Walking: An Update

Generally on my current walking map of Seattle I erase the blocks I've walked, but that makes it difficult to show progress positively. So after playing around a bit I put this together.



For reference this is a roughly similar Google map of the area, and for comparison here's the map I posted back around Labor Day.

Ideas

Today at work I was thinking that maybe the problem with the new Wolf Parade album is that it builds more tension than it releases. The last album released more tension by virtue of tighter, choppier, more staccato rhythms and more centrally placed guitar, but here we have lazy keyboards and lazier rhythms that don't fill the space. This uneven balance of tension reminded me of My Bloody Valentine and maybe other bands that I find it hard to listen to. For further exploration.

To rectify this I listened to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which is constantly building and releasing tension in spectacular fashion, not least in "King of Carrot Flowers," parts 1 & 2. The best thing about this first climax is that the guitar is so dirty and compressed that the sound increases in intensity without seeming to take up any more space, a kind of tidy explosion.



And tonight Brendan and I got on the subject of Vince Vaughn and how he ought to do something great instead of another bad Christmas movie. This may be a moot point since he's starring in a David O. Russell project to be released in 2010, but anyway I thought for a while and suggested that he would be magnificent in Clark Gable's role in a remake of It Happened One Night. Since this is my idea, you probably already knew that Richard Linklater would direct. (Like a higher stakes version of Before Sunrise, maybe?)

Fall

As the post below has now had ample time to demonstrate, Bumbershoot is fast approaching. But what follows? Well, the Decibel Festival toward the end of the month, overlapped by My Morning Jacket. A lot of other good stuff as well: Mogwai, Fuck Buttons, TV on the Radio, Matthew Dear, maybe Giant Sand, Stereolab, Fujiya & Miyagi, maybe The Black Angels, Gang Gang Dance, Growing, Deerhunter, and M83.

I'll probably miss most of the Local Sightings festival to spend a long weekend at the Vancouver Film Festival. Not sure of the exact schedule yet, but I may end up seeing Loos Ornamental again, as much as I can of the Dragons & Tigers series, and possibly Three Monkeys, A Christmas Tale, and/or Hunger.

And there will be rain. Lots and lots of rain.

Bumbershoot 2008

If you're real bored, why not peruse the list of 117 bands [included as the first comment] and leave a brief note about which ones you would be excited to see.

Here's what I've got so far. Full of conflicts and excluding some early-afternoon sets that would basically keep me at the Seattle Center all day, making for a very long weekend.

Blue Turning Gray

People of a certain age generally attribute lapses in memory to encroaching senility--with a chuckle, of course. My mom regularly claims she forgot everything as young as thirty.

This morning after I finished listening to The Modern Lovers, it felt like time for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, only I had no idea what the name of the band was anymore. After a bit I realized that I could at least recall the title of "In This Home on Ice," from which point I located the appropriate MP3s. Without iTunes I might have just had to stare at my record collection in silence.

I'm going to attribute this to simply listening to and reading about too much other good music since 2005. Twenty-five is too early to joke about being put in a home, anyway.

Contempt

I'm probably on record somewhere, or at least maybe I've mentioned to you in person, that I loathe trailers. They can ruin movies if screened often enough or misrepresent the film they're supposed to promote; it's probably due to the editing most of the time.

Probably no surprise that Godard provides an exception to the rule. This trailer for Contempt, subtitled when it ran at SIFF Cinema recently, is so good it not only made me reconsider seeing the film again so soon (10 months) but also whether the trailer might actually be slightly better than the film, which is basically terrific but also perhaps a bit overrated. [Turn it up loud for the music.] The superimposed words might have actually made it even better than the original, but I'd need a Francophone to figure that one out.

Trailer 1 for Nights and Weekends shares a similar structure, if only superficially. There's no music, but still, I'll take it over in-your-face overkill any day.