The Usual Subtexts

My brother-in-law just finished a new album called Earthquake Lake. It’s very good as usual, and while most copies have probably already been handed out to friends and family, for my own amusement I designed an album cover, which looks like this:


This is the fourth album cover I have done (not to mention the dozens that will never be used), and the first done entirely by hand. It is an embellished tracing of a photograph of Deerhunter’s Locket Pundt, a method I have used before (Patrick Wolf on a birthday card; Devendra Banhart on a going-away card; myself on a t-shirt) and which I recommend to non-artists like myself as it tends to produce good results. Because they are always at hand, I often use a set of six earth-toned Faber-Castell pens, and for Earthquake Lake, I believe the colors and the subject matter of the album art suggest the qualities of the album itself. I hope. The original:


Comment on this post if you’d like to hear the music. I will probably make a music video this summer if I can get my camera fixed, but in the meantime check YouTube for others I have directed: “Dull Moment” and “As Far As I Can See”, recorded under the name of my brother-in-law’s former one-man band, The Sugarbeeters.

Speaking of album covers, the best I have seen in a while is the new one by Sade, which recalls those odd Roxy Music covers of yore in a way I didn’t think possible in 2010.




The Magnetic Fields, Realism : Stephin Merritt has never operated without a premise. Racking my brain to think of a normal Merritt project, only a couple Magnetic Fields albums and one or both Future Bible Heroes albums seem like possibilities. Not even certainties! So unless the premise is quantity (69 Love Songs), his premises are always threatening to ruin him. He has escaped unblemished so far, and I think he does again on Realism, but only because half of the songs are pretty wonderful and not because the premise makes any sense.

Realism is presented in part as the flipside to 2008’s Distortion, which in every way but the packaging it is not, and which only goes to undermine Distortion’s startling cover design: the simultaneous cognitive dissonance and consonance caused by a bright pink background, the male restroom symbol, the word ‘distortion’ in a not-quite elegant font. When was the last time you were so shocked without knowing why? What advertising genius, nay artist, thought this up? Barbara Kruger? But in what way Realism’s paper-bag brown, female restroom outline, and quainter font are analogous to Distortion’s iterations, I don’t know. It also doesn’t meet its promise of being a folk album, unless within his definition of folk music Merritt includes all the categories and traditions he has always utilized. None of this matters, of course, except when the songs are so miniaturized, as they often are, that they fail to give the album a shape determined by the quality of the music. But there are wonders too: opener “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind,” with its instantly recognizable Merrittian melody; “I Don’t Know What To Say,” a surprisingly haunting formula song; “Better Things,” the rare moment when Merritt’s greatest quality, sentimentality, wins out over his second greatest, cleverness; “The Dada Polka,” a joke song that works in every way; and of course, the always breathtaking voice of Shirley Simms. These things work on their own terms, but with some future album we might need Merritt to contextualize his ideas in a commentary booklet, just like we would if Quentin Tarantino ever made a bad movie.

Update: There’s not a song on Realism I dislike, but the problem of extreme smallness persists.


Field Music, Measure : This album, maybe because it is so good, only makes me want to repent for not giving Sloan’s Never Hear The End Of It the praise it deserved in 2007. That record, the eighth by Canada’s greatest band (a fact worth noting in these Olympic times) was one of those unprecedented long-form bursts of creativity, experienced by all the band’s members in equal measure, that doesn’t need a unifying concept to distract from its ceaseless onrush of good ideas (think Double Nickels on the Dime). Field Music were good contenders to make such an album. Their previous record, Tones of Town, didn’t have a bad idea in its 32 minutes, and featured a Kinks/Small Faces-style quaint rockingness that seemed due for an expansion. But because Field Music has two songwriters to Sloan’s four, because this is their third album and not their eighth, and because they are more of a “head” band than those power pop Canadians, Measure is not as instantly gratifying as Never Hear The End Of It. Perhaps if you’re a Dave Marsh acolyte you’ll listen to it five times back to back tonight, but I prefer Sloan’s cavalcade of should-be hits. But… more on Measure soon, I hope.

--If I had to handicap my 2010 top ten albums list in this very premature month of February, I would say Owen Pallett’s Heartland will do well, and I have as yet only heard four of its songs! Not only that, but I had never listened to Pallett’s recordings under the name Final Fantasy, expecting labyrinthine string arrangements whose eccentricity would prove too much for me. Alas, Heartland—a place where pop music, string virtuosity, and North American imagery, storytelling and violence meet—features music that I think could be called culture-enriching, and which could well produce a more responsible and liberated generation of artists who are neither purely progressive nor purely traditional. Give this man a Guggenheim! Or are those not given to Canadians?

--Is it wrong to still be loving Basement Jaxx’s “Raindrops” all these months after the parade? Popular music’s transience is no bad thing, and just like the actual raindrops that fell in summer 2009, perhaps “Raindrops” existed to be loved once and never again. But no one has ever put an expiry date upon “My Girls” or “Lisztomania,” and similarly euphoric-at-the-end-of-the-world “Raindrops” is a hotter jam in every way. Here’s hoping we all live to see another summer. I will put it on a mixtape.

--I am such a devotee of the album format that I always prefer to hear a one hit wonder’s one hit in context rather than out, even if the “context” is 40 minutes of filler and tripe. But such cannot be said of A-Ha’s Hunting High & Low, Alphaville’s Forever Young and Modern English’s After The Snow, which are all fabulous albums despite containing hits so awesome (“Take On Me,” “Forever Young,” “I Melt With You”) as to seemingly preclude further awesomeness from whence they came. “Take On Me” is the only one that’s even in competition as the best on its respective album, although it’s the rare moment so heart-tuggingly lovelorn that Morten Harket has to strangle his beautiful voice into a nearly shameful falsetto. But not shameful, because it’s that sort of song.

ITEMS OF GREAT IMPORT

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a classic lesbian text, I have learned since I began reading it. The fact that it is written in first-person is all you need to know to understand why, I suppose. And it’s hardly surprising anyway, as I can’t name many great American authors, writing in a time when there were still restrictions on what could be written, who can conclusively be said to not have had a non-traditional sexuality. When uncertainty exists, it can make for great literature, potent readings. I’ve been thinking a bit about that, and about the two Russian bachelors, neighbors of our Antonia and our narrator, who live together, and what Cather might be telegraphing, possibly without knowing she’s doing it. But when I’m reading the book, I’m simply swept away, because when you find yourself on the plains of Nebraska and all the details you normally latch onto in fiction disappear, everything that remains takes on such great importance and vividness, especially in this present season that makes me hate the seasons.

THE BRAIN

Roger Ebert once tweeted that he has read all of Ms. Cather’s novels more than once. Ebert is probably the only writer I have read as extensively as he has read Cather. Since I began regularly reading his reviews and watching his old show in 2003, he’s never been out of my mind for more than a week at a time, which is something I can’t say about anyone else excluding my family. This is a fact I can hopefully rely on for a good while longer, but clearly not forever, as a new Esquire profile and Ebert’s own response to the profile suggest. The image that accompanies both, very sad or perhaps just very human, will become iconic, and makes Ebert’s recent articles about pleasures now denied him, like dining and making out, all the more touching. I’ve also been thinking about his original review of 2004’s The Sea Inside, which has stuck with me ever since I read it, particularly the bit about reading tomorrow’s newspaper. When much of what exists in blogland seems so perfunctory, like it was never written at all, Ebert’s online journal suggests a man wandering the corridors of his mind, finding and sharing solid truths.

THE BRAIN

I have nothing but love for most of mankind’s handiworks, and as you may have surmised from my various appraisals on this blog, that also means I love most everything that is mainstream. My tastes align pretty closely with the interests of those who are arts-conscious but not quite arts-critical. Maybe I am such a person, but positively, Lost is one such mainstream thing I love. You may have heard that the show is beginning to answer some of its most burning questions in preparation for its finale, which doesn’t really matter to me so long as it continues to be interesting, which it has been, eminently, this season. Here’s the premise of one episode: A woman holds hostage another woman, now a complete stranger to her, but whose child she raised in an alternate universe. There’s not time enough in the world to think through what this says about the nature of existence, and I doubt the show’s creators have taken the time either, but this is one of those identity puzzles Lost is perpetually setting up that doesn’t have to mean anything because it is just inherently fascinating.

THE BRAIN

I will duel anyone who does not love Shutter Island. I should have said the same about Avatar right after I’d seen it and before the skeptics made themselves known, but I hate to seem like some bozo movie fan who purposely ignores rational argument and relies too much on the word “awesome.” But once it becomes apparent that Shutter Island is a literal thrill ride through the human subconscious, it is awesome indeed, as giddy-making as a chase through John Malkovich’s dimmest memories. If you believe that Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Psycho have not just great endings but crucial endings; if you believe movies don’t do exposition as good as they used to; if you believe that dreams and not reality are the proper setting of fiction; and if you believe that 50 years post-Psycho our greater awareness of mental illness hasn’t made us better people and it’s still impossible to know that what we know is actually so… you will probably love this movie, and I won’t have to duel you. This is Marty’s Solaris, but entirely less ponderous. I fully expected the closing shot to zoom out and reveal Ashcliff surrounded by a roiling alien sea.

I Make No Claims To Certainty

The declaration above is a title that I was going to randomly affix to any forthcoming post, but now it proves more than just generally relevant, as I have been reading…

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin : Franklin, like me, considered certainty, coupled with love of argument, to be an inferior quality in people, to wit: “I wish wellmeaning sensible Men would not lessen their Power of doing Good by a Positive assuming Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create Opposition, and to defeat every one of those Purposes for which Speech was given us, to wit, giving or receiving Information, or Pleasure.” I have had it easy, as I have always been naturally uncertain of everything I think and do, but I know there are many who have to work hard to cultivate modesty (e.g. the U.S. Senate, whose public chastisement was the best part of Obama’s State of the Union speech). Franklin’s early life and thoughts are filled with other wonders, particularly his youthful flirtation with vegetarianism, for which he is “chid for his singularity.” Anyway, our lesson: anyone who tells you he knows something for sure is due for a major humbling (so it seems to me).

Angels at the Ritz by William Trevor : Trevor is a national treasure. Not ours, but someone’s. There are standouts among these 11 stories, but what is most amazing about them on the whole is the way they begin with dual protagonists and by the end shift toward the point-of-view of one or the other, or some third party, anyone who has the most clear-eyed understanding of what has transpired in the preceding pages.

J.D. Salinger died (or became ultra-reclusive, as someone put it) and I realized I never said much here about Nine Stories, which I read a couple months back. For those only familiar with The Catcher In The Rye, it’s easy to be swayed by the strength of Holden Caulfield’s voice and celebrate Salinger as the voice of a generation before celebrating him as a storyteller. And while Holden is chief among Salinger’s misfits, what Nine Stories makes clear is that, as a writer, he could make you understand the disappointments and modest joys in any American life.

I’ve been perusing the new fiction shelves again, so add these to my list of recent books about characters with various connections to pop music: I Can See Clearly Now, Pop Apocalypse, Putrefaction Live. I might read this last one, about a Navajo heavy metal band.

BLOG BLOWOUT!
EVERYTHING MUST GO!

BRITAIN

To the (not great) extent that I used to categorize the music I liked, there was nothing better than the grand 1990s tradition of lengthy and expensively produced British rock ‘n’ roll albums, “major statements” that stated only this: “Rule Britannia” has never been truer! I include in this tradition What’s The Story Morning Glory, Dog Man Star, Everything Must Go, Drawn To The Deep End, Urban Hymns, The Man Who, and exclude spikier contemporaries like Elastica, The Great Escape, et al. (However: Nothing is so tidy, and there’s a fine line between Liam Gallagher’s hedonism and bro Noel’s Lennon-complex, between “Charmless Man” and “The Universal,” etc. I continue to confuse the issue in the sentences to follow, but the point is that while all these bands had a sense of fun, there is something special and universally appealing about them when they are at their most self-absorbed and -indulgent.)

I'm going to start randomly incorporating
photographs I have taken and/or posed for,
and sometimes iPhoto modified, into my posts.

I don’t think this tradition came to an end (you only have to open an issue of Q to find another pale and misbehaved quintet standing tall and skinny behind their instruments as if no one else has ever been so cool, or perhaps a pale foursome with a humbleness matched only by their earnestness), but with the exception of my love for Doves and Engineers and my awareness of Elbow, I lost track (not so their spikier contemporaries, Maximo Park and the like). Which is why I am so happy to have made acquaintance with just such a band as I parenthetically describe above…

The Horrors, Primary Colours : I don’t know what era this album really belongs to, or on which side of my arbitrary grand/fun divide it lies, but it’s damn exciting, even terrifying at times, in a way I thought exclusive to Primal Scream’s Exterminator. By which I mean: with their funhouse organ and aloof brutality, these songs exist at the Swinging London happening of my dreams, but with an overlay of 80s post-punk jitters, 90s Brit-jam excess, and 00s feedback chiaroscuro that bring them up to the present day. One might find these guys a bit stage managed (another grand tradition) but I’ve decided they’re the real deal, and the British press agrees and feels that this sort of thing is here to stay, still. That’s one constant I can rely on.

Engineers, Three Fact Fader : One smart critic called this something like the hangover to Primary Colours' all-night bender. These guys seem like elder statesmen compared to The Horrors, maybe because it took them four years, not two, to follow up their debut, and because that debut suggested so many possible directions that Three Fact Fader has required them to make a conscious choice about the type of band they want to be. They’ve decided to favor the gently psychedelic, the dreamily grandiose. Even if they’re the last Brits making albums so resplendent, somnolent, orderly and overstuffed, the last ones singing “Rule Britannia,” through the force of their modest ambitions they’re not an anachronism.

SWEDEN

I tell everyone who will listen about how Sweden is a wonderland, maybe in actuality or maybe just in my imagination, or both. This is mostly based on the strength of their arts scenes and something I read about ways that the government there helps ease a person’s transition from male to female or vice versa. I could now regale you with declarations of my love for Ingmar Bergman, and then Lukas Moodyson, Let The Right One In, and the perfection of Sweden’s teen angst. And then I could list my 50+ favorite Swedish bands, but I will limit myself to recent happenings in my continually unfolding mental panorama of Northern paradise.


Frida Hyvonen is not the first person to not rhyme in her lyrics, but she makes an art of it and you might think no one else has ever so thoroughly freed her muse and sang her heart out in prose. She embodies the old cliché about how someone could sound good singing out of a phone book. (Phone books tend not to rhyme.)

The film You The Living, like The Knife’s Silent Shout, is completely unlike anything else that has ever existed, and almost as pitch black, albeit arriving there via washed out pastel greens and pinks. Sweden: the last frontier?


jj’s music, on the other hand, completely meets my expectations of what Swedes do best, and last year’s no 2 is a total knockout, the best thing that happened to me in January (you know, among the things I write about here; original name for this post: “jjanuary”). The album has the sort of globetrotting travelogue vibe that makes Air France so wonderful, but, in the way of these things, is also quite hermetic and best at its most insular and introspective. …I know the ship will still sail on long after I’m gone… This has been called the summer album to forthcoming no 3’s presumed winter, though I don’t think these things are absolute (e.g. a “shivery” guitar can sound “like a summer wind” or “glacial”) and can easily be taken too far. Summery jj has made my favorite winter ’10 music.

MOVIE ROUNDUP

I’ve worked on magazines and newsletters, so my justification for seeing The September Issue was that I find it interesting to see how publications come together. But I took “issue” with everyone at my place of work who suggested that this movie isn’t for everyone, only for fashion-savvy women. Because I saw it for the fashion too, and took special delight in watching these people who ignore everything else that happens in the world, although Grace Coddington, genius of the fashion image, never seems disconnected.

Stanley Tucci is good in The Lovely Bones, as advertised, though I find it a bit disturbing that he has been consistently singled out for awards nominations, his creepy and unredeemed child murderer meant to represent the entire movie. That goes to show what an over-directed muddle of a movie it is. Stanley Tucci can’t feel good about it either. I never want to see a close-up of his fingertips again.


Precious continues to gain power in my imagination, and I’ve begun to think of it, perhaps incorrectly, and only in part, as a feverish and impassioned mash-up movie-movie in the manner of Inglourious Basterds. I watched Two Women, one of the films it directly cites, for this reason, and it’s amazing to think that the big tragedies and bigger emotions that make that film’s ending such a knockout have been reclaimed and given new life in Precious. Director Lee Daniels cites Pedro Almodovar, John Waters, and Julian Schnabel as his influences, and if you look close enough you can probably find pieces of their visions floating around in that weird hybrid of a movie.

I can’t object to anything in the very classy Invictus, except that the final rugby match might have been a bit mishandled. During certain slow motion sequences, I became so hyper-aware of the sound effects editing (men grunting slowly on a soundstage somewhere in Hollywood) that I couldn’t take anything seriously. And I don’t like big rousing sports finales to begin with, except the one in Breaking Away. It’s always weird to remember how movies are pieced together, sound stitched to image, but I don’t blame the filmmakers for my moment of awareness. I just briefly got separated from movieland.

One of the best movies of 2009, The Road comes closer to my understanding and imagining of the source material than any other adaptation I’ve seen does to its original. I never thought the book unfilmable, just that it would require the sort of director who believes in the power of images and who could resist the temptation to narrate. John Hillcoat, of 2006’s great The Proposition, is the man, and the result puts to the test one of Ebert’s most quotable lines: “No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.” The Road is exhilarating, not least because the filmmakers care about our future.

I haven’t seen the original documentary, but the way the HBO retelling of Grey Gardens plays like a standard drama might initially seem inappropriate to the subject matter. In fact, it’s the perfect approach to take: weird as young Edith is, she always believes herself an undiscovered star, and this movie allows her to be the star of her own sordid life story. Drew Barrymore is great as a woman who succeeds in all her failures, while Jessica Lange, as Edith Sr., knows that the story is in fact no great Hollywood drama, and that she’s merely playing a part in Barrymore’s movie. I love that, when a story’s subject justifies what one might consider its shortcomings.

Newsweek published its obligatory piece of Hurt Locker contrarianism, but all it taught me is that the author (a) believes movies that are open to interpretation are inferior to movies with strong, clear messages, and (b) storytellers should have no limitations, and Hollywood directors in particular should be made to apologize for not telling stories completely beyond their understanding of other cultures. This last part ignores the best thing about The Hurt Locker—and here’s a bit of my interpretation, made possible by the smart choices of the filmmakers—the sad, painful admission that it can be dangerous for a soldier to connect on a human level to the innocents whose land he inhabits (i.e. the situation with the young boy).


Other recent movies I’ve liked, and approaches I might have taken in commenting on them: Big Fan (the purity of a certain kind of unthinking partisanship—see Franklin above—and its relation to loving bands); Up The Yangtze (the pitfalls of tourism, actual and cinematic); Lorna’s Silence (sympathy for junkies); Art & Copy (my continued disbelief that any advertising is good, yet simultaneous awe at certain campaigns); D Tour (life’s messiness, tragedy, even within the history of a band I love in a pretty impersonal way).

Twin Peaks: long-form movie, or TV show cut woefully short? It’s a crucial distinction, on which one’s interpretation of the ending depends completely. The simple answer might be that the show’s makers, aware that it would probably be cancelled, tried to have it both ways by imagining a bright future for the show that might grow out of a perfect, cynical ending. In particular, three unresolved plot points can be understood as resolved in these ways (vague spoiler alert!): Benjamin Horn, having lost one daughter, cannot reclaim the one he denied, so it hardly matters what his bleeding head signifies; all those adults, with their absurd teenageresque romances, realize their folly when it becomes clear they have been taking advantage of a woman’s mental illness and delusions of youth; Agent Cooper...sadly, he made the same mistake twice. And while it kills me that the show ends the way it does, it’s also true that it never quite favored good humor over a cold, hard stare into the face of evil.

SONGS OF THE MOMENT
JAM EDITION

--Devon Williams, “Fragile Weapon”
One of our preeminent pop romantics. Within the small part of his small catalog I’ve heard, only “Who Cares About Forever” bests this, which makes me think that his songs’ greatness is directly proportional to their structural intricacy. Prefab Sprout could cover this 25 years ago.

--Engineers, “Sometimes I Realise”
I wasn’t the first to call it a jam, but that’s what it is, a familiar sort of tune whose elements all have different degrees and qualities of buzz, resulting in instant brain fizz.

--Clinic, “Distortions”
The “ballad” on perma-classic Internal Wrangler, this is where Clinic momentarily forget how much they love every outsider musician of the twentieth century and sing one from the heart. I’m glad about how much less this song reminds me of Radiohead than it used to, proof that it has withstood the test of time and of authenticity. But it wasn’t made in a vacuum, and these guys learned something from jazz: the coda is a snatch of double time, I think, not just a quickened pulse, while “Goodnight Georgie” nearly out-sads Vince Guaraldi.

--The Twilight Sad, “And She Would Darken The Memory”
Head up dear the rabbit may die! Anyone who thinks James Graham’s depressiveness outweighs his vitality needs only to listen to the moment he stops singing that line and screams it. (I could revise that Ebert quote: “No good music is depressing, all bad music is depressing.”) Graham has that rare voice that is never disembodied; he sings so deeply you can almost see the chest the words pour out of. Many versions of this song exist, but the album version (with the punchiest drums) is best.

--The Besnard Lakes, “Albatross”
The Lakes want to set your heart racing this time around. Like Wye Oak’s “Tattoo,” this is a different kind of worship music, and the coda, maybe the best of its kind since GBV’s “Don’t Stop Now,” is the moment of oneness.

--Blue Oyster Cult, “True Confessions”
Agents of Fortune is my 70s radio rock album of choice, and this song, so modest compared to the song that follows it (cowbell...), is a true summer jam.

--Gang Gang Dance, “House Jam”
Not my favorite practitioners of everything-at-once quasi-dance music, but this song reveals that all they need is a steady groove and a diva vocal to sort out the culture clutter.

--No Age, “Sleeper Hold”
I think I have underestimated the melodic power of Nouns. When you’ve essentially got a nine-note vocal and a few chords, you have to choose wisely, and this song kills like the best of New Day Rising.

--The Joy Formidable, “The Last Drop”
Jack Rabid is going nuts about this band (the best to emerge in five years, he says). They are indeed the sort of tight post-punk unit (recalling Lush) that I think deserves nothing but admiration, and with enough listens this song might become part of my every waking moment.

--Echo & The Bunnymen, “Stars Are Stars”
If they’d been American, this is the band Ray Manzarek would have been producing in 1980, and there’s a particularly American type of longing and wide-openness in this one.

--Oasis, “Cigarettes & Alcohol”
This is just one of the great boozy and drawled out vocals ever recorded, and the song is such a simple rock ‘n’ roll jam (no great feat for Oasis) that nothing keeps Liam from owning it. I was looking for some akk-shee-un...

--Basement Jaxx, “Always Be There”
A lot of electronic dance music asks you to rearrange your mind like a computer, but the best creates its own headspace, an enchanted land of the interior, that has nothing to do with the technology that made it. Basement Jaxx tap into that pretty effortlessly.

--Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
God, anything to banish this wintry fog and gloom! Even if this song is about the disappointments and regrets of a life lived small, DeMent’s voice is so winning, as some of my readers know, that she never sounds like she’s letting herself feel low about her situation (pluck, I think they call it).

State of the Blog

Who is this blog for? What kind of post is best? Where do we go from here? (I had a horrible dream where Patrick Wolf died and I decided I couldn’t go on with this anymore.) I don’t intend to answer any of those questions, except perhaps implicitly by saying: I could easily accomplish everything I do here with a Twitter account, as this blog is only my way of keeping track of my ceaseless opinionating and I feel no inclination to be elaborate in my comments (I think I’ve said that before). Ergo, I thought it might be nice from time to time to forgo my omnibus posts (which directly reflect the way I make sense of the world) and, for the sake of my readers, post something more self-contained and particular (i.e. twitter one tweet at a time). Well, the albums that made me who I am today are well known to my readers, I think, but there are also many lists of albums that have influenced me over the years, so here’s a list of some of those:

a) Spin Top 20s, 1996-1999; Top 90 of the 90s; Spin.com Top 20, 2000; Spin Alternative Record Guide Top 100

I couldn’t choose just one, proof that Spin was the ultimate tastemaker of the 1990s. I’ve still got those 90s Top 20s, all beautifully laid out on two pages, bravely ranking Cornershop above Radiohead, putting Elliott Smith and OutKast side by side, championing Imperial Teen and Local H. I wasn’t interested in the mag’s 2000 list (and its gimmicky #1) but the much different one published on Spin.com was totally awesome, almost perfect. I can't find it on the 'net, but I remember it well: pushing bands that would go on to become my favorites of the decade (Idlewild, The Delgados); ahead of its time in recognizing a new Swedish scene (Starlet); praising the continued and renewed greatness of Primal Scream and The Go-Betweens. And then there’s that mythic record guide, which I never owned but pored over at the store anytime I got a chance.

b) Alternative Press Top 99, 1985-1995

I never had the issue, but found the list on the very handy Rock List site, and it became my buying guide for most of my teen years. It comes closer to expressing an idea of the ultimate musical canon than I could ever come myself. This is still the music I care most about.

c) The Big Takeover: Jack’s Top 40s; “Desert Island” Top 200; Top 700 (!) 1976-1989

I started with issue 45, and by the time Jack went off about Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows two issues later (also enthusiastic that Spin had just given the album, still an import, an enthusiastic 9/10), I was slavishly devoted. I don’t think I ever stopped to consider that my experience of the music he championed had to be different from the experience of Jack himself, punk and post-punk historian par excellence who lived through all of it. But he has a way of communicating the experience of a life in music in his writing, leaving you with a shared love of the music.

d) Noise from the Underground: A Secret History of Alternative Rock by Pat Blashill, Michael Lavine: suggested listening

The major draw of the book is Lavine’s grunge-era photography (recently given a more lavish retrospective in the ironically/appropriately titled Grunge). The listener’s guide in the back overlaps greatly with the Alternative Press list, but this book, pre-Azerrad, was the first time I’d seen such a discography tucked inside a narrative, and it totally beguiled me.

e) Ned Raggett’s Top 136 of the 90s

This one formed no part of my upbringing, but I was recently indirected to it on the internets and was struck by Raggett’s awesome taste (i.e. its similarity to my own). The list was linked from a piece Raggett wrote for Stylus’ retrospective of the most recent decade in music, for which he declined to provide a list. His premise in the article is that there are two ways to interact with culture, to observe and to proclaim, and he no longer has any interest in doing the latter.

I thought about this in terms of the future of my blog, but the only two choices such a distinction leaves me are to cease and to continue. I hope to one day achieve Raggett’s serenity of mind, which will probably allow me to hear more clearly the music I love, but right now I feel an unhealthy compulsion to continue. At least until Patrick Wolf dies. Which I hope I have averted by the very suggestion.

In summary: lists can often seem pretty soulless. For any subset of the near-infinite number of albums that exist, there are countless permutations, so what makes the lists mentioned above so important? I guess they came along at the right time. They wouldn’t have meant much if I’d already known all the albums they mention. But if you can believe it, I feel an emotional attachment to the permutations offered by Spin and AP. Those lists read like stories to me.

Umbrella Guru

I don't know what to do with any of this:

I’d like to hear a mashup of Captain Beefheart’s “Ella Guru” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” Although I don’t like mashups, especially ones that try to level pieces of music that have nothing to do with one another.

When writing fiction, my only two choices are autobiographical and dreamlike. Lately I feel called to write a novel about a sharecropper who concocts an impossible plan to sneak away with the entirety of his farm into the night, inspired by a dream I had in glorious black-and-white. More glorious than Citizen Kane, I swear!

I had another dream where my sister and I were driving down a crazy mountain road (really, it was more like driving along some high fashion garment) and despite the fog and deep snow (both at once?) she claimed she could see fine. Mom pointed out (in real life) that perhaps she will develop x-ray vision if she ends up getting Lasik surgery. A sensible connection that I would never have thought of.

I’ve kind of always wanted a family I could more easily disappoint: domineering parents who demand I become a lawyer and who cut off the trust fund while I fail to become a writer and travel the country searching out erotic adventures. Or something.

There are a surprising number of songs about being 22, but the best will always be Neil Young’s “Powderfinger.”

Do people have a genetic predisposition to preferring either fiction or non-fiction?

There was an anniversary issue of Box Office at my work that reprinted pieces from the magazine’s 90 year history. A 1929 piece about The Broadway Melody was included, and it struck me as the ideal movie review about an ideal type of movie. With great modesty (essentially disclaiming his or her writeup as entirely irrelevant), the reviewer treated what is nothing more than a big show as, yes, a big show, noting the number of skilled individuals who worked on the production and whose talents are on display. Plus, a story thrown in for good measure, but nothing that coheres, or should try to. I’ll type it up if the issue ever reappears at work.

I live for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, so tonight is a very momentous night for me. I posited his cancellation as a defeat for young people on the order of Proposition 8, which I still believe.

Of those residents of the twentieth century who escaped war, poverty, and oppression, it will be said that they ruined it for the rest of us, but also that no one in the history of the world ever had it better.

I’ve realized I prefer neither the town nor the country, only that I don’t like them in combination. In a true city, where nature has been eradicated, one can pretend it’s always been that way, and concrete is natural. But a cluster of houses on the side of a hill is a sad reminder. (In Of Time & The City, Terence Davies says something about there being no vitality stronger than decay. Well, that’s maybe because we don’t think of decay as having intention, but if it does, a well-run city is a place where one is not often aware of a battle being waged.)

Newsweek says there might be a partisan divide over science (Conclusion: Conservatives distrust intelligent people, facts). I wonder if there is a similar divide among people who grow up as horror fans and those who grow up science fiction fans. Assuming all these people become film critics, do the former develop a stronger theoretical engagement with film, and the latter a stronger emotional one?

A bad new ‘tween punk album will be called Wake Up Get Up Grow Up Give Up.

Zadie Smith says of the Zadie Smith who wrote White Teeth a decade ago: “I find her idea of the novel oppressive, alien, useless.” I find this heartening for a couple reasons: (1) I thought I was the only one who thought that about White Teeth; (2) It suggests that progress is possible.

Vanity Fair says that Norman Rockwell has been routinely underrated, but does the fact that art critics ignore him really count? The man is beloved, and rightly so. Anyway, the article is good, and I shouldn’t complain because indeed Rockwell could never be rated highly enough.

2009, Pt. 2

WAREHOUSE

Never publish a top ten 'til your warehouse is full.

SONGS

Atlas Sound, Logos : As musicians go, Bradford Cox strikes me as a real artist, someone who never tries to conceal his determination to use the raw materials of his trade to sketch out the contours of his brain. My notion is reinforced by the way he makes his music available to the public: a steady stream of fragments, sketches, ideas, historical documents, free of charge, and then, a couple times a year, the real deal, for which he expects the patronage of his ardent admirers. Logos is, in my estimation, a major work among his major works so far. I’m waiting for July to soak in the full weight of aching summerstrum “Criminals”; non-seasonal “Quick Canal” is the album’s masterpiece, and produces in me the same feeling I felt when I first heard DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing. To correct a previous blog post: I realize that feeling has nothing to do with closeness to death and more to do with eternal life. Call it Elevation (an emotion proposed by Roger Ebert that I redefine here for my own purposes): the immutable promise of mysteries lying in wait. (4.5/5)

Girls, Album : I like albums like this for how they show that, in some ways, life goes on the same as before, and that there are still young people who need songs like this, and who won’t settle for the way they were played generations ago (by Big Star, and others). I’ve begun to respond to this in a major way—in the contest between last year’s great rejuvenators, I strangely prefer this (ever so slightly) to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, whose accomplishments and themes are similar but whose inspirations are different. Music like this seems to say, “Relate…or die,” and while I only relate to some of it, and in a sort of automatic way, I am also struck by the breadth of Girls’ talents and the variety of the songs: a tangled Pavement-y jam here, a gentle noise-soaked lullaby there. And here I am mentioning Pavement, who originated nothing either, except their own brand of awesomeness. Last, I was going to say that the drumbeat on “Ghost Mouth” (as popularized by “Then He Kissed Me” and later, “Just Like Honey”) must be retired from rock music, or used a lot more so that it becomes as general as waltz time. But it’s perfect here, part of the way Girls take on every rock ‘n’ roll staple and break its hidden heart. (4.5/5)

The xx, xx : I already knew this was great background music, and had reason to believe it was also great foreground music. Surprise: It is! Early reviews, littered as they were with RIYLs, gave me no indication of what this would actually sound like. Here’s my own imperfect analogy: It’s a good and proper update of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds for the post trip-hop era. A lot of bands sound like The Cure recently, but only The xx seem to recall that they were essentially a very minimal band. The interlocking guitar and bass on xx, muted and melodic, is the essence of good taste. (4/5)

The Mary Onettes, Islands : A lighter set from my favorite pop romantics of the day. At first I wondered if they hadn’t brought what they brung on their debut, but then decided they’ve merely bringed something different, and less heavy. (4/5)

I’ve also been trying to hear at least one song by as many of 2009’s blog buzz bands as possible. So far, I especially love jj (soundtrack to a Swedish pillow rave), Wild Beasts (British sophistopop on the verge of going mad), and Neon Indian (70s AM radio + excessive pitchbend).

It’s a shame that no one heard The Sleepover Disaster’s Hover last year, but if the strength of “Scarlet Fields” is any indication, The Horrors’ Primary Colours has some of the same qualities to recommend it, and NME named it album of the year.

STORIES

--Film after film in 2009 asked us to “accept the mystery” (none more so than the year’s pre-eminent religious thriller, A Serious Man) and Tulpan, which asks us to accept the mystery of our animal stewardship, is one of the best. I was awed by just about everything in Tulpan, nothing more so than the way it frames its animals, shows them as so noble and so vulnerable, and forces us to realize the wonderful and heavy burden we’ve taken on in our decision to use them and care for them. The result is cinema as pure as the Coens’ experiments in control, but so much more improbable because there is so much in front of the camera that is beyond the filmmakers’ direct control. One sequence, involving an injured camel, its protective mother, and a brokedown motorcycle—somehow, unbelievably—plays out like clockwork. The way the animals—especially the sheep—behave nearly like actors helps the viewer set aside ethical considerations about how the animals are being used, and fears that they might be in danger. Because the results are so assured, the process must be equally so.

--I’d be unable to explain The Limits of Control without overusing the word “reality,” so I’ll keep it brief: I declare this film to be about the relationship between bohemianism and reality. The relationship is a harmonic and not discordant one, it turns out, though the evil Bill Murray believes otherwise. It’s a ponderous and not always very interesting movie with an ultimately simple message: abstract art is good.

--Roger Ebert has called Jason Reitman the “hope of the cinema,” but I didn’t quite believe it until I saw Up in the Air, which makes his previous two features seem even better in hindsight. Because: This guy’s a real director, and Up in the Air is the most relevant, confidently told, and classically Hollywood movie in a while.

--Pirate Radio could do without its governmental subplot—after all, why show authority and the rebels against authority, while only fleetingly showing the souls they are fighting for? But the faulty plotting doesn’t distract from a movie that would be perfectly wonderful without any plotting whatsoever. How has anyone overlooked the total awesomeness of some of this movie’s best moments? I never suspected director Richard Curtis was capable of such naturalism and sublime human comedy, and he’s also skilled in the way he gradually reveals the hopeless sadness of some of the film’s very cool rock ‘n’ roll DJs. One burnout audiophile makes a desperate grab for his favorite records during an underwater LP sleeve ballet, and moments later, fellow rock-critic-schlub-to-be Philip Seymour Hoffman goes down with the boat as he broadcasts “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” a moment as full of dread and pathos and clinging-to-beauty as anything in Titanic. Then he flies out of the sea (literally!) like a rock ‘n’ roll messiah, and the film ends with a montage of hundreds of record covers that suggests the filmmaker’s understanding of the evolution and parameters of rock. Sweet.

--In the aforeblogged I Remember, Joe Brainard’s memories, as they accumulate, suggest a humanity both general and particular, but there are also times when one is struck with the burden of remembering. By the time he gets to hairstyles and popular songs, it becomes clear just how much there is in life that might easily be forgotten, and that the important things are no more safely stowed in our brains than the trivial. There are moments like that in The Headless Woman, a movie as silent and undramatic as a dream, and some of them, like a family wedding video on fast forward, are absolutely disorienting if you try to let yourself into the head of the titular woman. She suffers amnesia after an automobile accident, but it’s unclear throughout whether she’s a victim of head trauma or some subtler unmooring of long-suppressed anxieties. Spooky.

--When analyzing foreign films (i.e. films from foreign lands and foreign times), 90% of the work must be an attempt to understand what an audience from the same time and place as the filmmakers would recognize instantly. Jia Zhang-Ke (in certain circles, the most celebrated filmmaker of the past 10 years) is my main line to contemporary China, and he’s made a hyper-relevant and heartbreaking movie called 24 City that any citizen of the planet ought to see. Some might see it and recognize China as it is today; I watched it as an outsider, and found it an educational as well as emotional experience, and fairly out of the ordinary in its method, but never as inscrutable as it could be (like the work of Zhang-Ke’s fellow brilliant intellectual celeb Apichatpong Weerasethakul, from Thailand).

If you have a sense of the Chinese people as a mass of the faceless and nameless, here you will see a filmmaker asserting the primacy of the individual while showing characters struggling in an overcrowded world. If you wonder how China can maintain a sense of its history in the midst of massive industrial and economic expansion, here you will see that the Chinese wonder this too, and that they’ve had many losses and some gains (it’s all in the film’s title). We have these same problems in America too, but they rarely show up in our films. 24 City proceeds as a series of interviews, or, more accurately, beautifully written monologues, and it chronicles a China that has progressed from a nation of self-sacrifice to a nation where people have begun to recognize they deserve better. I don’t know if that’s the real China, but in the world of the film, it’s a convincing one.



More 2009 coming soon, almost certainly.

I Remember

I’ve been reading Joe Brainard’s I Remember, which ranks among Frans Masereel’s The City and the Up documentaries as one of those wonderful singular things that says so much about the mystery of existence without really telling us it’s doing that. I Remember is a 167-page list of remembrances (experiences real and imagined, wisdom learned, both true and false), told with such economy and clarity that it’s impossible to mistake the contexts of Brainard’s remembering. I’ve been thinking much about the book’s form (Should Brainard be celebrated for originating the form, or for perfecting it? Would any book in this style emanate such silent joyousness and sadness, or is that particular to Brainard’s life?) in relation to its content, but mostly I’ve been compelled to try some of my own remembering. Here’s a brief sample of my life, following the Brainard template:


I remember a piece of tissue in my room that I was always meaning to throw away. I remember when I finally did.

I remember layaway.

I remember hi-speed dubbing.

I remember “turn your head and cough” and not doing it right.

I remember wetting the bed. I remember the heavy warmth of the blanket.

I remember thinking I could pee away an erection.

I remember show and tell.

I remember showing two chess pieces carved by my dad. I don’t remember what I told.

I remember a cat’s toy koala.

I remember a sky green with lightning.

I remember Paula Cole and “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone.”

I remember daydreams of creating a fanzine and leaving it at grocery stores.

I remember daydreams of taking trips to my friends’ hometowns.

I remember being really good at math (People still assume I majored in it).

I remember my second-grade teacher’s very large birthmark.

I remember winning an award and being taken out for ice cream by my second-grade teacher.

I remember Gleaming The Cube, and life’s mysteries lying in wait.





More posts very soon (numerous).

Gay!

I was going to do a list of my favorite movies of the decade, but the two I feel most strongly about are Mysterious Skin and Bad Education, so here instead is a list of the 25+ best gay movies of the decade.

1. Mysterious Skin
The coexistence of pedophiles and homosexuals in the same movie is always discomfiting, but this movie is uncommonly wise about the many modes of existence it circumscribes. It draws no obvious connections between its childhood traumas and adult miseries, but shows a collection of people whose only healthy relationships are friendships, and tries to understand why they’ve become the way they are. And what meaningful, sustaining friendships this movie contains.

2. Bad Education
There are pedophiles and homosexuals in this one too, but because this is an Almodovar film, they are swirled into an audio-visual movie-reverie about the ability of the characters to manage their demons while collaborating to make audio-visual movie-reveries. Almodovar is not often interested in the world of men, but when he is, he finds them as cinematic as his women.

3. Milk
I love Gus Van Sant’s insistence on making his characters gay when nothing requires them to be straight (like in Elephant). This one’s not like that though. Milk enacts in its story what the other films on this list enact in the method of their telling. Milk does the latter too.

4. Brokeback Mountain
In a way, Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock strikes me as a better gay movie, but probably just because it wasn’t marketed as one, and because it’s not one. People wrote about Brokeback Mountain as if it was the first time they’d ever seen two men in love, and indeed it is so good that it can feel like the first time you’ve ever seen two people in love.

5. The Hours
The correspondence between the scarcity of female directors and the scarcity of serious lesbian-themed movies can’t be an accident. Here’s an eminently serious one, directed by a man from a book by a man, that still manages to make men seem completely irrelevant: its male characters are losers and queers, while its female characters make the tough choice to kiss other women, for complicated reasons. Let me also mention the other Michael Cunningham adaptation of the decade, A Home at the End of the World, which along with The Fortress of Solitude taught me everything I need to know about mutual masturbation (like how 75% of those who engage in it are straight). Plus, Daldry’s Billy Elliot, which tells us nothing of its protagonist’s sexuality and becomes a triumph of the spirit for children of all persuasions.

6. Shortbus
In hindsight, Hedwig & The Angry Inch marks the rapid shedding of whatever inhibitions John Cameron Mitchell had to begin with. Shortbus is human sexuality unleashed, which means it is also, because of its honesty, exceedingly polite, proper, and cute.

7. Show Me Love
When released as Fucking Amal in Sweden in 1998, it outgrossed Titanic to become that country’s all-time biggest seller (as if we didn’t already know Sweden is a liberal paradise). When released in America under the name of the Robyn song that plays during the credits, the timing was unfortunate: 2000 was the nadir of teen-oriented cinema in the US, and nobody wanted a good teen movie.

8. Far From Heaven
Unsubtle as Douglas Sirk’s films are, there’s much in them that can be reclaimed, and Todd Haynes does a great job of that here. I’ve called him a primarily academic director whose movies are also dramatically interesting and plausible. This one favors the drama, and it’s sensational.

9. Tropical Malady
The object of desire: his charms are indefinable. He has no movie star attractiveness or charisma, but he’s captivating, and that makes him a rare sort of character. He’s sort of like one of Flannery O’Connor’s awkward seduced farm girls. But in the second half he’s revealed to be the seducer.

10. Chuck & Buck
I’m getting tired of writing these comments. Just imagine me shouting “Gay!” after each new title.

11. Tarnation

12. Angels In America

13. Capote

14. Breakfast On Pluto

15. Kinsey
Questionnaire as barometer of the self.

16. Bruno

17. Of Time & The City

18. Best In Show
The love story that develops in this one nearly makes it a plausible human drama (like Bruno, Lutz and OJ in #16).

19. The Deep End
Tilda Swinton’s in it, but because it’s not directed by Derek Jarman or Sally Potter, that’s not the reason gay men will love it. Instead, her son has a secret!

20. Mulholland Dr.
Weird as David Lynch’s movies are, his sexual politics have never progressed much beyond antiquated-yet-ironic. Here’s the ultimate “lesbianism for the sake of the male viewer” movie.

21. The Eyes of Tammy Faye / Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film / Michael Jackson’s This Is It
Three documentaries about three gay icons, two of them artists with vastly confused sexualities, and one of them a televangelist, of course.

22. I Love You, Man / Old Joy / Humpday
A bromance continuum. The characters don’t have much in common, but what really sets these movies apart is how far the directors (2/3 female) are willing to push them in the pursuit of love: hangin’ out, erotic massage, attempted sex, respectively.

23. 3:10 To Yuma / The Road To El Dorado
Ben Foster plays Charlie Prince as one of the great homicidal repressed homosexuals, but there’s nothing in Yuma remotely as gay as the fan fiction it has inspired. The Road To El Dorado plays like fan fiction, and it’s amazing Disney got away with such an obvious unrequited love story.

24. De-Lovely
Merely a placeholder for A Single Man, which I haven’t seen. If you’re having trouble reconciling that film’s promise of grief and despair with De-Lovely, it’s because the latter was advertised as a good times Cole Porter revue, when in fact it’s one of the most sour and dispiriting tales of a lonely and unfulfilled man I’ve ever seen.

25. Whatever Works
You can’t have a list of gay movies without an appearance by Woody Allen. Oh wait, you can, but here’s a surprise: the only remotely gay movie Allen has ever made.

Plus three I didn’t much care for that are sort of redeemed by their gayness:
-Y Tu Mama Tambien : It’s amazing that an audience of straight male film critics was able to understand the terminal protagonist’s decision to go driving around with two boys who are repulsive and annoying in all but the physical sense.
-Alexander : The best eye-shadow movie of the decade.
-The Descent : No hot cave sex? The restraint is admirable.


True Grit remains my favorite gay movie of all time. I hope the Coens don’t turn it into a straight movie.


And, because I can’t resist, my other favorite movies (gay, straight, lesbian, overweight, whatever) of the decade: George Washington, Ghost World, Waking Life, Panic Room, Lilya 4-ever, Lost In Translation, The Triplets Of Belleville, Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow, Me & You & Everyone We Know, Children Of Men, Marie Antoinette, I’m Not There, Wendy & Lucy. Those 13, plus #1 and 2 on the list.

And: Roger Ebert still has great taste, even if it's recently been obscured under a shroud of four stars.