I don't know if you read Frank Rich's column in the Arts section of the New York times, but this week's is right on the money as always. The ending reminds of one of my favorite George W. Bush quotes: "Conservation does not mean we have to do without."
Charles, Max and I saw The Life Aquatic today. I enjoyed it, though I don't feel it had as many great characters as The Royal Tenenbaums. It focused more on the main character, played by Bill Murray, so the supporting actors were all less prominent.
I did think, though, that Anderson's movies split nicely into pairs. While his characters speak and act in the same quirky fashion in each, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are distinct from the latter two. The early films both focus on a young male (Luke Wilson and Jason Schwartzmann) in love with the wrong woman (a Spanish speaking motel maid and a schoolteacher, respectively). The later films feature an older man (Gene Hackman and Bill Murray) looking to reconcile himself with both his family and his personal and financial failings. Anjelica Huston plays the same role in both of the later movies. All four give the protagonist a sidekick: Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Kumar Pallana, in the first three. The Life Aquatic provides Murray with a host of sidekicks, including all of his crew, especially Klaus and Esteban, but also Ned, who is both partner and rival. The later two films also feature much more elaborate and stylized design including the costumes and the set design (the house in Tenenbaums and all the Team Zissou paraphernelia Aquatic).
I hope Wes Anderson continues to work in such an oddball mode, and except for some sort of life-changing disaster, it seems unlikely that he would "go straight." Beyond their surface eccentricity, his characters seem able to express very human and basic emotions through an uncommon bluntness, often a fight scene followed by admissions of personal failure, then reconciliation. They, like all movie heroes and heroines, achieve their objective, but in such a compromised fashion that all of his movies end in a state of gentle and oddly encouraging bemusement rather than true celebration.
The Guardian has an interactive Flash guide to the effects of the tsunami on the various Indian Ocean nations.
Well, friends, here is a wrap-up of 2004. I looked through my web archives and gleaned most of this from there.
The short list is the really terrific things, and the long list is good things that didn't make the short list because then the short list wouldn't mean anything. These are mostly new things or things I discovered for myself within the last year. Also, I didn't include things like "Friendship," and "Generosity," and "Free food," because that would be dumb and pathetic and you don't want to read that crap. If you require further explanation, see me; none will be provided here. The lists are not chronological nor ordered in any particular way. As with most things here, if you don't get it or don't agree, that's your fault.
Short List
"Waste of Paint," "Always on My Mind," "Girl from the North Country" at Bright Eyes + M. Ward + Jim James concert
William Bowers, esp. his essay on My Morning Jacket in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004
New Mexico (Arthur, the desert, etc.)
Motherless Brooklyn, and Lethem in general
Achewood
Radio
Barbarian Invasions
Songs for Drella from the record library
Love "Always See Your Face"
Nebraska
The fact that the Washington (IA) Public Library shows independent and foreign movies
Last Plane to Jakarta
Newsreaders
The Arcade Fire live
Oregon & California, esp. City Lights bookstore
Long List
iTunes/thousands of songs on a large hard drive
Kill Bill, Vol. 2
being 21
The Harper's Weekly Review
Curling
IMS Basketball Team
The Thermals
Dogville
The personality test I took that said I was 0% extroverted
Parties at which I feel comfortable, despite the above
That Camaro reformed as the Olympic Hopefuls, played the Cave and put out a very good album
City of God
Koyaanisqatsi/Philip Glass
Roberto Benigni in Down by Law
Il Posto
Money, by Martin Amis
Distant
Jack's movie
Out Hud
His Girl Friday
Before Sunrise/Before Sunset
Earplugs at shows
The End of the Affair
Minimalism
The Black Keys live
Galaxie 500
Being There
Aphex Twin
Interpol live
Lonesome Crowded West
Junior Boys "Teach Me How to Fight"
Panda Bear
Sideways
Zaireeka, for Rag P's birthday
The Kinks "Victoria"
Listening to The Futureheads debut three times in a row
Tarnation
PY article on Counting Crows
It was kind of inspiring to see all that was good about 2004, and makes me anticipate 2005 which should include more fundamental life changes like stopping my education and moving to a new place.
Continuing the retrospective theme, I finally pulled together what I wanted from the year-end lists. For both movies and music I ranked the lists from most to least essential. I like the lists at the bottom of each category, but they aren't as necessary as the ones at the top. Eventually I'll go through and try to find what I want to watch and listen to in early 2005, but that will probably be after several days.
The Village Voice and Film Comment polls are very similar, but the Voice is restricted to alternative publications, whereas Film Comment has a broader and more inclusive range, so that's why they're at the top and the Voice is at the bottom. I found the individual music lists from ArtForum and Pitchfork a lot more informative than the individual film lists, but that's because the film critics are covering a much narrower field, whether they'd care to admit it or not.
Enough looking backward, time to look forward to the rock shows the rest of the year will provide. You may note that I have updated the concerts page with six concerts for winter term and one for spring. In addition, I believe Jens Lekman will be appearing at the Cave, which is exciting.
I am most enthusiastic this term about the Thermals and the Futureheads. I saw Conor Oberst, Low, and Pedro the Lion last year, so I don't feel an urgent need to see them. I don't know much about the Scissor Sisters other than that they covered "Comfortably Numb," which I assume is better than Korn's worthless "Another Brick in the Wall," and that they made it onto a few year-end top ten lists. I'm guessing the Modest Mouse show will be very crowded, and knowing what it was like at the Interpol show last October, I'd rather not be smothered at First Avenue for hours on end unless I really have to.
Today I programmed the KRLX schedule for the last time. There weren't as many applications as I'd anticipated, but the schedule still filled up.
I was wishing this evening that someone would have made a list of great songs on terrible albums for 2004. This would be like a singles list, except that all the songs would have to be stuck on albums that aren't otherwise worthwhile.
I have been pursuing some sort of free blogging space for after graduation. Blogger seems like the most obvious, but it wouldn't surprise me if the merger between Six Apart (MovableType, TypePad) and LiveJournal resulted in something new and exciting.
Time: Midnight, Thursday evenings
Name of show: Marauding by Moonlight
Genre/Example Artists: Ambient, Post-Rock, Lo-Fi, Slowcore
Brief show description: My Morning Jacket, Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Belle and Sebastian, Pedro the Lion, Aphex Twin, Drive-By Truckers, Interpol, The Mountain Goats, The Thermals, Galaxie 500, Keith Fullerton Whitman, The Arcade Fire
I think I'll trade in my Burton single for one of these next term, ideally hanging somewhere in the lower Arboretum.
On Tuesday I went and saw me some House of Flying Daggers, since I was in the Twin Cities buying tickets. (Incidentally, I will almost certainly be going to the Thermals on the 29th, so let me know if you want in on that action.)
I'm really glad I saw this before it hit video, because the immersive color and design on the theater screen was fantastic. It was at the Lagoon and not, say, Southdale where it would have been overwhelming, but even so the pictures were impressive. There aren't that many locations depicted in the film, but they're all distinct.
We start out in the jail, where everything is dark gray. The uniforms, the halls, the cells, everything is gloomy and brooding. Then we move to the brothel which has ornately beautiful decorations on seeming every surface in the enormous main room where the action takes place. Back to jail for a bit and then the rest of the movie plays out in a variety of gorgeous forest locales. The bamboo groves, the meadow, the intense greens of the hideout of the House of Flying Daggers, the dying leaves, and the blizzard at the end. I'm not sure Zhang Yimou even needs plot or actors, much less characters, to make this a successful film. The choreographed scenes (fighting, dueling, ambushes) are as amazing as you knew they were going to be, but I think the extraordinary attention to color in each scene is far and away the best reason to see House of Flying Daggers.
Also, I finished reading Nobrow by John Seabrook last week, and it was not quite as good as I'd hoped from what I'd read in the bookstore. It wasn't bad, but a lot of the theorizing seemed kind of obvious, even though the author seemed to think he had summed up contemporary American culture in a revolutionary fashion.
I'm now midway through Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, which isn't quite as vitally important to me as his Generation X, but that probably has more to do with external factors than the quality of the respective volumes.
The record library has one album by the Contortions, Buy, and it's just as thrilling as I'd hoped it would be based on the strength of "Contort Yourself," which is on the New York Noise compilation, which I happen to own. According to All Music Guide, they're "the quintessential no wave group." Free jazz saxophone playing plus funk rhythms equals cathartically frenetic noise.
I started the term off with a bang, ie Wolf Eyes. You can see for yourself on the playlists page. The middle section, from The Futureheads through John Lennon, was probably the best. The end got messed up because I played the wrong Rolling Stones song and the Bob Dylan song just cut out. Next week will be better.
First, I beat Mickey Mouse for NES. It is not a very good game, and the ending kind of sucked, too. No thanks to Iago, for inspiring me to play it. I think I did find the game I was looking for, though: Adventures in Magic Kingdom. I used to only use vimm.net to download NES games, but I found another site that lets you download not just five but an unlimited number of games per day. I'm assuming you don't need to do that, so I won't bother linking to it.
Second, I've been looking at various film blogs this evening, and noticed a list meme that had been circulating through a number of them. I replicated it for the first post at my new potentially permanent blog home. You'll be happy to see that you can once again leave comments, as I know you've been dying to do for the past six months or so since they disappeared along with my TypePad site. I'd rather get MovableType and space on a server, but that would take longer than the five minutes it took me to register and set up this Blogger-hosted monstrosity (and it wouldn't be free). I'll be tweaking the look eventually, and probably adding stuff to the sidebar, but I don't mind the appearance as is.
This entry at the Chutry Experiment got me to thinking about my own "cinematic education," if you will, and related topics. Perhaps what most amazes me is how frequently I get to know new people. Whenever I relocate to someplace new, I always envision getting to know a few people in a short period of time (forming a "clique" perhaps, though I'm not terribly susceptible to this tendency) with whom I will do whatever it is I do with friends and acquaintances. This seems to be a woefully inaccurate assumption, since I continually surprise myself by becoming friends with new and different people even though I managed a 100% introversion score on the rather extensive introvert-extrovert test presented to me last spring.
It still kind of stuns me to recall how little I knew about film or how few important (classic or contemporary) movies I'd watched up until somewhere around my high school graduation. I'd never had a VCR of my own and there aren't that many movies I'm comfortable watching with my parents, since they tend to have relatively stringent requirements about what is and isn't acceptable on screen. I also hadn't ever gotten into the habit of going to the movie theater with people, just because. I suspect that I wasn't a complete moron, since I kept up pretty well with film reviews, since I've always tended to read a lot of cultural and media criticism in newspapers, magazines, etc. (In fact, I can still recall enjoying scathing reviews for computer hardware that I didn't really even care about in some geeky magazine I had back when I was 13 or something, and failing to be able to communicate to my younger brother why I thought they were so great.) I think my DVD player was the reason for any increased interest I developed in movies. I can recall that several Netflix rentals had an effect on me; American Beauty and High Fidelity are the only two which spring immediately to mind. I suppose I should be glad that I failed to cancel my subscription before the free trial ran out.
Anyway, the main point (well, sort of) which I haven't actually made is that there are a lot of good film blogs out there, and I don't have time to read them all, which is always a hard sort of thing for me to realize. I can still vaguely recall the unsettling feeling I had when I first realized that it simply wasn't possible to, as I believe Encyclopedia Brown was reputed to have done, read all the books at the public library; it was just something I assumed that I would do, at least until my brain grew enough to do the math that told me that simply wasn't possible. In fact, it was just yesterday that I had to stop myself from trying to start at the first week of the year of All Music Guide's list of albums released, because I wanted to see all the albums released in 2005 so I didn't miss anything. I had to stop myself because, even though I tend to view these sorts of impulses as positive, that was just crazy.
In fact, if you were psychoanalyzing me, I think this desire to assimilate, organize, analyze, and store any and all information, ideas, and mediated or non-mediated experiences probably goes a long way toward explaining a number of quirks of my personality. At least, it probably serves better than attempting to claim that I'm autistic, which has indeed been attempted in some quarters. It should also explain why I don't get bored when I'm home on break without a job, which was a topic that came up if only for a short while this evening.
For lack of any attempt at tying all this together, I'm just going to stop.
It looks like Out Hud is playing the Cave for my birthday. Well, six days afterward. Hooray for Sarah Moody!
I've added the Decemberists to the concert list (9 April) and am growing more excited about the list of albums coming out in 2005. My personal list so far:
- The Books: Lost and Safe
- Caribou (formerly Manitoba): The Milk of Human Kindness
- The Decemberists: Picaresque
- The Fiery Furnaces: EP
- The Headphones (David Bazan): s/t
- Low: The Great Destroyer
- Out Hud: Let Us Never Speak of It Again
- Prefuse 73: Surrounded by Silence
- Trail of Dead: Worlds Apart
- M. Ward: Transister Radio
Yes, I know the Trail of Dead album is supposed to be bad, but there is always a critical backlash after something as big as Source Tags & Codes. I mean, I liked the second Interpol album a lot even though I certainly heard negative things from people whose opinions I respect at least some of the time.
iTunes has a mute function that isn't visible on the interface unless you enter the Control menu. It had me worried for a while, but I'm over it.
Update on my other blog.
There were a few minor technical glitches tonight (seconds of silence, etc.), but those were mostly due to external circumstances, so I'll assume everything will go perfectly next week. I was planning to go with the last track from the Arcade Fire CD after I finished Explosions in the Sky, but it seemed like overkill, so John Darnielle won the spot instead. I hope you enjoyed the EitS/Arcade Fire medley as much as I did.
I had a dream the other night (one of many, in fact) in which I went to see the Explosions in the Sky with my brother, I think, and they were even better than at the Cave, where they were pretty good.
I checked out five books from the library today which all have at least some information on self-avoiding random walks, so that I can do my comps talk on February 24.
Because I didn't want to actually read those books today, I started a Tecmo Super Bowl season with the Oilers. Lorenzo White is underperforming, but Warren Moon has come back from a lackluster first game to lead the league in passing yardage.
I'm very excited about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being released on May 6. Perhaps I will go see it after I finish my math comps exam.
Update at the other blog. I'm thinking that until I post everything over there, that space will get the longer, self-sufficient things, while here you will find shorter, less substantial posts.
Remind me never to trade CDs in at Spun.com again. Of the five CDs I sent them, they accepted two, one of which they'd previously rejected because it was "scratched". Those they rejected this time were, for the most part, listened to very little and likely not damaged in any way. In fact, I'd bet if I tried them again they'd go through.
Kottke.org linked to this stunningly colorful photo of thousands of buttons.
Radio: No high points quite like last week, but no low points either. As always, the playlist is posted.
BBC News has a collection of facts and information about life in post-Saddam Iraq.
You may note the updated concert list. It includes four shows for the remainder of this term which I may possibly attend, the two new ones being Rogue Wave on February 19 and Clem Snide on March 12.
Next term is shaping up to be pretty big. Mono and Bloc Party have been added to first week. Also, within a single week, the Triple Rock will be bringing us M83, Animal Collective, and Of Montreal. I'm really, really hoping for a My Morning Jacket show before graduation so I don't have to drive to see them this summer. That, and it would be awesome to see Jim James for a fifth time during college.