins in my pocket. $3.63. I locked my bike to a drainpipe and brought my guitar in with me. The warm breath of the café’s interior almost made me cry all over again, but I held myself together and sat down on a stool at the counter.

“Within seconds, a plastic menu slapped down in front of me and an overfull glass of water came after it. I looked up to see a tall middle-aged woman nudging at a pair of glasses. She wore thick bifocals. Her face was tired but friendly.”

—from Peter Bognanni’s The House of Tomorrow

This is a remarkable passage to me, putting Bognanni in league with those comics artists (Seth, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware) who are able to paint a nostalgic portrait of America with only the details of the present day. Even the patterns of the prose are very comics-like, and I could imagine a graphic novel adaptation of The House of Tomorrow in which those details following the narrator’s vision of a mirage are each granted their own panel.

It never seems like Bognanni's priority as a novelist is great prose style (story is his emphasis), and yet he often achieves just that. There are other moments in his novel where even the tiniest units of language seem unusually vivid and powerful to me. In particular: “Through me” (p. 153) made me cosmically aware of the weird fact that there are elements in our bodies that aren’t really “us”; “Everything” (p. 175) was almost like a word I’d never seen before, or at least I’d never realized how much is implied in its compoundness.

MY TEMP YEAR**

But perhaps I’m in a mood. I’ve been finding instances of great language everywhere I look recently. I worked a job last week deciphering motorcycle questionnaires, and they abounded with deliciously ambiguous poetry (“Dimmer, yellower”) and surprising aphorisms (“Illumination is important”).

More recently, I’ve been counting pedestrians in the Skyway, and am constantly reminded of the grace of walking, which must be the most divinely purposeful act that the average human performs on a daily basis. The limbo of that brief suspension between places is all we want out of life, and, unless we’re lucky enough to work in a different place and return home to a different place everyday, we only get it in travel.

I’ve also learned that 6 a.m. in downtown Minneapolis is a very, very weird phenomenon. Before there’s even a glow in the east, it feels nothing like morning, instead like 15 minutes later than the latest at night you could ever possibly imagine. The people out on the streets look like they still belong to the night, and then moments later when the sun appears, either they disappear to be replaced by the morning people, or they metamorphose, but either way they are not the same. And it’s morning.

IMAGEAGE

My recent fascination with evocative fragments of language is perhaps best expressed in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who I’ve recently encountered in the new documentary The Radiant Child and his 1981 low budget starring vehicle Downtown 81. The former is a great glimpse at a brief window in time, the latter not a very good one, being one of those “scene” movies that makes everything look just so dismal and dispiriting, that fails to capture any of the poetry or music of a time and place that was certainly waiting there to be captured. It fails to even show any of the mysteriously extraneous background information (people and things that just “happened to be there”) that you find in street scene black-and-white (or color, really) photography.

Anyway, Basquiat’s graffiti and art makes me want to do something drastic, like put a large-lettered declaration across the wall of my room, perhaps each elaborately drawn letter given its own piece of pasteboard. Something like:

YOU’RE TOO LONG OF A GAP BETWEEN FACES***

(something a friend said)

Winter’s Bone comes closer to Faulkner than any other movie I can think of, mostly because it doesn’t try (to come close), having such faith in the rhythms of its story and the audience’s ability to look with open eyes, and being so fearless in its confrontation of corpses.

The American, more than any other entry in the recent (unending) slate of movies about organized crime, secret agents, and superspies, indulges our fantasies about surveillance and men who know enough about the ways they’re being monitored to (sometimes) manage to go “off the grid.” Most of the movies that have been playing Uptown this fall I would dub “Google-era cinema” in this way.

Lebanon might be a great movie, but it is nearly an unwatchable one, certainly the most upsetting war movie I’ve ever seen. To film all the action through tank crosshairs, so that every human face is in imminent danger of being exploded to pieces, is to wreak psychological havoc on the audience, and reminds us that Hitchcock showed restraint (pun noted) in his narrative parameters: Rope, Lifeboat, Rear Window, none of these are so emotionally exhausting.

It’s often said that the idea of watching Andy Warhol’s films is more interesting than actually watching them. His “screen tests” (which, somewhat contrary to their name, are four minute silent films that stare squarely into the faces of Factory denizens) are short and manageable enough as to probably trump his longer works in terms of watchability. The recently compiled 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests is a brief tour through an artful gaze, together with a soundtrack by Dean & Britta, who have managed to do something interesting with these films while avoiding the academic. Instead, these are mood pieces, interrogations of the mystery of the human essence. The soundtrack is a great success, I would say, sometimes so finely tuned as to seemingly be the thing “leading” the film, and thereby revealing faults in the images, not vice versa. But perhaps that’s only because these seem like music videos, an often corrupt art form whose defects tend to lie all on one side.

The 1930s films of French auteur (debatable, but just barely) Sacha Guitry are being rediscovered, and I’ve seen a couple. 1936’s The Story of a Cheat is truly admirable. When people say they don’t like voiceover narration in movies, I think they only mean that they don’t like when movies can’t commit to a narrative approach. Cheat commits entirely, and entirely gets away with it. The only dialogue comes during the film’s frame story, which is also a neat little ruse, providing the film with its punch line: Everything you’ve just seen is a pointless diversion. True, perhaps, but diverting only in the way the very best movies are. 1938’s Quadrille is similarly precise in its narrative devices, but it’s perhaps a bit too heavy-footed to really earn being labeled as that titular dance. What’s most interesting is the way it talks (and talks and talks) about the French as being romantically conservative, while at the same time alluding to sex much more than any American movie of the late 30s could have gotten away with.

How to Marry a Millionaire is what I might call a fashion movie, and therefore its success is dependent upon its ability to put beautiful, sometimes hideous, but always lavish things on the screen. If you’re not paying attention to the changes in wardrobe, then you’re totally missing the point. But this one’s also a sort of mild-mannered screwball comedy, and it succeeds on those terms too.

I Am Cuba makes me ask: Can a movie fail as propaganda but succeed as spectacle? It really does end up as hideous propaganda, but there are at least two hours worth of images (movement, lighting, lenses, and more) that boggle the eye, and the mind. Rare thrills, especially in 35mm.

“Don’t you think it common to smell of ourselves?”

This line is lovely even out of context, and it provides the key to Black Narcissus, the Powell/Pressburger masterpiece that, in its visual splendor, and perhaps in its thematic elements, is like The Wizard of Oz for adults, or, I should say, for adults exclusively. It is about a nun who goes to the Himalayas to escape her deep wants, but when she finds that she still smells only of herself, she must purge her ghosts, in the form of her double. I’ve been wondering if a similar approach to The Tales of Hoffmann (the Powell/Pressburger splendorama of four years later) is possible, but it’s hard to say, as I can’t understand operatic vocals, and I had neither DVD subtitles nor the printed libretto to aid me. And yet, Hoffmann works well enough as a silent film with musical score, and I would venture that if Hoffmann never purges his own ghosts, it is only to his benefit, as he is a poet.

The Social Network was great, but I don’t feel I need to add to the conversation, except to offer this clever alternate title I came up with: What We Talk About When We Talkabout.

TUNEAGE

Check out my reviews of new albums by Weezer and Sun Kil Moon and recent performances by Laura Veirs, Arcade Fire, Pavement, and Billy Bragg. But that’s not all…

Sweden update: Robyn and El Perro Del Mar had somehow never rated too high on my list of the best Swedish musicmakers of the current century, but, on the basis of the tip of the Robyn iceberg and the entire ‘berg del mar, I’m coming to see both as major songwriters. In the spirit of their fellow countrymen, they are much better at updating old musical trends in clever and delicate ways than their American and British peers.

I am late to the party, but the songs on Hunx & His Punx’s Gay Singles are remarkable mostly for the way that it’s unnecessary to rewrite the lyrics (replace the pronouns) in one’s head to have them aimed at a different recipient.

I haven’t yet found a review of Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest that is the least bit adequate to the band’s allure and intelligence. The Pitchfork one, while ascribing motives to the album that I just don’t hear, at least not more so than I do anywhere, did however make me think momentarily about my earliest musical interests and my progress since then, so I’ll use this awkward segue as an opportunity to mention…

The Posies’ Every Kind of Light (their 2005 album, purchased used in anticipation of the new Blood/Candy), the rare album that strikes me as one I would have found totally rad as a 6-year old, and which I’m able to find equally rad, for the same reasons, as a 23-year old, while also keeping an ironic distance from that same 6-year old, whose mind I can think about, even tap into, but never reclaim as my own. If that makes sense.

Anyway, some things I would like to address in a future Halcyon Digest review:

1. The superlative album cover. I didn’t love it at first, questioning the odd framing of the transvestite midget, but the ample negative space becomes more beautiful every time I see it. Of course, the photograph is not the band’s own (a George Mitchell, rather, from 1983), but everything they touch turns to rad, as if their bodily oils are chemical baths of Intense Emotion and Innate Cool. It’s an appropriate photo, too, since it’s possible that Halcyon Digest has everything to do with limb length and cross-dressing and looking heavenward. (The lyric sheet is also a great achievement.)
2. What is implied by a Deerhunter jam. “Desire Lines” is this album’s “Nothing Ever Happened,” but there is something almost esoteric in their restraint, the denial of total jam.
3. The way that Deerhunter become balladeers of greater strength with every passing year. Soon my mom and I will be able to share them the way we share R.E.M.
4. The way that Lockett Pundt sounds like an Everly. Now that he has found the confidence to S-I-N-G, this can be known.
5. The way that they’re no longer privileging one of their influences above all others, the way they did The Breeders on Microcastle.
6. The way that they’re still the greatest band currently working in America.
7. The lyrics, which could be placed in the emotional category “despair without despair.” Fitting that the band’s anthem for the semi-tragic figure Jay Reatard is called “He Would Have Laughed,” Reatard being another songwriter whose scary, lonely lyrics never seemed like harbingers of a sad demise, and still don’t. The difference being that Deerhunter are also very romantic.

If I can figure out what all this adds up to (besides the obvious, a great album), I’ll write my review.

*Erstwhile film critic Glenn Kenny does these on his excellent blog Some Came Running, so I thought I’d give one a try (though mine is more of an aside, given that it’s embedded within a single, much too long post).
**One of my readers suggested I start a new blog about my temp work assignments, but I’ll just lump it in here with everything else.
***I feel such a child still, in this world only to find things I like, and then rip aspects of them for my own purposes.

Rhetoric 1: Like A Schizo Running Wild

2010-09-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

I don’t see the point in maintaining this blog if I let whole months of my reading, viewing, and listening go uncommented upon, so in the interest of playing catch-up (I’ve been busy), here are short takes on a wide number of things:

...let whole months of my reading, viewing, and listening go uncommented...

Ironweed by William Kennedy : Wonder of wonders, these sentences. I hate when reviewers use the word “breathless,” but that’s how they leave me. Here’s one: “The gravid weight of the days they had lived was now seeking its equivalent level in firstborn death, creating a rectangular hollow on the surface of each grave.” This is enough to make me think I should only read books about poor people from here on out, though if you can cite me a comparable example from the new Jonathan Franzen, maybe I’d read it. For a novel that begins in a graveyard, its characters seem much more alive than most others, which I guess is the final proof that destitute people are closest to the real.

What’s also great is the way the characters are allowed their nostalgia. Too many historical novels leave this essential part of the human experience out, as if to set a novel in the past is to sufficiently enact nostalgia. But the men and women in Ironweed pine for an even more distant past than the one in which they’re located. They’re so haunted by ghosts that they could pop over to Joyce’s “The Dead” and fit right in.

Recidivist by Zak Sally : These six stories are all linked in an occult way (interestingly, this was once the given definition of “hypertext,” but I can’t remember where), so much so that one has to wonder if they add up to a sort of autobiography, and the recidivist in the title is Sally himself.

The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni : Pretty much all I ever want out of a book is a sense that the author is a thoughtful, caring person. I knew Peter Bognanni to be an owner of these qualities from my encounters with him, but if I failed to detect them in his writing during the number of his readings I attended, it was entirely my fault (I don’t do well with oral storytelling, tending to zone out, unable to turn words into stories when there are so many other people sitting and listening to look at). Alas, Peter B. loves his characters and wishes them well, and by extension this is a wonderful novel (as of p. 137).

...whole months of my reading, viewing, and listening go uncommented upon...

Despite my oral deficiency, I often enjoy monologues, and recently I’ve wondered if monologue might be the best way to relate the gay experience on film. The sitcom-cum-feature film Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, the great documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, and the debut episode of The Kids in the Hall all tell me this. The first, with the exception of a great the-couch-is-too-small-can-I-share-your-bed moment, is best when Sean Hayes speaks directly to the audience about unrequited loves, so honestly that his words might as well be the old diary pages of the film’s writer. The second is composed entirely of such moments, gay men and women of the 1970s speaking candidly about their lives, without the unnecessary gloss of fiction, and in hindsight it’s impossible to conceive of any other approach that might have had the same long-term impact. The third is funny beginning to end, but elevated to a higher level of satire by Scott Thompson, who, in the guise of a doting mother and a promiscuous creature of the night, takes these kinds of stories and twists their details into wickedly smart pieces of theater.

The Lost Weekend’s Don Birnam is a rarity among WWII-era movie protagonists. You can find a similarly bleak worldview in any film noir, but it’s almost always coupled with a tough existential hero. Birnam isn’t hard-boiled, or any kind of hero, just a failed writer turned alcoholic, living on the penny of his well-to-do brother, awash in feelings of his own worthlessness. Given how few of the movie’s details are period specific (there’s nary a mention of the war), Birnam is a character who lives today all over the country and who could appear in our current films. For those who consider the movie’s ending “soft,” I would counter: (1) it’s a noble enterprise that Birnam is about to embark on, and one that’s very relevant today, given the popularity and troubled veracity of memoirs, and yet (2) this is perhaps another delusion, the possibility of failure, and a return to the bottle, being so tangible.

Of Late Spring, so modest in its storytelling, it can only be said: marriage should always be so sad.

Dinner For Schmucks had its share of defenders, though few were willing to celebrate the directorial talents of Jay Roach. I will, by mentioning that this movie makes better use of close-ups than any other recent mainstream movie I can think of. The style of its comedy depends on our ability to see, in large magnification, each character’s every twitch of reaction and every slight abnormality of facial feature. This is nothing new, and could easily lead to strained unpleasantness, but here it leads (mostly) to laughter. Watch Zach Galifianakis turn purple with hysteria and then back to beige, and then tell me a better way to frame him. There’s even a romantic moment between Paul Rudd and Stephanie Szostak, done entirely in close-up and shot-reverse shot, but so nicely lit and well played that it establishes their mutual love as effectively as if they were shown in silhouette against the lights of Paris.

Beeswax was my introduction to the world of Andrew Bujalski, and it was as revelatory to me as John Cassavetes’ Shadows or Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. This is all the more surprising given how much less “movie-ish” it is than those other two, how recognizable its characters are. And yet this is a movie, of course—it has a point of view, and a meaning. It’s in the title, and in a single whispered word between sisters that tells you how much they share and how much they keep private.

One should never take anything for granted, but it would be nice to be able to take a movie like Restrepo for granted, when in fact it’s one of a kind: a documentary that shows you, in microcosm, almost everything you want to know about what’s happening in the war in Afghanistan. Between its total access footage and first-hand accounts by soldiers, it still doesn’t locate the why, but then I guess the why is never in the details of the war itself, but in some shadowy back room half a world away.

Didn’t we demonstrate such thoughtfulness as a civilization when Todd Solondz’s Happiness reaped all the praise it deserved in 1998? Like any filmmaker, Solondz is hardly infallible, but still I feel we’re backtracking a little bit every time one of his films gets lower marks. Life During Wartime is generally well liked, though it’s been argued that Solondz’s sympathy for his characters has turned to disdain, and that the film doesn’t hold out any measure of hope. Wrong! First, I’ve long thought his characters are the people we would be if we lived out our feelings at every moment—asking desperately for love and acceptance, weeping at every gesture of kindness, cracking under the constant specter of our own failings—and that’s never been more true than in Life During Wartime. This is not to say that these characters don’t lie or pretend (this is one of the movie’s central concerns), only that the ways they interface with the world are a bit less sophisticated than our own. Second, this movie’s hopefulness is writ large, in the face of Dylan Riley Snyder, the 12-year old boy who becomes its unlikely hero. He’s given misinformation, he makes mistakes, he questions unceasingly, and yet by the movie’s end, he sorts it all out, becomes a man at his Bar Mitzvah, and decides he doesn’t care about the lies he’s been sold—he knows what he wants.

Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother wonders how it would be if sons never really left the womb, if they reached adulthood and still their bodies were owned by their mothers. Of course, mother and son, to satisfy society, must live separate lives in separate bodies, and can only communicate their pain to each other in words, but aren’t they really the same person?

Sometimes I couldn’t care less about what a movie is trying to tell me, and I’m instead held rapt by observations of things happening on the screen and outside the screen, these observations leading to associations leading to memories, etc. Such was my experience of the opening of The King of Marvin Gardens, whose general import I anyway caught enough of to know it would be spellbinding seen only for itself. But my mind was elsewhere: (1) I’ve always thought Jack Nicholson in the 70s looks a lot like my father did in the 80s, but the similarity is uncanny here, and since I look so much like my father, I wonder if that fleshy face looming above me on the screen (sometimes so submerged in shadow that you can only imagine Nicholson’s face exists somewhere in that pool of black) is my eventual fate. Also, could this resemblance be the reason my father liked this movie so much (supposedly)? (2) This small screening room is wonderful, I could spend the rest of my life here, and although the print I’m watching is very old and has turned almost completely red with age, it’s enough that it’s real 35mm and being shown in a room like this. And so on. These thoughts end up being not entirely beside the point of the film, which Roger Ebert captured in his original review: “Only after it’s over do some of its scenes and moments fall into place; for much of the way we’ve been disoriented and the story has been suspended somewhere in midair.” Point taken. I thought maybe I’d missed something during my mind wandering, but then there’s a beautiful circularity in the movie’s closing scenes, when you realize finally who the Nicholson character is, that he hasn’t been sleepwalking through the film but has delivered a great, atypical performance.

I was similarly less interested in the whole of The Girl Who Played With Fire than I was in its parts, though in this case when I noticed things I liked, I was thinking about the movie and not about myself watching it. Of particular interest is a lesbian sex scene that is entirely more tender and passionate and plausible than it has any right to be, given that its direct antecedent is a sexual fantasy from the mind of Stieg Larsson. Movies always have this advantage over novels, i.e. there’s a greater chance that someone on set will have the life experience necessary to make a scene real, however poorly conceived it is on paper.

I believe the critical mind is most effectively molded by looking for connections between things that on their surface might seem to have nothing in common. I like to plan double features and reading lists accordingly. What My Winnipeg (2007) and Athens, GA – Inside/Out (1987) have in common is in their titles, but that’s also a place to locate a key difference: the possessive pronoun suggests that one is closer to autobiography and one is closer to cultural document. In brief: the former is Guy Maddin’s masterful tribute to his sleepy, snowy hometown, and the latter is a documentary about the Athens music scene of the mid 80s. Despite their different perspectives and different climates, both try to reach an understanding about why we live in towns, why we sometimes want to leave them, why we end up staying or needing to return. Of particular note: an Athenian man named Ort decides he’s getting out of town because he feels too restricted by the network of relationships that require him to stop and say “Hello” too many times on a daily basis. Maybe that’s one reason why the fictionalized Guy Maddin in My Winnipeg attempts to navigate the night trains out of town, but the complicated byways are too overwhelming and he never gets out. He invokes a sort of “wonder girl of Winnipeg” who might be able to set the city back the way it was, undo all the awful changes Maddin has seen in his time, but when he remembers she doesn’t exist, he has to stay. We have to stay because of the delusion that we can keep change from happening, and even when we fail, we can at least bear witness. This plays out over Maddin’s haunting refrain: “lying on couches… lying on couches… little chunk of house.”

Meanwhile, I Am Love and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World are superficially not the same, but they could be more different, as both are intoxicating bundles of music and images. This is not one of those cases where the awesomeness of music brings out brilliant colors and textures in a movie that aren’t actually there; these films depict entirely convincing movie worlds, held together by brilliant cinematic techniques (could I be more vague?), which find perfect expression and counterpoint in lush, orchestral and adrenalized, rock ‘n’ roll soundtracks, respectively. The latter film features a Japanese electronic duo, perhaps inspired by Daft Punk and the enormity of their live shows, and even though you never really hear their music, the way it’s visualized tells you exactly what they sound like.

...of my reading, viewing, and listening go uncommented upon, so in...

You might not be surprised to learn I’ve been listening to some new music. You can read my thoughts on recent releases by Deerhunter and Panda Bear, Perfume Genius, and Procedure Club, and the live prowess of Barlow and Wye Oak, and should also know that…

Wolf Parade’s Expo 86 is a churningly fine rock ‘n’ roll album that, if it contained more surprises, could almost be as good as TSOL’s Beneath The Shadows, and, if it had a greater sense of humor, could almost be as good as Possum Dixon’s Star Maps.

Toro Y Moi’s Causers Of This grows and grows, from the moment you realize it’s really just looking for the right listening environment to bring out its latent richness of color and texture. A Greyhound at dusk in a green and humid region of America works as well as anywhere.

The Depreciation Guild’s Spirit Youth is the best new album I’ve heard since I spoke to you last. It’s an album that was bound to appeal to a (insert name of early 90s band here; I think Chapterhouse are their closest ancestors) fan like me. Multiply that by the circa 2005 8-bit melodies, and you have a band that is not doubly dated, but all kinds of new.

Wild Nothing’s Gemini fades into existence like “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” and from there onward is almost the pop album we’ve been waiting for. But commenter “Jeffkelson” on BigTakeover.com suggests one reason why it’s perhaps not quite perfect: “Live they were under-rehearsed. Too much too soon I reckon. Bands need to play to 20 people in Dubuque before headlining a sold out Saturday night show at the Bowery Ballroom. But in this day and age the first part can be skipped due to blog hype.” The same logic could be applied to the vocals, I think, which are not in the realm of Morrissey or Kate Bush (whose “Cloudbusting” Wild Nothing have covered). They’re not trying to be, of course, but maybe trying is what’s lacking, when the singer sounds too content to just mumblingly fill in the spaces in these winning arrangements.

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs sounds like it was produced for vinyl even on CD, and if I’m breaking up its sides correctly, then Side 4 is its greatest moment. It’s worthwhile to think of the album as a double LP, as that’s the form the band is working in this time around, allowing them to make another “large” album, this time as a function of its length rather than its volume. Their ecstatic nature is tempered as a result, which is what made the Terry Gilliam-directed webcast of their appearance at Madison Square Garden on August 5 such a fitting companion. It was a great rock ‘n’ roll show—I was no less giddy to watch it on an eternally buffering computer while selling movie tickets than if I was actually there—and therefore a noble use of the internet.

Sun Kil Moon’s Admiral Fell Promises just might return us to the prime Kozelekian realm of “Katy Song.” Find out soon in my full review!

On the Swedish front, two songs you may have heard this summer are Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” and Jens Lekman’s “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love.” The former is a great club anthem (Sasha Frere-Jones hoped it would topple “Alejandro” and “California Gurls” to become the song of summer, while my more realistic friend Ola knows it will only ever be popular among gays and Europeans, which would explain why the savvy DJs at Jetset played it between spurts of Lady Gaga), and the latter is perfect for a hangover breakfast the next morning (theoretically). Lekman has a way of making the most awkward, topical, jargon-laden lyrics sound utterly charming and graceful, and the bit here about his trip to Washington D.C. for the election is nearly as nice as his poetic use of the term “out of office auto-reply” in “A Postcard to Nina.”

This has been blog post #69.

Announcement, Pt. 2

2010-08-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece about The Chills' Soft Bomb for a fab new blog/online arts journal called The Modest Kingmakers.

I mention it here because I long ago intended to post a shorter article about the album on this blog under the heading Album [#4]. You may, but probably don't, recall that I started writing about individual albums here last October (with the hope that they would soon proliferate and redefine this blog), but now that so much time has passed, and the MKs were kind enough to publish my article, I think I can officially name that a failed endeavor.

Announcement

2010-07-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

The music festival of my dreams is happening next weekend:

That dream won't be coming true for me, but a related one just has. Think of my article(s?) for this new venture as an extension of the blog (or vice versa), but with mercifully less of the first-person.

Krell Vid Blogger

2010-07-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes : Richard Ford famously axed most of the adverbs from the manuscript of Independence Day to cut down the word count. The Real Cool Killers is exploding with adverbs. The literature of real estate agents doesn’t exactly demand adverbs, but they are crucial in a crime novel as violent as this one, in which something is always happening, and happening in a particularly vivid way. In the bravura opening scene, set in a Harlem nightclub, a knife slashes a man’s tie and the knot blossoms “like a bloody wound over his white collar.” The arm holding that knife is then axed off “as though it had been guillotined” and the owner of the arm scrabbles about the floor “searching for his severed arm,” then loses consciousness and falls on his face. This heavy and active prose (though I left out all the adverbs!) might have become tiresome, but then the book starts to shift toward long passages of dialogue, another of Himes’s great strengths. You might call The Real Cool Killers anthropological in the way it hears its characters so sharply, but I’m not sure. What do their voices add up to, when none of them seem to have a very clear idea of the world they inhabit? A barman and a detective argue over how a black man would respond if he found a white man in bed with his girl (the barman thinks he could be bought off, and that white men don’t count as cheating anyway; the detective thinks it might lead to murder), but the argument is never resolved. That conversation starts to hint at the deep, deep racial prejudices that somehow don’t quite register in the book’s opening chapters but which feature more and more explicitly as the tangle of murder unravels. That same detective lays it all out with a great speech: “If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.”

Scorsese by Roger Ebert : The pieces in Scorsese by Ebert started life as stand-alone reviews and interviews, so the fact that they add up to a book well worth reading cover-to-cover, and an interesting narrative experience that could almost be called biography, is quite something. Ebert may harp too much on certain elements in Scorsese’s films (the Madonna-whore complex, the evocation of a Little Italy childhood spent watching the gangsters come and go across the street), but it’s this sort of redundancy that gives the book weight, that provides a long and varied life with its necessary ghosts and obsessions. Ebert has always been smart enough to not suppress his old writings even after his ideas have changed, so when this book is at its best, it’s not just about Scorsese but about a filmmaker and his most visible critic journeying through life side-by-side.

A Newsweek article wonders what the difference is between an episode of Jerry Springer and some recent movies like The Kids Are All Right and Please Give, and then, as if some great critical thought has gone into the intervening paragraphs, concludes that they are different because of the way they treat their subject matter. Really? Roger Ebert’s rule, that movies aren’t about what they’re about but how they’re about, could have saved this article from ever being written, but at least it arrives at a reasonable conclusion, however belabored. Sadly, though, the final line intervenes: “But let’s not pretend that the subject matter, whether set to Joni Mitchell or onstage in front of an angry mob shouting, ‘She’s! A! Dude!’ is not, at heart, the same.” No one’s pretending, because we’re all too busy using critical systems that understand the nature of context.

I understand the solace of finding the perfect pair of jeans, but I wish the ending of Please Give was a bit more ambivalent, given how perfectly the rest of the film reflects its characters’ complicated feelings about shopping. Last year The Hurt Locker contained that moment when Jeremy Renner stares at an endless expanse of cereal boxes at the grocery store with a blank look on his face, but that shot was meant to be particular to the mindset of a soldier returned home from the war. Please Give contains a similar moment, one that springs from the characters’ daily lives, when Catherine Keener spies her young daughter looking at makeup at the other end of the aisle, starting off on life’s fraught journey of buying things. Keener sometimes has a look in her eye, asking, is this what I’m supposed to do with my life, buy things? Will her daughter end up wondering that too? She doesn’t yet, not at the moment of the perfect jeans, which I just can’t accept as the end of the story.

Why does young Andy love his toys so much? All children love toys, but Andy is obsessed, to the point of mania. Instead of a family portrait on the bulletin board in his bedroom, he has a portrait with all his toys. With Toy Story 3, I’ve finally realized that these nagging questions have been the key to these movies all along. The movies are finally about, in a fairly explicit way, the absence that has always been at their center. Up gave us a single parent family last year, but Toy Story 3, and its predecessors, presents one with such little fanfare that I’ve only just now begun to understand the trilogy’s essential tragedy. First there is Andy, whose parting words to the audience (and to presumably fatherless Bonnie) before going to college are about his beloved toy and father figure Woody: “He’ll never let you down.” Then there is his mother, who has lost her only son and who will remain alone at home with only a decrepit dog and an oblivious pre-teen daughter to keep her company. In even its most veiled metaphors and subtle implications, Toy Story 3 contains more of the stuff of real life than the sum total of this awful, awful summer of movies. Consider the Claw, which is divine intervention and random coincidence all bundled up into one persuasive philosophy. After the Claw rescues the toys from the fires of hell, they conclude that maybe Andy’s attic wouldn’t be so bad after all. Of course!

Note: The family opted to not see the movie in 3D. After some pleasant 3D experiences last year—the first two refurbished Toy Story films (my first novel experience of the phenomenon), A Christmas Carol (a dark, dark London that benefits from being seen as dark as possible), and Avatar (projected at an appropriate light level, probably per JC’s orders)—Alice in Wonderland broke the spell for everyone, tolerable only when I raised my glasses to see that things were actually happening, vividly, on the screen. I imagine most moviegoers have experienced a similar trajectory by now. No more 3D for me, at least until Hugo Cabret or Avatar 2.

Here are two reviews of Inception, one of which accepts the movie on its own terms and finds it to be pretty good, and the other of which expects the movie to conform to real human experiences of dreaming and finds it to be pretty bad. My own feelings exist somewhere at the intersection of these two reviews. I was able to accept Inception’s weirdly precise un-dream logic (and even thrilled a bit at its loony formulas for elapsed time in different dream levels, etc.) without liking it very much. Yes, Inception has nothing to do with dreams as they are experienced by any person now living, but that hardly matters, since the elaborate and clever rules that govern the world of the film have only sloppy directing and editing to enforce them. Here’s one example of a three-shot sequence that I hope I am recalling correctly: [1] Leo looks through the window of a closed door and sees Prof. Michael Caine sitting at his desk in an otherwise empty classroom; [2] closer shot of Caine, being startled by off-screen voice of Leo; [3] Leo sits in the room facing Caine. This scene does not ostensibly take place in a dream (though perhaps it inadvertently ascribes meaning to the film’s final shot), so I suppose the implication is that Leo has the ability to walk through closed doors in his waking life.

As poorly edited movies and the internet continue to evaporate our brains, I’ve been finding more and more articles about the benefits of slow cinema and slow reading. These aren’t really the same topic (one is under the control of the artist and the other under the control of the audience), but commentators tend to define “slowness” as some sort of aesthetic choice (readers too make aesthetic choices, after all) when I would consider it a simple human imperative. People (or at least I) don’t comprehend information at the alarming rate that hypertext and quickly plotted and edited movies require. Consider Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, an ideal movie because its actions and meanings unfold at the same pace. Action without meaning is chaos. I don’t know if I believe that, but it sounds like a good manifesto.

Metropolis is another movie that proceeds at just the right pace for my slow brain to comprehend it. The new footage in the 2010 restoration can easily be deduced according to the quality of the image, and aside from a number of lengthened scenes, which heighten the film’s emotional impact, the only really “new” discovery here is a sequence in which a minor character takes a cab to a Metropolis nightclub. Funny that no one has seen this sequence since the film’s first premiere, considering that this is one of the moments that I find echoes most strongly in the films of the past 80 years. The way the lights flash through the window in the back of a shadowy cab, the suggestion of a vast and glittering city that an endangered character can only experience in passing, we’ve seen in all this film’s direct descendents (Blade Runner, Dark City), in the entirety of film noir, in Pulp Fiction too.

But since we’re talking about a silent film, this new cab sequence in Metropolis doesn’t function as a bridge between larger scenes, but as one among a series of tableaux, each given equal weight. Indeed, I propose a new “tableau” theory as a way to unite silent cinema and the art of the hip hop album. In the last post, I wrote about Janelle Monae’s hip-hop-by-design record The ArchAndroid as if I had uncovered some sort of linear narrative in its songs that made its Metropolis-themed concept worthwhile. Rather, the album works as a series of linked set-pieces, which anticipate and illuminate each other and add up to an experience that could be deemed “cinematic” (an adjective most commonly found in hip hop reviews?). Metropolis can be viewed that way too, although it also has a narrative that can be followed.

Ben Allen has produced the new Deerhunter album, out September 28. This worried me a bit from the first, for the simple reason that Deerhunter knows best how to produce Deerhunter, and now that I’ve heard “Where I’m Going” from the next Cut Copy album, out in January and also produced by Allen, I’m considerably worried. Ben Allen is best known as the man behind Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, a much-celebrated head trip album that is all a-muddle to me, or at least, minus some brilliant patches, never hits the way it’s supposed to. I would liken Allen’s influence to the teleportation devices in Larry Niven’s SF classic Ringworld. Instead of leveling human culture, he seems to be leveling modern music, so that everything sounds culturally, geographically and emotionally unspecific and pitched at the same level of ecstatic chanting/dancing. I don’t know what separates the new Cut Copy song from any recent Animal Collective song, or what it’s supposed to make me feel besides a desire to feel joy. Will all of humanity soon unite over their shared love of this sort of music while I’m left out in the cold? I’m not being misanthropic; instead I feel that Ben Allen’s work does a disservice to people with complex emotions. And Deerhunter has never lacked for complex emotions, either in their content or the way they wrangle content into dynamic sounds.

Speaking of that indefinable line between production and content, it’s been on my mind while pondering what makes the greatness of Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty separate from the greatness of OutKast’s Aquemini. It is simply this: I’m so wowed by the sounds on Left Foot that I’m unable to hang on every word, the way I do when Big Boi raps about his West Savannah upbringing or the charms of Suzie Screw. I can hardly believe I’m even talking about the same Big Boi. Whether or not Sir Lucious is a “mainstream” record, it probably seems so current because it is so purely aural, even when the songs are about something. Does anyone think the album would actually be better with the awesome “Royal Flush” on it? Not only do the George W. lyrics date the song, but that dating would call undue attention to the lyrics on an album that generally doesn’t.

El Perro Del Mar’s Love Is Not Pop, so beautiful and hushed, is belatedly one of 2009’s best, and scaled exactly right: 7 songs in 33 minutes, each song long but not epic, like brief moments of repose sustained for a few minutes and then blown open into tiny symphonic reveries. I never expected that Lou Reed’s solo catalog would be one of the great influences on 21st century pop music, but I’ve been hearing him everywhere, in most things minor-key and modest, in the work of musicians who sound like survivors of drugs, even if they’re just survivors of melancholy. Love Is Not Pop contains one Lou Reed cover and six would-be Lou Reed covers, though I shouldn’t underestimate the influence of Kate Bush (which you’ll also find all over Chico Dusty), Sam Phillips, and those gentle early 80s records by King Crimson.

Meanwhile, I’ve liked every Pernice Brothers album (up through Live A Little) better than its predecessor, and while the new Goodbye, Killer could be nobody’s idea of their best album, it earns bonus points for this same sense of modesty and smallness. Could it be that musicians are cutting back their excesses in these “tough economic times”? I don’t think it’s that; instead, we’re losing our suspicion of understatement, thank God.

Mom and I made our annual trip to the ballpark last week, and more than I felt the inevitable loss of the Helena Brewers, I felt my continued conviction that baseball is the only team sport worthy of my attention. This has nothing to do with the history of the game or its all-American status, and more to do with the beauty of its rules—so precise and uncluttered, so absolutely mathematical, so free from the tyranny of the clock. Then there are those silences between the plays when its players are revealed not as athletes but as men in an impossible situation, waiting. Football has those moments of waiting, too, but they conceal the threat of imminent violence, which makes the game unpleasant and possibly immoral. If baseball contains violence, it is only psychological.