Wedding Pictures

I put up five pictures I took on Saturday as a set called Pennsylvania Wedding. They aren't particularly interesting, but they aren't ugly, so look at them if you like.

Harper's on Christian Fundamentalism

Harpers.org has posted the two pieces they printed in the magazine last month on the recent rise of forceful Christian fundamentalism. Part I is a profile of the gargantuan New Life Church near Colorado Springs, and in particular of its founder, Ted Haggard. Part II is an account of the author's experiences at and around the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters association. If you only feel like reading one, I would suggest Part I, but both are interesting.

Wedding

I traveled to near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this weekend for the wedding of my cousin. I was an usher, and no, I did not wear my elbow-patched blazer, but rather a dark-blue pinstriped suit which I've had for about 5 years now. I took some pictures, a few of which turned out all right, and I may edit them and post them of Flickr sometime, but not right now. Now I'm going to turn the lights out and count down until graduation, or go to sleep, whichever comes more naturally.

Also, I think I am going to institute the rule that before I do anything with new music I haven't bought yet, I have to listen to and read about at least one album in my collection that I am not acquainted with.

Reading List

If I'd, say, gone to St. John's College, the "great books" school, four years ago instead of Carleton, I would have read these books in that time:

• HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
• AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
• SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes
• THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
• EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
• HERODOTUS: Histories
• ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
• PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theatetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
• ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
• EUCLID: Elements
• LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
• PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
• NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
• LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
• HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
• THE BIBLE
• ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
• APOLLONIUS: Conics
• VIRGIL: Aeneid
• PLUTARCH: "Caesar" and "Cato the Younger"
• EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
• TACITUS: Annals
• PTOLEMY: Almagest
• PLOTINUS: The Enneads
• AUGUSTINE: Confessions
• ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
• AQUINAS: Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles
• DANTE: Divine Comedy
• CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
• DES PREZ: Mass
• MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
• COPERNICUS: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
• LUTHER: The Freedom of a Christian
• RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
• PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
• MONTAIGNE: Essays
• VIETE: "Introduction to the Analytical Art"
• BACON: Novum Organum
• SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets
• POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
• DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
• PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
• BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
• HAYDN: Quartets
• MOZART: Operas
• BEETHOVEN: Sonatas
• SCHUBERT: Songs
• STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms
• CERVANTES: Don Quixote
• GALILEO: Two New Sciences
• DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
• MILTON: Paradise Lost
• LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
• LA FONTAINE: Fables
• PASCAL: Pensees
• HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
• ELIOT: Middlemarch
• SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
• LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
• RACINE: Phaedre
• NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
• KEPLER: Epitome IV
• LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
• SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
• HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
• ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
• MOLIERE: The Misanthrope
• ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
• KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
• MOZART: Don Giovanni
• JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
• DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"
  
• Declaration of Independence
• The Constitution of the United States
• Supreme Court opinions
• HAMILTON, JAY, AND MADISON: The Federalist Papers
• DARWIN: Origin of Species
• HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
• LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
• TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
• LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
• KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
• MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
• DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
• TOLSTOY: War and Peace
• MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
• TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
• FREUD: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
• WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.: Selected Writings
• DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
• HEIDEGGER: What is Philosophy?
• HEISENBERG: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
• MILLIKAN: The Electron
• CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
• Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust, Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Mendel, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broigle, Dreisch, Orsted, Ampere, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy

No More Radio Posts

Which, of course, is a result of my having no more radio shows, at least not until I can insinuate myself somewhere next year, which may or may not be a possibility. You can see the final tracklist, which was mostly a summation of why I wanted to do the kind of show I did this term, except that it was mostly older stuff that I tried not to play since I was attempting to play as much new music as possible. The edits I did to shorten the time worked pretty well and the transitions went okay. It wasn't quite perfect, but then it would be pretty tough to be completely flawless for an hour and 45 minutes. I've had more thrilling moments on air, but felt pretty good going out this way.

I finished Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema a while back. I really liked reading about the directors he liked, and wasn't really convinced about the directors he doesn't like, but I enjoyed getting an over of, well, the pre-1968 American cinema. It was kind of funny to see how little space and care he devoted to Frank Capra, even though he put Capra in the second-highest rank of American directors. I couldn't figure out whether that was a case of him being trapped by his own auteur theory or what. Sarris really doesn't like cynics, which was part of the reason I didn't care for what he had to say about Billy Wilder, for example, but he is objective at least some of the time, or at least focused more on the plastic side of the art than on the personalities of the directors.

I notice that my summer reading list (from which this was prematurely plucked) doesn't contain any other film books, except for the Anthony Lane collection which contains a lot of non-movie writing, so I'll probably look for some more in that department. Maybe Graham Greene or James Agee, or something encyclopedic like David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film or Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia.

I've been keeping track of the movies I watch (mostly feature-length, which excludes a lot of stuff in the avant-garde film class, and more than one of Stan Brakhage's films would get four stars) and I've seen 24 over that time. I sorted them by rating below. For a lot of them I could have predicted my reaction, but sometimes I like it much less (Decasia) or more (Sherman's March) than I'd thought I would.

The only ones I didn't like are the *'s. I think I mostly disliked Decasia because the soundtrack was shrill and REALLY LOUD, but I did feel bored as well. The **'s are good, but I would be hesitant about recommending them to some or most people. The ***'s are very good, and I have no complaints about them, but they're not in the same league as the ****'s, which means it's the sort of film where even after the credits are over, I still haven't been able to get up because I can't get over how good it was, in whatever sense of "good" applies. I might try to do regular long-form reviews this summer (beware!), just to keep myself busy, but who knows how I feel about it once I get home; I usually get lazier as vacation progresses.

The Killing [Stanley Kubrick, 1956, DVD] ****
Sherman's March [Ross McElwee, 1986, DVD] ****
La Mala Educación [Pedro Almodóvar, 2004, Film Society] ****
Get Carter [Mike Hodges, 1971, DVD] ****
Dancer in the Dark [Lars von Trier, 2000, SUMO] ***½
Maborosi [Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1995, DVD] ***½
Closer [Mike Nichols, 2004, SUMO] ***
Cinemania [Angela Christlieb, 2002, DVD] ***
Days of Heaven [Terence Malick, 1978, Film Society] ***
Holes [Andrew Davis, 2003, DVD] ***
Primer [Shane Carruth, 2004, Film Society] ***
Dinner at Eight [George Cukor, 1933, DVD] ***
The Station Agent [Tom McCarthy, 2003, DVD] ***
Twentieth Century [Howard Hawks, 1934, DVD] ***
Maria Full of Grace [Joshua Marston, 2004, Film Society] ***
Northfork [Polish Bros., 2003, DVD] **
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Garth Jennings, 2005, Theater] **
Coffee & Cigarettes [Jim Jarmusch, 2003, DVD] **
Waiting for Guffman [Christopher Guest, 1996, DVD] **
Mallrats [Kevin Smith, 1995, Midnight Screening at Uptown Theater] **
The Palm Beach Story [Preston Sturges, 1942, DVD] **
Two Harbors [James Vculek, 2004, Film Society] **
Spectres of the Spectrum [Craig Baldwin, 1999, Class] **
Decasia [Bill Morrison, 2002, Class] *

Maborosi

I really wish I could see this in a theater. The shots are almost all dark or in low light, and the characters often dress in black, portrayed in either silhouette or shadows. There aren't many (any?) close-ups, and at one point over halfway through I realized that I didn't even really know what the main actress looked like.

It reminded me of Love Liza, probably because there aren't a lot of movies about people struggling to cope with the suicide of a spouse. It's one of those "lyrical" films, so it's more of a visual (and aural) poem than a story. This also made me wish I was in a theater and not my room because this is something that would be really easy to get lost in, with all the stunning panoramic shots and the meditative pacing, but for that to happen you need the screen to fill your vision, so I had to concentrate to stay focused a couple of times when my mind wandered.

I'm reminded that if I ever find out where I'm living, I hope it's near some art house or repertory cinema that lets you in free if you're a member, like Anthology Film Archive in New York. You only get into the Essential Cinema screenings for free, but I'm pretty sure I'd be there all the time after paying my $50 (or $30 if I could make good use of my soon-to-be defunct Carleton ID). Then again, I'll probably be happy to find out where I'll be living no matter what, since I've been waiting to hear about that for well over a month.

On an unrelated note, I pruned my playlist for my last radio show down from four hours or whatever it was and edited some of the tracks, and now they're in order. I just have to go over the transitions to make sure I get everything right, because I'm like that.

Counter Culture

Avant-garde film legend Jonas Mekas in the New York Times on counterculture:

"We are not counterculture. We in the East Village are the culture and everything around us is the opposite of culture. Counter is the mass that is called culture, but it is really the shopping-counter culture. I'm very much opposed to this term counterculture."

Normal Radio Show

It was a lot of fun doing something more like a normal radio show today.

Do you think I will have more to say once I finish classes? Probably.

Out with the Old, In with the New

Nothing as severe as selling my entire CD collection, but I got rid of maybe 50 albums from my hard drive last night so I could keep adding music until the end of the schoolyear. I got some good stuff from Scott, who I hadn't been able to see online before, like DJ Shadow, RJD2, and The Zombies' Odessey & Oracle.

Then today, after eating with Charles, I visited the Music Department's collection with Jack, and borrowed a few things:

• The Best Best of Fela Kuti
• Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gesang der Jünglinge
• Phil Spector: Back to Mono (1958-1969)
• OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music

Sharing My Music

I finally figured out what I ought to do to share my music, and I did it. I used an inactive AIM screenname (laurensfood) and listed it on my iTunes identity (Andy Slabaugh [Download on AIM: laurensfood]). Hopefully this way everyone can get around my inability to share music like a normal network user. Feel free to browse if you're on the Carleton network, especially if you were previously unable to.

Radio Countdown: #3

There was a lot of new stuff from the record library tonight since there was a lot to be had in the past week. I like the Jason Forrest EP and will probably need to add his next album to my "must-buy" list, which is expanding even though I got M.I.A. from the network.

I listened to my first Stycast yesterday and it was pretty good. In particular it was On the Lilypad, Under the Water 002 featuring electronic-tinged Japanese music. I also noticed that Stylus has a lot of links to podcasts and MP3 blogs, which maybe I will check out and certainly I will tell you if I find anything worth noting.

King Kong

Apparently I didn't order the King Kong from the 1930's, which is what I wanted, but the 1976 version starring Charles Grodin. I think I saw part of this on TV before, and I don't think it's worth watching.

Best New Music

Max asked me tonight what was the best music I'd heard in the last two weeks. I answered that it was the new Caribou album, and the Pedro and Greg Davis CDs I'd bought. Looking at my radio playlists, it might also include Mouse on Mars' "Frosch" and Saxon Shore's "Love Will Not Save Us".

On a somewhat similar note, I've been trying to refute my assumption that James Murphy is the coolest man alive, but I'm pretty sure he's got it wrapped up. When the Juan Maclean album comes out this summer, it won't even be arguable.

You can listen to parts of each song at their/his website. You can read what Maclean has to say about the tracks too, but some of it's about his fairly messed up life, upon which he expounds in his bio, so you might get kind of depressed, particularly from the one about track seven.

Get Carter

"As bleak as it is hard and viciously uncompromising... Director Mike Hodges keeps the pace fast, while cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky creates a world as bleak and dark as the tortured souls that scheme in it. It's an absorbing concoction." - BBC Film

Star Wars

Oh man, Anthony Lane really, really dislikes Star Wars!

DVD Version

Today is truly a red letter day for my generation.

Dick Dale

The best thing that happened on this week's radio show was when I was playing the Jean Michel Jarre record and I kept hearing the Four Tet remix of "Money Folder", so I played it over top of the record. It might not have been that noticeable since they kind of sound similar, but I enjoyed it.

Dick Dale was masterful last night at the Cabooze. The Cabooze itself wasn't really my favorite place, and not in my favorite part of town, and the Ronnie Lake Band was not anything to get excited about, but Dick Dale was worth it. Probably just the first five or ten minutes of his set was worth the price of admission. I got a little tired of his rambling, improvisatory style, especially since he tended to stray from rigidly defined "surf rock" which was what I enjoyed the most. I mean, I didn't mind that played "Ring of Fire" for a while, but I wouldn't care that much if I went to hear Dick Dale and he didn't cover a Johnny Cash song. He is, though, quite the performer.

Music on the Internet

I got sucked into some more MP3 blogs and such this afternoon, when I clicked through from Philip Sherburne's This Month in Techno piece at Pitchfork to his personal blog. Before I could escape, I'd subscribed to three new blogs, which I'll post at right later. I also subscribed to Earplug, in part because they were offering three free MP3s from Kompakt, so they must be cool, right? Most dangerously, I registered over at I Love Music, which looks like it could pretty much be the end of me.

Best Film Society Ever

Well, maybe not the best, since there have been a lot of good Film Society screenings, but it's certainly the most memorable I've been a part of. I thought we had a lot of people for the late screening last week, and there were easily more than twice as many in Boliou 104, which made it that much more full.

The real excitement, though, came when the projector and DVD player shut off with about 15 minutes left in the film, because apparently you can't use the system in that room after 11 pm. Since the controls up front were locked, it took a while for somebody to get up and find the light switch so we weren't in total darkness. A riot was averted when security agreed to open Olin 149 for us, since the other screening had finished in there.

It was great to watch the mass exodus from one lecture hall to the other. Hopefully this will keep Film Society in people's minds for the next two weeks and perhaps even next year. It was also great that we actually got to finish the film, which I'd highly recommend.

Endless Music Shopping List

Adam gave me another disc full of music today, so I got excited about that and the concept of new music in general, so I decided to do something about the ridiculous pile of lists I'd been keeping in a text file. The problem was a lot of them overlapped and included stuff I already had and whatnot, and basically it just made me not want to learn about the music on there.

So, I got rid of all the numbers and "the"s at the beginning of the list-items, dumped it all into a database so I could sort it, then deleted all the irrelevant information, which was pretty easy, especially the big sections of Radiohead, or the 10 Junior Boys entries from last year. I was able to downsize it from 1100 items to a little over 300, which was a big difference.

It'd be really nice if I could figure out a way to get rid of all the leading numbers without deleting numbers in either the artist or title of the album. If I could get that worked out, it would be supremely easy for me next year when I go through all the year-end lists and try to find out what music from 2005 I missed.

Personal Cinema

I was overwhelmed by Ross McElwee's Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. Tarnation was an impressive example of personal cinema, sure, but it didn't have the same impact on me as this film, probably because I feel I can identify more with McElwee than Jonathan Caouette.

My main reaction is like how when you read a lot of someone's writing you feel you know them as a friend, except more powerful since this is cinema. He's not just telling you about his awkward attempts at "coupling", as one of the cast puts it so deftly, you're actually in the moment as, for example, he tries to convince one of his longtime woman friends to start dating him, and fails somewhat embarrassingly.

He gets advice and encouragement from his high school teacher, Charleen, who is adamant that he get married and reproduce at once, if not sooner. That their conversation is being videotaped is not so weird; it's the fact that since he's behind the camera, it started to feel to me like I was the one being exhorted, especially since I share a lot of McElwee's flaws, at least those that seemed to Charleen to be particularly negative.

At first I just thought it was going to be diverting, and McElwee does retain a sense of humor throughout. There are moments where you can tell he must be excited to have something so perfect fall into his lap while the camera was running. But as the film progresses, he becomes a semi-tragic figure, continually falling in love with women who either have to leave almost immediately or who are inappropriate for him one way or another. I kept waiting for him to end with some resounding success story or advice or something, since it felt more like a personal conversation than a feature-length documentary, but instead he hints that despite his disappointments he's ready to give love another try.

It's too bad none of his other films are available on Netflix at the moment. I'll be sure to see Bright Leaves as soon as it comes out on DVD. Time Indefinite sounds like it might be even better.

100 Other American Films

After discussing the AFI 100 best American films with Charles last night, I thought I'd post a link to Jonathan Rosenbaum's rebuttal and his own "Alternate 100".

Largehearted Boy linked to the iTunes Registry, an alternative to Audioscrobbler, which hasn't worked for me in over a year. I think it requires me to upload my entire library database from time to time, which is kind of burdensome at 25 MB, but at least it works. I found the "Description" on my page to be interesting, if not exactly enlightening. It's not entirely accurate, but it's a nice way of expressing the information they collect. I currently have more tracks than all but 17 other people, but I'm sure that will change as more users sign up.

I also realized that Ben Folds' Rockin' the Suburbs elicits certain emotions from the beginning of freshman year, even if I can't connect them right away with actual circumstances or events, which was kind of unsettling. Then I deleted it from my iTunes library, because I sold it a while ago. Does that mean I deleted freshman year? Probably not.

Redesign

The site now looks more or less like I want it. "More or less" because there are certain limitations when working with Blogger or a template design, because there's so much you're not sure you really want to throw out. There shouldn't be any more of the unreadably small, faded, capitalized text. The profile is gone from the right side, with only a link remaining.

The banner at the top is now a link to the home page, and all the post title's are links to those individual pages. I didn't remove the times from the posts on purpose, but that's what had to happen given what I wanted to do and how well I was able to do it. Not that you're probably concerned, but since this is that sort of post...

Record Library Fun

Another Friday afternoon in the record library. Some of you may be excited to know that we added a portrait of Nigel Young to the rotation of images on the iMac desktop in there. We also listened to a very well-done 90 minutes of radio devoted to Mariah Carey.

Nick showed me that the Eddytor's Dozen column at the Village Voice has links to MP3s, which is nice.

Adam got us started on a discussion of the best album of the year so far, which eventually devolved into a philosophical debate. Lizzie was with me on Antony and the Johnsons. Adam picked LCD Soundsystem, I think, which I might agree with if you include the bonus singles disc. I liked the Caribou album a lot the first time through, but I haven't listened to it again, so I don't know. There's also a list that I haven't heard, but could be in contention: Justus Köhncke, MIA, and Keith Fullerton Whitman.

I never really tried to figure this out for 2004, but I'd probably include the Arcade Fire, Death from Above 1979, Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands, The Futureheads, Jason Forrest, Juana Molina, Junior Boys, Loscil, M83, Panda Bear, Ratatat, and The Streets. If forced to, I would probably say that the Arcade Fire was number one, but I'd rather not be forced to make such a decision.

I'll be doing a radio show tonight at 10, and somehow my randomized list of "New Singles", or non-album tracks with a play count of zero, has generated a perfect show so far. I'm pretty sure that this will be the end of it, at 8 tracks and 34 minutes, because the Mountain Goats should probably never follow Mouse on Mars, even if it's a Mountain Goats remix.

Thursday in Minneapolis

For our avant-garde cinema class today we went to the Walker to screen some "structuralist" films. The first was an intercut series of images at various points down a hallway. The second was a film that notified the audience each time a minute had passed, and featured a couple of guys trying to figure out the names of boats from pictures of the boats. The third was a long zoom (maybe half an hour) from a wide shot of a room down to one of the pictures on the wall, with various color filters and a steadily rising drone in the background.

The museum was free, since it was Thursday, so we wandered around for a while, eventually making our way outside to the "Sky Persher" (perhaps not the correct name) which consisted of a tunnel to an underground room with an unglassed viewing window to the sky, from which you could see no edges or buildings or grass or anything other than sky.

We (a small group, not the whole class) visited two record stores. I picked up Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene on used vinyl at Cheapo in Uptown, where they're now using the basement below their enormous first-floor space. We also went to Vital Vinyl, which I liked a lot, probably because it is small and well-kept and full of music made by electronics. Since most of their stock is on vinyl, and most of it open, you can listen to it on their fairly excellent turntables with their fairly excellent headphones, which I think would make me a lot more likely to buy something. I mean, it's not quite the Kompakt Records store, but it's somewhere I was happy to spend time in, which I can't generally say for Cheapo or Electric Fetus.

I also got to thinking about how bad it is that the only way I can listen to music is by turning on my ridiculously loud computer and either sitting uncomfortably at my desk or laying on my bed, which I can only do for so long before it feels like it's time to go to sleep. I don't know exactly how I plan to solve this, but it's something to consider.

Also, Max took care of my radio show so I could finish my statistics report, which I hope to do soon. Either I will be on the air this Sunday or will have two shows in one of the last few weeks of the term.

New Music

Ordered from Forced Exposure over the weekend:

• Pedro: Early Pedro
• Greg Davis: Arbor
• VA: Runeology 2 [Rune Grammofon]

Twin Cities Rock and Roll Shows

It looks like there will only be one more of these for me. The Autechre show I had listed at right was going to be $20 plus Ticketmaster charges with an opener I hadn't heard of, so that one's probably out. I think that Caribou/Junior Boys/Russian Futurists has the potential to be a terrific last show.

Here we have a list of what bands I've heard in the cities (and elsewhere). I'm pretty sure it's complete, but it's hard to say. The shows at the Cave are bands I would have paid to see elsewhere.

• Tom Petty, The Mark, Fall 1999
• Styx, The Great Jones County Fair, Summer 2001
• Weezer, Tweeter Center, Summer 2002
• Ben Folds, [Clive, Iowa], Summer 2002
• Foo Fighters, First Ave, Fall 2002
• Dismemberment Plan, First Ave, Fall 2002
• Wesley Willis, 7th St. Entry, Spring 2003
• My Morning Jacket, Ascot Room, Spring 2003
• Yo La Tengo, First Ave, Summer 2003
• Wilco, Walker Art Center, Summer 2003
• White Stripes, Roy Wilkins Auditorium, Summer 2003
• Built to Spill, First Ave, Fall 2003
• My Morning Jacket, Ascot Room, Fall 2003
• Death Cab for Cutie, First Ave, Fall 2003
• The Shins, First Ave, Fall 2003
• Belle & Sebastian, Fitzgerald Theatre, Fall 2003
• Pedro the Lion, University of St Thomas, Fall 2003
• The Unicorns, 7th St. Entry, Winter 2004
• Jim James/Conor Oberst/M. Ward, Pantages Theatre, Winter 2004
• Xiu Xiu, Triple Rock, Winter 2004
• My Morning Jacket, Quest Club, Spring 2004
• The Decemberists, 400 Bar, Spring 2004
• Mt. Eerie, Triple Rock, Spring 2004
• Pedro the Lion, Gabe's Oasis, Summer 2004
• Ted Leo, Gabe's Oasis, Summer 2004
• Beach Boys, The Great Jones County Fair, Summer 2004
• The Black Keys, First Ave, Fall 2004
• Mouse on Mars/Ratatat/Junior Boys, Ascot Room, Fall 2004
• Low, Triple Rock, Fall 2004
• Explosions in the Sky, The Cave, Fall 2004
• Olympic Hopefuls, The Cave, Fall 2004
• Interpol, First Ave, Fall 2004
• Drive-By Truckers, First Ave, Fall 2004
• Trail of Dead, Triple Rock, Fall 2004
• The Arcade Fire, Gabe's Oasis, Fall 2004
• Magnolia Electric Co., Gabe's Oasis, Fall 2004
• The Thermals, Triple Rock, Winter 2005
• Jens Lekman, The Cave, Winter 2005
• Bloc Party, First Ave, Spring 2005
• The Mountain Goats, M-Shop, Spring 2005
• Out Hud/Hella, The Cave, Spring 2005
• M83, Triple Rock, Spring 2005
• Animal Collective, Triple Rock, Spring 2005
• Caribou/Junior Boys/Russian Futurists, 400 Bar, Spring 2005

Film: The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)

Movies

I've (finally) started trying to write a little something about every movie I see, but the point is that I don't have to edit any of it into readable form, since it's just for me, so I'm not going to bother putting any of it up here. Maybe I'll just mention a title at the bottom of a post if I want to mention it but don't want to actually write about it. That sounds good.

I have some thoughts on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and maybe I will post them here at some point, but I don't feel like doing so now. Instead I'll link to, and post an excerpt from, Anthony Lane who may be my favorite film critic at the moment. (Incidentally, I don't like David Denby, the New Yorker's other main film critic, much at all.) I hadn't realized this until just recently, but upon further consideration, it may just be true.

The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy [my emphasis], with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags. The demand for the literal, too, seems overwrought; a leading character with two heads became, in Adams’s hands, a sustained joke about split personality, whereas here he’s merely a job for special effects. As radio listeners, we couldn’t believe our ears. These days, as hoary old moviegoers, we shrug, and believe our eyes.