Five weeks til summer.
Voyage in Italy wasn't all that exciting. Maybe it would have been
terrific fifty years ago, but I'm pretty sure more subtle,
complex, and better films about married relationships have been made
since then, probably many of them.
Code Unknown was pretty good. I liked the slightly disjointed
feel, but I couldn't tell what the film might have been like with more
traditional editing, maybe just as good? Who knows.
City Pages has their Best of 2004
feature up at their website. I don't think there were many big changes from
last year, at least in the categories that I paid attention to.
This evening I will make a second attempt to get tickets for My
Morning Jacket. Apparently Marshall Field's and Mervyn's stores sell
tickets for the Quest Club, at least according to the information
available by phone from the Quest, so I might stop there.
I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn this weekend. I have a good start on it, so hopefully I can finish before work piles up too high again.
After a layoff of some time, I've begun adding songs to my
collection again from the record library. As of this moment, 9851 and
counting.
The Observer has its own, unavoidably idiosyncratic, timeline of rock, just now reaching 50 years.
Disney blocks Michael Moore film on Bush links with leading Saudis
La Strada I'm not feeling very expressive at the moment.
Down by Law Roberto Benigni was hilarious. It seemed like the
film would have been sort of dead without him, but maybe the other two
fugitives would have gained more appeal in his absence.
Motherless Brooklyn I couldn't put it down!!! Amazing!!! Detective crime-solving action!!! Tourette's!!!
Il Posto A satirical office comedy that I thought was terrific.
The Circle Yes, it was heavy-handed in parts, like where the
women complain that you can't go anywhere without a man, even though
that has been clearly shown a number of times in the film, but it was
also a great trip through the streets of Tehran looking at the
underprivileged (women here sort of like the economic underclass was
featured in Crimson Gold). I liked how Panahi connected the
stories of his characters by bringing them together in close physical
proximity, suggesting that they formed a community even if they didn't
actually know each other. Now I have to see The White Balloon.
Also, I'm thinking that a database of literary reviews and
information in the vein of All Music Guide, All Movie Guide, iMDB, or
Rotten Tomatoes would be great. Maybe it already is great, but I
haven't found it.
Furthermore, I can't turn down Pedro the Lion at Gabe's Oasis on July 2, once again assuming I'm in Iowa this summer.
Mr. Rumsey says to read about digital information overload, and the people attempting to do something about it
Using my Spun.com credit left over from Winter Break as well as some money I hope I'm able to spend, I have ordered The Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera along with Frank Black's Teenager of the Year,
both double albums. Reading about them reminded me of the fact that
critics are simply not able to write anything about double albums
without using the term "sprawling". Seriously, it's a natural law.
Also, I'm really enjoying Mission of Burma's self-titled compilation from 1988.
I found Big Fish to be contemptible. Not only were most of
its fantastic stories pointless and ultimately uninteresting, the main
premise seemed to be that if you ignore the truth long enough it will
be replaced by a more palatable and interesting version of events. The
"real" characters were a complete waste of time. Neither the son, his
wife, nor his mother had a shred of personality. The father could have
been intriguing if once he had even once wrestled with any of his
failings as a father or husband, but the movie never even reached that
basic level of complexity.
Even worse, Burton decided that rather than add any character or
depth to the story, he'd just substitute cliche and pap. So we get the
son who is estranged from his father and needs to come to terms before
the older man's death. The understanding companion who tries to help
him see the beauty in his flawed father. The wise old black man who
helps the main character achieve a necessary insight. Perhaps Burton
knew what a weak film he'd made and thus decided to wallop the audience
with melodrama at the end, which seemed effective but only served to
prove how dishonest and disturbingly effective the cinema can be in
attempting to convey vacuous nothing as some sort of moral triumph,
especially if you're not paying close attention.
A.O. Scott hits the nail squarely on its head in the New York Times
No offense intended to anyone with an opposing viewpoint, but my
reaction was strong enough that I felt it necessary to attempt to state
my case.
Edward Scissorhands, on the other hand, was pretty good. It followed a similar pattern to Dogville:
cautious acceptance, welcoming, and exploitation of the outsider,
followed by a period of disenchantment and finally a need to eliminate
that person from the community. Oddly enough, I don't recall ever
hearing that Edward Scissorhands was an anti-American movie,
but it's startlingly similar to von Trier's film in its criticism of
closedminded and xenophobic communities. I suppose Edward's monster-like
status made it more sensible for the community to develop a dislike for
him, but it's really no more acceptable here than the townspeople's
cruel treatment of Nicole Kidman in Dogville.
I loved Tim Burton's bizarro suburban hamlet all in solid pastels,
and the Avon lady idea was a great one. I didn't get much out of the
inventor scenes, and the heart-shaped cookie bit could have been
subtler, but overall I was okay with the melodrama, even the sappy and
not entirely necessary scenes with Winona Ryder as an old crone. It's a
lot harder to argue with sentimentalism when it's so well-done and fun
to watch. Alan Arkin didn't really do a whole lot as the father, but I
still enjoyed his slightly absent-minded performance quite a bit.
I agree with Roger Ebert that the characters are pretty weak, but
that didn't bother me so much here, and I guess I can't say why, but
that's how it is.
And I must thank Nick for tipping me off to William Bowers' amazing review of the White Stripes' first two albums.
So you don't have to...
I'd really enjoy seeing The Cure, Interpol, Mogwai, and The Rapture in Chicago on August 12.
Next year I will reside in Burton 313, which means I will finally be able to spend the entire weekend inside now. Score!
Today I completely forgot my record library hours and instead finished the math homework for Wednesday. How embarrassing.
On top of My Morning Jacket/M Ward, the Decemberists, and Guided by
Voices, this summer may also include Iron & Wine, depending on
whether or not I can make it to Chicago on July 2. I'm completely
willing to skip a much closer Pedro the Lion (AMG is excited about the new album) show since I saw him/them last November and haven't seen Sam Beam & co.
iTunes song #10,000: Dolorean "The Light Behind My Head"
Also, iTunes is now up to version 4.5, which means that I can't listen to anyone's shared music if they use less than 4.5.
Thanks to a long shift in the post office and some time in the library after class, I managed to finish Martin Amis' Money.
It included an astonishingly disgusting narrator, a wild plot twist at
the end, and a lot of observations about money. Amis was also able to
write himself into the book, as a secondary character, and actually
voice some of the conflicts that arose for him while writing the book
within the text itself, which I thought was very clever. I assume that
it's impossible not to understand the author's ironic detachment from
the protagonist, but if you didn't the book would probably just be
creepy. By inserting himself into the narrative, Amis seems to make an
even more concerted effort to show that the protagonist is not him. I
wonder how long I can keep up this trend of reading books during the
term. I suppose until I have to write two research papers and take
finals at the end of the term. Probably about that long.
India elects a new government. Also, the Guardian analyzes India's democracy.
Tonight I managed the first screening of The Blackboard Jungle for Film Society. It's dated, but not irreconcilably so.
I also watched Before the Revolution for class. I didn't mind the Godard and New Wave references or techniques, and enjoyed the experience a lot more than Accattone, which was almost painful. In addition, many comparisons can be made between this film and The Dreamers, even though they were made 40 years apart.
Fog is coming to the Cave on Friday.
Tomorrow afternoon, 5/15: Distant at Bell Auditorium, 5 pm.
Let's hope that tonight is the last frost advisory for a few months.
According to All Movie Guide, Field of Dreams is the only movie set in an Iowa cornfield.
Tonight's radio show [see the playlists] is going to make a good mixtape once I replace Secret
Machines through the Buzzcocks with the Pet Shop Boys version of
"Always on My Mind." Removing that many songs should mean I won't have
to worry about staying under 80 minutes, which will be nice. Speaking
of "Which Will," I'm ambivalent about whether or not I should include
it here since it was the penultimate track on the last CD I made from a
show, which was at the end of last term. If you have an opinion, which
would be surprising, you should tell me what I should do about the Nick
Drake song.
Distant was great as expected, although the bleak skies outside and the fact that I was by myself made leaving the Bell a little eerie.
I couldn't help but feel that Fog's show last night was a little
uninspired. It's not that the music was really that divergent from
what's on his albums, but everything just felt a little dead or boring.
It could have been the crowd or the atmosphere or whatever, it's hard
to say. At any rate, I did pick up both of Andrew Broder's Modern Hits
EPs.
So today in the post office I picked up Granta magazine,
not knowing what to expect. The fiction was pretty much all terrific.
Probably my favorite was the piece by J. Robert Lennon, but "A
Religious Conversion" by Orhan Pamuk was also quite good.
Having excoriated Big Fish about a week ago, I realized that
perhaps it would be necessary to state that I am not against escapism
in general. The case in point is Heavenly Creatures, a fine
example of cinematic escapism if there ever was one. I watched it last
summer. It's about two adolescent Australian girls who create their own
fantasy world which the film's special effects allow them to inhabit,
at least part of the time. It is their way of dealing with the
realities of daily life which would otherwise depress them to no end.
That the end is horrific and brutal really has no bearing on my point,
which is that I thought Heavenly Creatures was terrific because
while it showed how useful escape and fantasy can be in dealing with
life, it didn't pretend that the mundanity of the world would disappear
if one simply refused to believe in it, which I felt was Tim Burton's
major fault in Big Fish.
Also, I have come up with what I think will be an interesting topic
for my Sociology paper due at the end of the term. I have not explored
the topic of Queueing Theory to any extent yet for Stochastic
Processes, and the test will be handed out tomorrow. Even with what
could be a large amount of work ahead, this still looks to be one of
the easiest year-end stretches in recent memory.
And you were wondering what next year is going to look like. Well, something like this:
Fall
Topics in Numerical Analysis 4A
Cyberculture: Digital Seeing and Surveillance 5A
Intro to Video Production 6A (first five weeks)
Winter
Combinatorial Theory 4A
Math Comps Presentation 6A
Media Theory and Analsyis 2,3C
Spring
Applied Regression Analysis -or- Topics in Combinatorics 2A
Math Comps Exam 6A
Hitchcock/Bergman (TBA, but hopefully not also 2A)
I just discovered the Hitchcock/Bergman class, and am quite excited
about it. I was thinking about either a class on French/German cinema
or one on the avant-garde, but I can't imagine enjoying any film class
offered at Carleton more than one on Hitchcock and Bergman (the
Kubrick/Scorsese class would not be quite as great because I'm not all
that into Scorsese). Plus it's being taught by Vern Bailey, who has
been teaching longer than film studies has existed and used to hobnob
with Jean Renoir. His Capra/Wilder class had no exams or papers longer
than a single page. Also, since he is nearly as old as Scoville, he is
free to be a cantankerous as he wants, which makes for a great time in
class.
So, it'll be 9 credits the first half of each term and 6 credits the
second, which will make midterms kind of rough (well, really about the
same as they were this year), but should make finals pretty easy.
I didn't list 8 1/2 among the best films I watched last
summer, when I made up such a list. This time through it seemed like
about the greatest thing I'd ever seen. So much of Fellini's internal
dialogue, which actually makes up most of the external dialogue in the
movie, resonated with me in a way it didn't seem to last time. Perhaps
it's because everything seems to take much longer the first time, and
so I didn't get bogged down waiting for something special to happen
this time around because I was already prepared for what was, and
wasn't, coming. I can't even really say what my favorite part was,
except for maybe the entire last hour, the cutoff point being
approximately when Guido's wife spots his mistress and he launches into
a fantasy sequence that turns against him. Hooray for awkwardly titled
movies!
Roger Ebert from Cannes:
Is it true that Billy Bob Thornton was drunk during most of
his scenes for "Bad Santa," the Terry Zwigoff film that plays Tuesday
in the festival? (It opened in the States last year.)
"Absolutely," Thornton told me as we did a Q&A session at the
American Pavilion. "There's one scene where I'm supposed to arrive late
to work as Santa Claus, with a cut face, holding a broken bottle. I get
to the top of the escalator where all the kiddies are waiting and
attack a papier-mache donkey.
"Well, I had overprepared for the scene, let's say, and I was
supposed to wait at the bottom of the escalator until the director
said, 'Action!' Then a crew member would start the escalator. I laid
down on the steps and went to sleep, the escalator started, I didn't
know a thing and I arrived upstairs, still passed out."
The actor said he rarely drinks on the job, "but this role seemed to call for it."
The new mix CD is finished. The final tracklist goes something like this:
Part I
A. Fog "Pneumonia"
B. Fog "What a Day Day"
C. Do Make Say Think "Frederica/War on Want [edit]"
D. My Morning Jacket "At Dawn"
E. Neil Young "Campaigner"
F. M. Ward "Helicopter"
Part II
A. M. Ward "Let's Dance"
B. Fog "Under a Anvil Tree"
C. The Mountain Goats "Jenny"
D. Richard Thompson "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"
E. Willie Nelson "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"
Part III
A. Willie Nelson/Pet Shop Boys "Always on My Mind"
B. Joy Division "Digital"
C. Joy Division "Atmosphere"
D. Death Cab for Cutie "Transatlanticism"
E. Nick Drake "Place to Be"
F. Cat Power "Colors and the Kids"
I spliced "Always on My Mind," reordered Part II, and switched the
Nick Drake song to something I didn't use on my last mix CD. I also did
a much better job of volume leveling, mostly because in the car it's
impossible to hear anything not mixed very loudly. I'd say there's less
ambitious crossfading here, but what does take place works pretty well.
I haven't yet decided if want to make myself a schoolyear retrospective
this June or not. I suppose time will tell.
Posted on May 20, 2004
Last Thursday's My Morning Jacket performance was a wonderfully
life-affirming event full of monster riffs, beautiful reverberating
vocals, and on-stage exuberance. They've been consistently terrific the
three times I've seen them in the past thirteen months, and losing two
members since their last performance has done nothing to diminish their
power on stage. Here is what I had to say [slightly edited] for History
of Rock class last Fall about My Morning Jacket's live performance:
The average hair length of the band is well below the shoulders,
somewhere in the middle of the back, with moustaches or beards
accompanying. The most consistent image is that of incredible masses of
hair flying around and through the air as the band, especially James,
jumps around on stage in time with the music. The vision of these big
hairy guys jumping around and playing their hearts out signifies the
utter lack of irony or emotional distance between the band and crowd.
Essentially, everybody is there to lose themselves in the music; the
band by playing and the audience by listening, but they're flip-sides
of the same coin.
The sound is, of course, the essence of the concert experience and
why everybody is here in the first place. The most notable thing about
the music is the reverb. My Morning Jacket records in silos and barns
in addition to doing all sorts of other things to create their sound.
Here is Jim James in CMJ on their signature sound: "The only way I can
explain it [the reverb] that might make sense is that it's kind of like
almost becoming a superhero or something. To me, reverb is the
difference between heaven and Earth... It just makes me feel right." He
is sort of like a superhero on stage: pulling down supernatural forces
from above and sharing them with us mortals on Earth. With the generous
amount of reverb he uses, every note James sings in falsetto sounds
magical and otherworldly. This is most notable on the acoustic numbers.
The guitar has a healthy crunch reminiscent of Neil Young and pretty
much any good, loud country-rock group of the last 10 years.
The most important thing about My Morning Jacket's songs, on record
and in performance, is dramatic swell. The use of verse and chorus, as
well as alternating instrumental sections, is vital, because that's
what creates the tension and anticipation as the guitar gets louder and
louder playing a short little figure over and over, until the full band
explodes again, as everybody knows they will, and James approaches the
microphone to climax the build-up.
I feel like an unmusical fool trying to describe the actual musical
elements of My Morning Jacket's sound, but then again, so do most
critics. Nearly every review I've seen resorts to describing them as a
genre- and decade-spanning mishmash of the best that rock, country,
alt-rock, alt-country, Southern rock and indie rock have to offer.
Their power lies so obviously not in individual instrumental
virtuosity, nor the elegant lines of the melody, nor anything but the
huge, reverberating mass of sound that envelopes the audience for the
duration of the show. As I mentioned earlier, there is a complete lack
of artifice with My Morning Jacket. At all times they seem overjoyed to
be playing this music, just as much as the audience is to be hearing
and seeing it. Rather than producing a nice little line here and there
to catch the ear of the listener, they create an alternate reality with
their sound that band and audience enter into.
Last weekend I went home for a wedding which was nice in the way weddings usually are.
I finished my exam for Stochastic Processes. Now on to the final papers and then the final exams.
I will see the Decemberists next week; Max, Summer, Kevin, Sarah
Moody, and Dana Reinoos will also be there. I also saw today that John
Vanderslice will be accompanying Pedro the Lion in Iowa City on July 2,
so that's exciting.
Last night, the light in my room dimmed appreciably, so I filled out
a work request and it is already fixed. I'm glad I didn't have to
finish the year in the dark.
I've got Funny Ha Ha on loan from Ivan since I wasn't able to
make it to Film Society on Tuesday (Stochastic Processes exam). Also,
we are meeting Monday morning with the Cinema & Media Studies
department, where maybe I will find out how they can help Film Society
be the best ever next year! Or at least maybe they will be able to help
out with funding or something some time. Speaking of movies, would
anyone like to see The Agronomist on Saturday, June 6? I know I'm going to. I will be seeing at least Barbarian Invasions and Good Bye, Lenin! this summer at the Bijou Theater at the University of Iowa. It's not quite the Oak Street, but it's better than the mall.
Also, I'm helping Jack make a movie for one of his classes. In it, I
speak German and break a bottle over someone's head. Most of the time I
am standing around with a beer bottle in my hand taking abuse from
Charles Petersen.
I haven't really done much for my final papers yet, but at least
I've outlined what it is that I will need to do, and have researched
some sources for both. I'm still feeling good about them at this point.
I got a spam-looking email about "secret shopping" today, which
would really be about the greatest thing ever if I actually made
$150-400 per week. That, or I'll have to find some sort of job this
summer. I can't wait for summer to start. I'll be able to meticulously
refine the ID tags on each of my 10,622 songs (current tally). And
maybe if I make a boatload of money I'll be able to buy an iPod and new
speakers for my car, and a hookup so I can listen to the iPod in the
car on the new speakers.
Dirty Pretty Things was about immigrants in London and it was
good because the good guys were so good and the bad guys were so bad.
Even the really obvious speech at the end where Okwe explains the
plight of London's illegal immigrants was satisfying enough that it
felt like it needed to be included. I hadn't previously suspected that
Stephen Frears was the reason why High Fidelity was so good,
given that the cast was so funny/sympathetic and it was based on
something by Nick Hornby, but after seeing this movie I'm inclined to
seek out more of Frears' work since this film didn't have as many
factors in its favor, and I usually am hard on melodramas but I came
away liking it a lot anyway.
Funny Ha Ha felt strikingly true to life due the painfully
realistic dialogue and perhaps even more because of the awkward
personalities of the characters themselves. I'd cite the phone call
between Marnie and Alex as the point where I became completely
enthralled by the banality of the movie. I thought Ivan was just
bullshitting when he called it the "independent" film of the year, but
I have to say it was pretty great and the production values were
solidly low-budget all the way through. Not low-budget in an edgy way
or anything, but more in a way to remind viewers that films can be made
very well without a lot of extraneous stuff getting in the way. I'm
glad I managed to see it via special delivery.
That's right, I actually sat down and did some homework this
afternoon. According to my research, there is a pretty clear
correlation across a number of variables between level of education and
quality of life/outlook on life, even when taking race and income into
account. I'll do a minimal amount of research (I successfully
S/CR/NC'ed the class last week) and cook up some tables and statistics
to toss in there, and it'll be done in no time. Then I can get started
on researching queueing theory for math class. I'm still hoping I can
somehow do a simulation in which I go to McDonald's and attempt to
model the process of customers coming in and getting served using a
probabilistic model.
Also, Kevin is currently
going out in a blaze of glory on KRLX, and seems to have found the
Architecture in Helsinki album in the record libe. I think "Sleep the
Clock Around" is a solid choice for the final song; it was the first
Belle and Sebastian song I can recall getting stuck in my head.
I better come up with something clever by the time the end of spring
term comes around next year. Last year I ended with the last few tracks
from Source Tags & Codes, which was pretty terrific. Last
term I finished up with a pretty nice sequence with some crossmixing:
Interpol, Pedro the Lion, Nick Drake, and Sigur Ros.
Then this term I had a Do Make Say Think segment flow into my
favorite Brian Eno track followed immediately by a strikingly
similar-sounding track from Ratatat. I also put together a clever
little sequence which started with Jason Forrest's "10 Amazing Years"
(Ringo Starr drum sample), followed by the final chord from "A Day in
the Life" and "Her Majesty", then a track from DJ Danger Mouse's
Jay-Z/Beatles mashup, but the finale was VU's "Heroin" segueing into
most of a Keith Fullerton Whitman drone-fest. There really isn't
anything like the freakout/climax of "Heroin" for cathartic noise, in
my opinion, really anywhere in pop music. So anyway, hopefully next
year will be ten times better.
I've got Lou Reed & John Cale's collaboration Songs for Drella
on vinyl out from the record library at the moment and am really
enjoying it. It's got a ton of beautiful songs ("Hello It's Me" sounds
just like Reed's "Xmas in February" from New York, but it's so
haunting and perfect that it doesn't matter) and you can palpably sense
the loss and mourning these two feel for Andy Warhol, on whose memory
the album is based. I might have to make it a priority when browsing
used record stores in the near future.
Also, I finished The Great Gatsby today, so I'll need
something new on hand for dead time which is bound to arise during
finals week. My "books to read" list is at 154 and growing (smaller
than both my "albums to buy" and "movies to watch" lists), but you
should suggest something out of the blue anyway.
Speaking of the "books to read" list, I've had an impossible time
attempting to find a reliable online source for date of first
publication on books in general. Library catalogs (even the Library of
Congress) and Amazon.com will list the date of publication for the
particular item they have in stock, but not the original date, which I
would like to have for my list(s). You don't happen to know of such a
source, do you?