| So, I have some stupid tickets to stupid sell |
[Aug. 15th, 2009|10:10 am] |
If anyone will be near Billings, MT on Sept. 3rd, you might want to see Modest Mouse. And you might want to buy the tickets from me. It turns out that Back to School Night is the same night. Yeah.
Drop me a line. |
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| Dig the nihilism |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|06:35 pm] |
So, we've been playing and recording tracks for an upcoming memorial service.
THe songs are all spirituals, with a Dylan cover thrown in. I have a strange relationship to this music. As a non-believer, it's odd enough, but a lot of that old-timey depression era religious music really contains all of the world-negating nihilism that I most despise about most religious thinking. But I love the music.
So, in case you missed it, here's Take me Away.
And, getting old school: On the Wings of the Snow White Dove.
And finally, Dylan's Every Grain of Sand, one of the most beautiful songs ever. I dig this track because you can hear Amber really well.
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| Stuff |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|06:25 pm] |
So, I think I'm writing a comic book script about secret societies and dream worlds and patricide and addiction.
We'll see.
Working title: The True Believers |
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| Week One |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|04:42 pm] |
Today marks one week of summer vacation, and no sun to speak of, so I've been occupying myself with other things.
To wit:
( click for more... )
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| Down with Up |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|10:38 am] |
 \
Ten years ago, Steven Spielberg committed one of his two greatest sins: Saving Private Ryan. This film was somehow more offensive than any other due to the hoopla that surrounded it. Hanks and Spielberg were busy receiving special military honors for finally portraying war as it really was, etc. and generally feeding the whole "Greatest Generation" nonsense that continues to romanticize the deaths of some seventy million people while simultaneously devaluing the deaths, suffering, and sacrifices of the following generations. I digress. The hoopla was based around one stunningly realized scene depicting the massacre that was the landing on Omaha Beach. If memory serves, it's about twenty minutes worth of men in muted colors walking headlong into a wall of bullets, crawling into a wall of bullets, and then finally crawling through dead bodies.
It's an amazing scene, and it's very affecting. It's emotional. It's fascinating in the way is evokes several conflicting emotions at once.
And it's a crime.
The crime is to follow this supposed moment of truth telling with a piece of wartime schmaltz that John Wayne would have been perfectly comfortable in. Only with more blood. "Gritty" somehow becomes its own reward.
The point is, that the rest of that movie (about six hours worth of movie, it seems to me) all drag on the coattails of that opening scene and kind of bleed it dry. The emotional charge of that scene is like a check that the rest of the film keeps trying to cash, even though the rest of the film is both emotionally cliched and (more importantly) has nothing to do narratively with the opening scene.
This brings me to Pixar's newest offering, Up. I won't go into too much detail except to say that this film pulls the exact same sucker punch on its viewers. More condensed (and, really, more interesting) is Up's opening montage in which we are introduced to our hero and his love and watch an entire lifetime pass in less than five minutes. It's powerful stuff. I don't think I've ever been so near tears in the first few minutes of a movie, and I'm a weepy mess at movies.
And what follows is what I consider the fall of Pixar from its very great heights. The rest of the film is something worthy of the dozens of saccharine CGI crap that Dreamworks (Spielberg again) churns out by the fistful. Sure, it looks better (several shots are just pure art), but it's still a collection of half-drawn characters enacting cliched plots that keep recycling the same lame jokes. It is utterly and completely predictable, and--here's where I start sounding like a prude--needlessly violent. There's blood in multiple places and the villain, a cardboard fascist stand in, chases the boy and his companions with a shot gun, while dogs attack in little bi-planes (no, I'm not joking). All of this would be acceptable if the violence was in some way warranted, in some way in keeping with the story, but really, it just marks the place where a quiet, surreal little story about memory, love, and what it means to live a full life gets hijacked by summer movie bullshit.
Pixar became Pixar through their writing, and through their writing, they now become Disney. Sound the death knell.
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| 3 reasons why this summer is going to be awesome... |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|05:23 pm] |
1. A two dollar patio table from the Salvation Army. Now we're ready for some serious amounts of doing nothing.
2. Three dollar set of horseshoes from a yardsale. One post away from a permanent horseshoe pit in the sideyard.
3. DairyQueen. |
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| Music |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|09:07 am] |
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What's the album that I've never heard of but need to listen to right now? huh? |
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| The Prisoner |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|08:00 am] |
I haven't been making use of this space for a while. I've fallen under the evil sway of Facebook where I am not required to think.
But now that school is out, I might have time to think and....gasp..write.
Last night I watched the final episode of the Prisoner. This was a show I was really enjoying and became an instant favorite, but the final episode made it something that I will likely have to write about in order to organize my thinking about it.
There's a lot swirling around in there at once: Kafka, Blake, the Beatles, Lewis Carroll, and on and on.
So, this post doesn't actually contain any thinking, but it will stand as a kind of promise to do some thinking and some writing. Soon. |
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| Two must-see movies |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|08:10 am] |
 Let the Right One In is a Swedish Vampire movie that is practically perfect in every way.
I consider it a kind of anti-twilight where the vampirism is just a kind of fact of the narrative which is always subordinated to the amazing relationship between the two main characters. It is gorgeous and Hitchcockian in its application of violence, allowing your mind to do the dirty work for the most part.
It is beautiful and haunting and sweet and heartbreaking.
Happy Go Lucky is simply a perfect film. I've been a fan of Mike Leigh since I was assaulted by Naked about 15 years ago. This is a perfect film. It takes forever for a plot to even present itself, but I didn't care one bit. I just wanted to keep listening to these people talk to each other. Perfection. I was prepared for Poppy to be a bumbling fool, tripping through life a la the Tramp, but she's actually smarter, more beautiful, more amazing than everyone else, and she's good. Perfect.
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| BSG: What happened? |
[Mar. 24th, 2009|05:17 pm] |
 I don't expect these thoughts to be terribly cogent, as I just returned home from another day of driving, but I want to take a minute to address the absolutely horrific finale of Battlestar Galactica, one of the greatest TV shows ever.
I wonder if the show shouldn't have ended midway through Season 4 (where the season stopped for the writers' strike anyway). That would have been a perfect ending for a difficult show. After fighting tooth and nail to find the mythic Earth, the fleet was left with a burnt-out husk of a planet already destroyed by earlier incarnations of the same conflict the show has been documenting. A serious downer, and a perfectly brutal ending for this show that has never flinched in the face of something ugly.
Instead we get wishy-washy, touchy-feely talk about Hope. Damn Obama, he's already screwing stuff up.
But seriously, this show was always a direct statement about the Bush administration and its war on terror. More than that, the show fearlessly muddied waters that the Bushies wanted to keep crystal clear, such as the distinction between good guys and bad guys. In this show, the heroes were the victims of a massive strike, but they were also the "enemy combatants," terrorists attempting to topple the oppressive peace-keeping forces that had first decimated their civilazation and then wanted to re-order it.
In these final episodes, several things go wrong: first, everyone falls in much neater categories of good and bad. Sure, there are "surprises" as characters shift alliances, but it's not the usual twist of the dagger than we've come to expect. The beauty of BSG is that you routinely have "good" characters behaving in ways that impossible to apologize away. In the final episodes, everyone just shows their colors.
The real problem with the finale is this: the religious fanatics are right! First off, we get a convenient melding of radically different belief systems. "Well, we've been killing each other because of the twin causes of revenge and religious differences, but it turns out we're all Unitarians after all and we can just sweep that fuzzy god(s) stuff under the carpet." And several characters who have been apparently psychotic (Baltar being cheif among them, are just fine. You see, there are angels among us. Oh, and a key character is one of them.
One problem is the simple rush to resolve a lot of messy plot points. Much like the X-Files, the writers are very adept at weaving multiple narrative threads together, twisting them back on themselves, and creating a great puzzle, but they apparently have no clue what it all adds up to. The journey, it seems to me, is the point, not the destination.
At least not this destination. This is crap.
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| Album Recommendation #2 |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|04:45 pm] |
 Papercuts: Mockingbird.
Sounds like: From his iron lung, Brian Wilson uses telekinesis to control the actions of the Jesus and Mary Chain, forcing them to create lo-fi nuggets of pure pop goodness.
Why you should check it out: With "pop" music officially devouring itself, the only place where true pop music is being created (I'm thinking of structure rather than mass consumption) is underground and well out of the pop radio radar. If the 'sounds like' whet your appetite, think of those lovely little VU duets with Lou and Mo.
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