Midnight in a Perfect World

Heat Death

2009-05-26T01:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I was reading the New Scientist's article on photographing black holes, particularly the one presumed to be at the center of the Milky Way. I then took off on a Wikipedia spree in the following order:

Solar System
Milky Way
Galaxy
Dwarf galaxy
Great Attractor
Dark flow
Timeline of the Big Bang
Universe
Ultimate fate of the universe
Heat death of the universe

Histories in tabbed browsers are notoriously bad at representing the precise order in which the user actually read the pages listed, but I'm fairly sure that I had to shut the computer off at some point near the bottom of the list after my brain exploded.

Rolling SIFF Updates

2009-05-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

After running through the catalog again, I believe I've got a tentative schedule set at 48 films.

Thirteen on Memorial Day weekend, nine the short week after that, fourteen in week two, and twelve the final week.

Hard to say exactly how many will actually get watched. Any besides Humpday definitely getting theatrical release in Seattle will be stricken from the list. Probably half of these are can't-miss, and the rest I'd like to see if possible. Hopefully I can compile a manageable list of a dozen or fewer to suggest to interested parties.

---

Andy Horbal's Film Blogs, Etc. search tool at Google is exceedingly helpful in trying to get an idea of general reaction to smaller films. It includes both of David Hudson's blogs, Twitch, Slant, The Auteurs Notebook, and of course a load of personal blogs. Variety is also a necessity, though their review database is slightly less than comprehensive.

---

After the first run-through, I've scheduled ~45 films over the 24 days of the festival. This doesn't include several I've marked to look up later, so I will also need to start trying to find reasons not to watch some as well.

20090503

2009-05-03T22:39:00.000-07:00

Today is significant for three reasons. First is the biggest cache of information thus far on SIFF '09 in the Seattle Times. Most startling to me was the re-scored film at the Triple Door: No Age performing new music for The Bear (Annaud, 89). The Album Leaf and Kinski, who I know have filled the musicians' role in the past, both seem like rational choices, but I would probably have gotten through most of Sub Pop's roster before guessing No Age. The film might be longer than their entire recorded output to date.

Second is the second time I've recognized someone onscreen in a commercially released movie. Ivan popped up in a Joe Swanberg film or two, and today I spotted Isaac Smith in Sugar, the middle third of which is set in Iowa.

Third is that I finally finished walking the last block on Capitol Hill, unless you're the sort of perverse Seattle geographer who considers anything north or Roanoke to be part of the neighborhood. And I don't.

Pp+

2009-04-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

I have decided on the occasion of finishing three (not all-that-long) books in the past week to read through my accumulated stack before looking at anything new or different. The result is roughly 4,000 pages of required reading; perhaps I'll get an exact count for a Daytum panel. It feels like a pretty tall order.

Last year I read approximately 31 books that were not graphically oriented. They tended to not be terribly long, so at an average of 250 pages, that makes 7750 for the year. I also believe, on average, that they were probably less dense than those to be found on my Goodreads list (to-read + currently-reading). Given that, and slightly increased magazine reading over 2008, I'm probably looking at seven to eight months before I can go looking for anything new to read. That is, somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In other words, the goal is to finish up before attending the Vancouver Film Festival around the beginning of October. There are only 2.5 fiction books out of the 9+ total, but hopefully Infinite Jest can absorb several non-fiction titles to maintain a pleasantly even ratio.

Inauspicious

2009-04-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sure this has been noted elsewhere already, but Cliff Lee has already given up more runs in 2009 (the Indians played their first game today) than he did starting regularly through the full first quarter of the 2008 season.

Consolidation

2009-04-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Since I can't get my act together and make a decent mix anymore these days, I decided (after Holly's comment) to finally get all the old ones uploaded in one spot. Twelve and counting currently via MediaFire.

Q1 '09

2009-03-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

Movies
Che
Medicine for Melancholy
Coraline 3D
Crips & Bloods
I Love You, Man
- - -
The Baxter
Easy Rider
They Shoot Horses, Don't They
The Wild Bunch
Body Heat
- - -
PIFF

Beer
Ninkasi Total Domination
Avery Ale to the Chief
Avery 15th Anniversary
Cascade Vlad the Impaler
Deschutes Oregon 150
Big Time Breakfast in a Glass
Elysian Stout on cask
Full Sail Black Gold
Russian River Consecration
Pilsner Urquell (can defeats bottle)

Staving Off Bittorrent, Update

2009-03-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

It's movies, not music, but today David Hudson blogged about an up-and-coming database of films available online, called SpeedCine. Not fully functional yet; or rather, it's functional but just not fully populated with all results from relevant sources. I wonder if/how they'll take into account brief windows of opportunity, like Pitchfork.TV's weekly rotation of features.

There is a section devoted to "Free Films," and I hope that will include information on commercials and interruptions. For example, just pulling a couple from the list, I'd watch Stagecoach like that, and would hesitate before doing so with Last Tango in Paris, but would still probably go ahead. There is absolutely no way I would want to watch Ballast piecemeal, though.

Staving Off Bittorrent

2009-03-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

One thing the Internet really needs is a site that matches record labels to MP3 vendors. You could then fill in artist and album-specific links, but basically I really want to know something like, Where can I buy the new Six Organs of Admittance record online?

Now, I know they're on Drag City, which means eMusic doesn't have them and apparently neither do Insound and Other Music. However Amazon is carrying it for $17.98 and iTunes has it for $15.99. But this is all at least label-specific information, if not album specific. For example, some labels only provide part of their catalog to certain stores, and I know eMusic sometimes receives albums long after their original release date, if ever.

This should pretty much be Google Shopping* with an awareness of international restrictions (Bleep won't let Americans buy a lot of rock music, but most of their electronic stuff is okay) and store preferences, since if thirty sources are selling a record for $9.99, I'd rather not have to page through a bunch of junk to get to eMusic or Other Music, which are my preferences for indie rock type stuff. And it would need to include iTunes and any other sources that aren't directly available through a browser.

*Yes, I tried doing a relevant search on the actual Google Shopping, and it was completely useless.

Asymptotic Adaptation

2009-02-20T23:39:00.000-08:00

Basically the only thing I'll complain about to you regarding my Mac is the lack of something as simple, clean, and free as Paint.NET. Mostly I was upset that I couldn't save specific layers of an image directly as a new image, for creating slices of my Seattle walking map. Then tonight it finally dawned on me that the Mac actually makes this easier than the PC via the shift-cmd-4 shortcut, in that I can create the subsections of the map without having to even create and save a new file, as the limited screen capture does it automatically and even names them correctly (as I'd previously had to enter a number 1-6 to order the images) with a little forethought.

As a replacement, I'm now going to complain that Audacity for the Mac won't save the WAV-out signal, meaning I need to use other programs to, say, capture audio from movies, TV shows, etc. Certainly even more minor of a quibble than the one I solved tonight.

Valentines to Presidents

2009-02-17T21:32:00.000-08:00

Area walked, roughly:

I saw seven films, six of which I'd originally planned on. 24 City (China) will be playing in Seattle this spring, and its replacement, Fermat's Room (Spain) was not showing, so I settled on Cape No. 7 (Taiwan), probably less good than the eighth film of the weekend, High School Musical 3 (Disneyland), shown on Amtrak Cascades enroute to Seattle.

Wolf (Sweden) was disappointing from a number of angles, including the extremely polished style and constant dramatic score, as well as the profoundly uninteresting plot. The herds of reindeer and arctic mountainsides looked nice, though. Scenery was also pretty much the only saving grace of Terra Nova, the nihilistic near-future Russian sci-fi film featuring a bizarre, and unsurprisingly uncredited, cameo by Michael Clarke Duncan. The Friend (Switzerland) was merely lackluster, not bad by any means, but less of an original twist on the suicide/grieving film than expected. As Simple As That (Iran) had some profound moments, but felt a bit too precious here and there, particularly right at the end. From some origins, this film probably would have seemed powerfully original, but as part a national cinema that's given us The White Balloon and Ten, this didn't shine too brightly.

The two really good films I saw were both Saturday evening. While waiting in the long line, I questioned the logic of attempting to see Shall We Kiss? (France) on Valentine's Day-I honestly hadn't considered the occasion-but eventually found a seat. In retrospect, it would have been worth waiting much longer to see this. Much of the plot is roughly as inevitable as Wolf, but even the twists near the end aren't all that necessary due to the buoyant comedy that sustains the whole enterprise. Light and endlessly likable. Stars the director, Emmanuel Mouret, and Virginie Ledoyen, whose only obvious English film seems to have been The Beach, directed by the astonishingly vapid Danny Boyle. Said vapidity was only recently discovered via his interview with Elvis Mitchell, on KCRW's The Treatment.

So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain (Korea/US) was even better though, perhaps because as much as I love a delicious puffball, miserabilism is where my sympathies really lie. I had a hard time getting into her first film In Between Days, as angsty a portrait of adolescence as a Cure-inspired title might imply. While this is certainly the more beautiful film (ie not shot in New Jersey during winter), I suspect the difference lies mainly in the culpability of the protagonists. The adorable, neglected, mischievous little girls of Treeless Mountain (seven and four years old, I believe) were tragic but resilient, whereas thirteen-year-old (?) Aimie of In Between Days struck me as much more responsible for her ennui, boredom, misery, etc.

Further proof of Treeless Mountain's greatness: collecting, skewering, roasting, and selling grasshoppers is a major plot point. Also, the film ends with the girls wandering across a field on their grandparent's farm, at once abandoned and saved, like something out of Miyazaki-though live-action, of course. Even better, they're singing Grandaddy's "Nature Anthem," which I didn't quite get because it's in sung Korean and neither sounds particularly like Jason Lytle, but the lyrics seemed strangely familiar, and the credits confirmed it.

Besides the movies I managed to visit Pizza Schmizza, Rocco's (pizza), Bailey's Taproom, brewpubs by Laurelwood, Rogue, Deschutes, and Bridgeport, avoided an ungodly line at Voodoo Doughnut and instead ate Thai food from a trailer outside a tent for the Jazz festival in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I saw much of downtown, the Pearl and Alphabet districts, and even made it to Powell's, where I was overwhelmed by the appeal of their ugly-beautiful trucker hats.

SF '09

2009-02-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

Pictures are up on Facebook. Maybe soon at Flickr.

Friday
Mel's Diner
Museum of the African Diaspora
Alamo Square
Buena Vista Park
Haight-Ashbury
Mission District
La Cumbre Taqueria
Union Square
Book purchase (Paul Auster's New York Trilogy)

Saturday
Chinatown, pre-festival
City Lights
North Beach
Lombard Street
Fisherman's Wharf
Tarantino's
Alcatraz
North Beach Pizza
Chinese New Year's Parade
The Owl Tree

Sunday
Dottie's
Walk:
- Tenderloin
- Nob HIll
- Russian Hill
- Fort Mason
- Marina/Yacht Harbor
- Crissy Field
- Fort Point
- Golden Gate Bridge
Cable car

Downloading in the Future

2009-01-29T21:31:00.000-08:00

I remember that periodically Charles and I used to revel, after some personal technological revelation or other, in the fact that we live in the future.

As I sit here listening to music through my new receiver (heavy and not really that futuristic) I marvel at the fact that I purchased one disc of this William Basinski box set (The Disintegration Loops) for probably $14.99 or so at The Record Collector in Iowa CIty several years ago, supposing that some day I might get around to acquiring the rest. That obviously didn't happen until one day I realized that I could legally purchase the remaining three discs (as eight MP3s) at eMusic for what amounted to under $3.

Progress is awesome.

SAN

2009-01-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

I'd already basically decided to go to San Diego around my birthday for something (warm) to do this spring, watch some baseball*, see the sights, etc., and then I learned that you can walk to the airport from downtown in less than an hour. Under three miles. Bonus!

*The World Baseball Classic in either San Diego or Los Angeles was also tempting, but I'd rather be watching basketball than traveling in March.

PIFF

2009-01-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

I got worried for a while there that Portland's film festival wouldn't be showing anything good. I mean, who releases a festival schedule less than two weeks before it opens?

I'm less excited than I was about Vancouver, but that was to be expected. I'd been hoping to see 24 City and Treeless Mountain, Wolf intrigues me, and the rest will hopefully be okay.

PIFF '09

SAT 14 FEB
3:00 Terra Nova (Melnik)
6:00 Shall We Kiss? (Mouret)
8:30 Treeless Mountain (Kim)

SUN 15 FEB
1:45 24 City (Jia)
4:45 As Simple As That (Mir Karimi)
7:00 The Friend (Lewinsky)

MON 16 FEB
2:30 Wolf: The Laws of Wilderness (Alfredson)

8track

2009-01-14T14:55:00.000-08:00

So Muxtape's got a successor, which seems nearly as straightforward if not quite as perfect. My first mix features Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Dept. of Eagles, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, The Dodos, Wolf Parade, and Deerhunter.

Davenport

2009-01-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday Meryl mentioned that she was taking a castoff couch from the VS house. I decided to follow suit so today we moved one for her and one much heavier couch for me.
This week a month-old hold item came in for me at the library: Couch, a novel by Benjamin Parzybok.
Tonight when I got home and turned on the radio just before sitting down on my new furniture, KEXP played "Will Work for Food" by The Halo Benders. First lines: "I need a couch/I haven't got one."

Clark Kent

2009-01-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

Tonight, around the fifth minute of the oral Tim Tebow hagiography in the second half, one of the broadcasters mentioned that, although some people doubt Tebow's accuracy, "he makes throws when it counts."

Being a bigger fan of logic than sports-related pabulum, I noticed that this was essentially the same thing that's often said pejoratively about Allen Iverson, Randy Moss ("I play when I want to play."), and any number of less hallowed athletes. Whether "clutch" athletes definitely exist is debatable, but perhaps also up for question is, if they're real, aren't they just super-talented slackers who ought to be able to play a lot harder the rest of the time?

Disconnection Noticed

2008-12-29T23:54:00.000-08:00

The other night I got Ableton Live set up on the Mac and attempted to put together some kind of mix, but it just wouldn't happen. In part this is probably because of all the scattered listening done in 2008. Not so much haphazard as listening to something for a few weeks and then discarding it, perhaps before its time. Even with stuff like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver that I listened to death, after putting them away for a few months I'm not able to recall specific moments without re-listening, which makes the mixing process long and tedious.

I'm not sure what the remedy is, because I'm not sure this really qualifies as a problem. It feels like this ought to be related to Slow Listening Movement-type issues, but theoretically that's just what I've done. It does at least call into question the idea of a month of post-punk, or really a month of anything at all specific. Since I won't remember it all that well, at best it would slightly influence my listening habits.

There has to be some brilliant way to fuse concentrated bursts of listening and prolonged recognition. Hmm...

Alert!

2008-12-22T14:37:00.000-08:00

Due to the apocalyptic air travel situation, I will be in Seattle all this week and next, with refund money burning a serious hole in my pocket.

So if you want to do something, let me know.

NYR'08

2008-12-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

So far my New Year's resolutions include: not obsessively spending hours on iMDB trying to figure out what good movies are coming out six or twelve months from now; renaming this blog; ...

My 2008 Lists

2008-12-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

New Films
Number Ones: Ballast, Still Orangutans, Loos Ornamental, Wendy & Lucy, Still Life, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, Summer Hours, Pineapple Express
Right Up There: Momma's Man, Flight of the Red Balloon, Chop Shop, The Juche Idea, Synecdoche, New York, Let the Right One In, Milk, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, The Last Mistress, The Edge of Heaven, Paranoid Park, Captain Ahab, Shotgun Stories, Role Models, Hamlet 2, I've Loved You So Long
Satisfying: Pierre Rissient, Ashes of Time Redux, Profit Motive & The Whispering Wind, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Son of Rambow, Timecrimes, Kung Fu Panda, Reprise, Sparrow, Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, Cthulhu, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Boarding Gate, Yella, Days in Between
Oddly Appealing: Opera Jawa, Eat for This Is My Body, Great Speeches from a Dying World, In the City of Sylvia, La France
There Were Moments: Rachel Getting Married, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Blind Mountain, Be Kind Rewind
Others: Alexandra, Chelsea on the Rocks, The Pool, Continental

Old Films
Solid Gold: Young Mr. Lincoln, Sunrise, Le Cercle Rouge, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, Dead Man, Pulp Fiction
Hal Ashby at Northwest Film Forum: The Landlord, Being There, Bound For Glory, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Harold & Maude
Otto Preminger at Film Forum: Anatomy of a Murder, Laura, Daisy Kenyon
Charlie Chaplin: Monsieur Verdoux
(Post-)Modernism: Muriel, Last Year at Marienbad, The Immortal Woman, La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, Vivre sa vie
Recently Neglected: Tropical Malady, La Promesse, Clerks II, Worldly Desires, My Neighbor Totoro
Ridley Scott at the Egyptian: Alien, Blade Runner

Recorded Music
Growing, Antony, Foals, Junior Boys, TV on the Radio (Tunde Adebimpe singing Neil Young in Rachel Getting Married), Beach House, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, "Happy House," Los Campesinos!, harmony, Bradford Cox, Jan Jelinek, Four Tet, Gang Gang Dance, "Graveyard Girl" live, Caribou, "wonky," Fuck Buttons, "Supreme Balloon," Truckasauras, The Clientele, Vampire Weekend, Villalobos, The Dodos, "Street Flash"/Water Curses, Hamilton Leithauser, "The Good Old Days," Shocking Pinks, James Pants' Stones Throw podcast

Live Music
Atlas Sound & co., Caribou & Fuck Buttons, Simian Mobile Disco, Truckasauras, Sera Cahoone, Los Campesinos, Beachwood Sparks, Iron & Wine, Comets on Fire, The Dodos, Man Man, Gang Gang Dance, Deerhunter, M83

Stuff I Obviously Need To Hear
Portishead, Flying Lotus, MGMT, Advisory Circle, Santogold, Nico Muhly, ...

Tracks from Lists
Mala "Alicia" (from Fact Magazine)

Books
The Extra Man (Jonathan Ames)
The Somnambulist (Jonathan Barnes)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)
Personal Days (Ed Park)
Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)
The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
---
The Physics of Baseball (Robert K. Adair)
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman)
Born Standing Up (Steve Martin)
Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace)
Black Postcards (Dean Wareham)
---
Let's Talk About Love (Carl Wilson) [33 1/3]
Master of Reality (John Darnielle) [33 1/3]
If You're Feeling Sinister (Scott Plagenhoef) [33 1/3]

Having made this a year-zero of sorts for beer, this is a list culled from everything I had this year (2009 will be just "new" stuff). It doesn't include tasting samples or your truly obvious local year-round standbys, but basically everything else better than good. Besides alphabetization, higher is better than lower.

Alaskan Smoked Porter
Deschutes Black Butte XX
Dogfish Head 90-Minute Imperial IPA
Duvel
Great Divide Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout
New Belgium Giddy Up!
New Belgium Le Fleur Messeur
New Belgium Lips of Faith: Eric's Sour Peach Ale
Russian River Pliny the Elder
Russian River Salvation
St. Bernardus Abt 12

Aktien St. Martin
Anchor Porter
Chimay Grande Reserve
Corsendonk Christmas Ale
Delirium Noel
Deschutes Abyss '08
Deschutes Cinder Cone Red Ale
Deschutes Hop Fest Pale Ale
Elysian The Great Pumpkin
Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale
Elysian Dragonstooth Stout
Elysian Bifrost Winter Ale
Elysian Prometheus IPA
Hale's Cerberus Tripel
Hitachino Nest Espresso Stout
Hoegaarden
Lindemans Peche Lambic
Lindemans Framboise Lambic
New Belgium Abbey Grand Cru
New Belgium Old Cherry
New Belgium Frambozen
North Coast Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout
Ommegang Abbey Dubbel
Ommegang Rouge
Oskar Blues Gordon
Pike XXXXX Stout
Port Wipeout IPA
Rogue Chocolate Stout
Rogue Mocha Porter
Russian River Damnation
Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat
Stone Ruination IPA
Duchesse de Bourgogne

2008 Year-End Lists

2008-12-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

Music
Textura: Ten Favorite Labels
Textura: 2008 Top 10s and 20s
Fact Magazine: 20 Best Mixes
Fact Magazine: 20 Best Albums
Fact Magazine: 100 Best Tracks
Fact Magazine: Lists from DJ /rupture and K-punk
Rough Trade: Albums of the Year
eMusic: Best Albums of 2008
eMusic: Philip Sherburne's 12 Electronic Albums
XLR8R: Top 25
The Wire: The Office Dissonance
*I've also posted The Wire's top 50 as an alphabetized artist list in comments.
The AV Club: 30 Best Albums
Resident Advisor: Top 15 Remixes
Resident Advisor: Top 20 Albums
Resident Advisor: Top 30 Tracks
Pitchfork: 100 Best Tracks
Pitchfork: 50 Best Albums
Blissblog: Lists of 8
Philip Sherburne: Comprehensive Blog Post

Books
Amazon: Best Books
Publishers Weekly: Best Books of the Year
NY Times: 100 Notable Books
The Millions: The Year in Reading

Film
Artforum: James Quandt (via Girish)
Roger Ebert: Best Films
New York Film Critics: Awards
indieWIRE: Critics Poll
NYTimes: Manohla Dargis' Top Ten List
NYTimes: AO Scott's Top Ten List
Film Comment: 20 Best Films (Released & Unreleased)

Etc.
Lifehacker: Top 10 Things You Forgot Your Mac Can Do
Planetizen: Top 10 Websites
New York Magazine: The Year in Culture

Transfusion #5: Three Burials

2008-12-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is thoughtfully engaging on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. On the most basic level, it's a Western, a tale of both redemption and revenge, depending on point-of-view. Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones, who stars and directs) hears that his friend and immigrant ranch hand, Melquiades Estrada, has been killed by the Border Patrol, and kidnaps the guilty patrolman, Mike Norton, enlisting him for the gruntwork of giving Melquiades a proper burial in Mexico as Melquiades had requested.

For Pete, it's a story of vengeance/closure as he seeks solace by carrying out the last wish of his ill-fated friend, specifically by forcing his killer to do the work and eventually ask forgiveness of the much-traveled corpse. Though it wouldn't seemingly be the primarily intended reading of the film, it's also possible to view it as a redemption story for patrolman Norton, who becomes a mensch only after enduring some truly horrific discipline at the hands of Pete, serving as some sort of divine figure for this reading of the film.

The primary reading includes all the most obvious themes of the story, namely the mistreatment of migrant laborers from Mexico, and the related issues that arise for both natives and Mexicans. What we get here that we don't get in Crash, for example, is a more complex, though not necessarily robust, characterization of the hard-working chicano than we're used to. We also see a continuum of attitudes by the white authorities toward foreign Spanish-speakers rather than a bifurcation of extreme caricatures. At this level I think the film works fairly well, but it's probably not great.

Mike Norton and his wife serve as a way for Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter, to discuss the underlying cultural values that may help fuel the clash between white Texans and Mexicans. Norton and his wife, Lou Ann, are callow mallrats from Cincinnati, recent transplants to the west Texas desert, and naively hopeful about their prospects. Their utter cluelessness serves over and over again as an indictment of the artificiality and disconnection from reality of consumer culture.

Lou Ann's relationship with Rachel, waitress at the local diner, reveals to us the shallowness of her point of view throughout her development, from naif to disenchanted (and neglected) spouse to the worn-out and defeated easterner who finally gives up and quits both the town and her lost husband. Her comment that Mike is "beyond redemption" seems both true and, ultimately, false, both shortsighted and immediately perceptive. Within the world she knows, her husband is indeed a sad and worthless deadbeat, but that also exposes the narrowness of her experience.

We get an early hint that Norton's unintentional act of manslaughter has changed him when he refuses to go shopping with Lou Ann after driving into Odessa, even as she reminds him, "You used to love the mall." He seems oddly resigned to his fate throughout his abduction and labor-intensive rite of passage, as if he knows innately that the world he is leaving behind is not one to be mourned or regretted.

Jones expresses his distaste for consumer culture visually and symbolically, as he forces Norton out of his regular clothes and into Melquiades' work shirt and pants. Memorable scenes include Norton slipping around in flip-flops recovering Melquiades' body from the freshly re-dug grave as the Friday night Midland high-school football game glows and rumbles in the background; Melquiades' confusion in the hotel room during a sexual liaison, arranged for him by Pete, with palm trees painted on the walls and porn on the TV, liberated finally by some south-of-the-border dance music from the clock radio; and the at-once obvious and poignant, and hilarious, moment when exhausted ex-bigot Norton, who began the film as a brutal enforcer of the border with the demented enthusiasm of an Abu Ghraib guard, sharing a bottle of whiskey with some friendly Mexican gauchos, and abruptly bursts into tears at a ridiculous soap opera his wife used to watch.

All this is to say nothing of the sheriff, the pickup truck-as-horse or the design of the dusty town filled with mobile homes and trailers and its visual link to the old cowtowns of Ford and Wayne, or even Leone and Eastwood. I've also mentioned very little about the powerful, quasi-religious transformation of Mike Norton as a biblical sort of figure (think Moses, Jonah, or Paul), wandering through the desert and put through severe trial, emerging as a fully human man of God, or, in this case, a real cowboy, neither American nor Mexican, simply and honorably Southwestern, in the mold of Jones's Pete Perkins character.

Jonathan Rosenbaum review

Transfusion #4: A Few of My Favorite Things

2008-12-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

First, this essay/manifesto, by David Bordwell on the absence of great film writing, is for Charles to read. I've been meaning to read On the History of Film Style for a while now, but this was engaging enough that I might really do it. I'm sure I must have read him in Media Theory class somewhere.

Two pictures: Older people dancing and younger people dancing.

The New York Times had an article today on beards and their return to fashion.

Quotes:

Mr. Martin's idea of a style symbol, seriously, is Ulysses S. Grant.

For a while men have looked too much like Boy Scouts going off to day camp.

Do beards that call to mind Charles Manson suggest dissatisfaction with "the system"?

"I wonder if beards can have the oomph they once had when it feels like someone will ask you: 'Where did you get that beard? Is that beard from Dolce & Gabbana?'" - Tim Harrington, Les Savy Fav

No survey ever conducted about women's attitudes toward beards, even those not underwritten by the Gillette Company, has indicated that more than 2 or 3 percent of women would describe a full beard as sexy.

Also, this site makes me laugh every time I think about it, no matter what: "GiganticURL.com: Make Any URL Gigantic!"

Transfusion #3: Bird's Eye View

2008-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Opening day approaches and I just read Moneyball. Thus, here are overhead views of all Major League ballparks. As a psychedelic bonus, you'll want to check out the carnival to the east of Tropicana Field in Tampa. Also, the area around Dodger Stadium is pretty cool.

American League

AL West
Seattle Mariners
Oakland A's
Los Angeles Angels
Texas Rangers

AL Central
Kansas City Royals
Minnesota Twins
Chicago White Sox
Detroit Tigers
Cleveland Indians

AL East
Tampa Bay Devil Rays
Toronto Blue Jays
Baltimore Orioles
New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox

National League

NL West
San Francisco Giants
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Diego Padres
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies

NL Central
Houston Astros
St. Louis Cardinals
Milwaukee Brewers
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Pittsburgh Pirates

NL East
Atlanta Braves
Florida Marlins
Philadelphia Phillies
Washington Nationals
New York Mets

Transfusion #2: April 2006 Chart

2008-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Since list-making is about all I can manage in terms of writing/blogging sometimes, I figured I'd follow the pattern I've seen at group blogs such as Tape and House Is A Feeling, among other places.

So, six things I've been listening to and enjoying a lot lately, not in any strict order.

1. DJ Copy "Emotions"
I said what I wanted to about this when I posted the MP3 at my blog a few weeks ago. If you, too, would like to hear it (it's the old Mariah Carey chestnut with a new electro backing track), I can post it again. Just leave a comment.

2. Three 6 Mafia "Stay Fly"
I'm getting to this a little late as it was a big single in 2005, but I only got around to hearing it by paying attention to year-end lists. It may or may not frustrate you to learn that the lyrics are entirely about getting and staying high, but this track is much more about the means than the ends, as content goes. That is, there's not much content but the presentation (strings, backup singers, mildly clever rhymes delivered in an addictive fashion) is fabulous.

3. Dead Prez "Hell Yeah (Pimp the System)"
Via Diplo's DJ Shadow mixtape and the Emynd and Bo Bliz mix at Lemon Red.

4. The Decemberists The Tain EP
I've been really feeling this along with other heavier stuff (Dinosaur Jr., Black Mountain, Black Sabbath, Death from Above 1979) lately.

5. Band of Horses "Funeral"
Duh.

6. Tiga "Far from Home (DFA Instrumental Remix Edit)"
As Geeta Dayal says, "That bassline! The shimmering harmonics! I swooned!" She and other bloggers have also gotten me really excited to hear Carl Craig's remix of Delia and Gavin's "Revelee," which I don't have yet, so maybe that'll be on the next chart.

Transfusion #1: L'enfant

2008-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

The other day I remembered that I had some posts sitting at another blog which isn't even Google-able, it's been dead so long. Rather than link to it, I'm going to freshly repost several items here.

Directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Son), this reminded me of Bresson's Pickpocket. We follow a young man around an urban environment as he performs petty (for the most part) criminal acts, mostly thievery. Eventually, though, there is a reckoning, in which the young man winds up in jail. The film ends with his girlfriend crying as she visits him there. Here, though, the thief himself is weeping, as he seemed, after an overwhelming series of consequences, to finally comprehend how destructive his irresponsible behavior had been, and perhaps what it means to own up to his actions, both criminal and paternal.

Early parts also recalled scenes from several Godard films, as the handheld camera follows the young couple frolicking recklessly. Similar to Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, the early scenes of levity here counterbalance the grim stuff to follow. L'enfant, though, is much more grounded than those films. Very tightly framed, though not claustrophobically so, there are few establishing shots, really not much other than close-ups and medium shots except through a character's point of view. The style and form serve to create a sense of immediacy that is at times intense and even uncomfortable. See it for yourself.

Numbers One and Two

2008-12-05T18:03:00.000-08:00

It's not often two bits of bathroom-related trivia occur to me in the same day, so I figure the coincidence is good enough for a post.

I remembered today out of the blue that my last place of work at one point hired a private detective to figure out who was repeatedly plugging one of the toilets in the mens restroom by using an inhuman amount of paper. And that frequently felt like some kind of encapsulation of my whole experience there.

Kottke's "Short Digital Ramble," in which he mentions paruresis, reminded me not only of Nicholson Baker's mention of the phenomenon in The Mezzanine, but also that it was the main topic of our brief conversation (initiated by me) when I got Baker to sign one of his books after a reading at Carleton. Less awkward than might be expected.

Day 30

2008-11-30T00:34:00.000-08:00

And finally we have an odds & ends post.

Simon Reynolds has a thrillingly good review at Salon of the new albums by Kanye West and Guns N' Roses. I praise it not because I agree with or have even heard any of the music discussed, but because it's a corrective to the dreaded and endlessly popular "think piece." Instead of a convoluted mess of half-baked reminiscences and observations thrown about in nominal relation to the records at hand, Reynolds briefly summarizes the popular opinions/ideas about the musicians and then zeroes in on the music, most notably the technological aspects. Kind of like what David Bordwell might produce were he a pop music critic, Reynolds discusses in depth, vis a vis Chinese Democracy, ProTools, compression, and digital correction; and re. 808s and Heartbreak, well, 808s, Autotune, and many/most of the other techniques Kanye's puts to use. Sure, he throws in some not unfounded psychoanalysis, but this is a review and not a tech-spec sheet. Writing like this obviously takes a bit of a gestation period, and a solid body of knowledge on the part of the reviewer, but the music world would probably be a better place if more pieces were half as edifying.

Secondly, in a fit of haven't-done-the-dishes-in-a-while resourcefulness a short while ago, I discovered that spoons may actually be preferable to butter knives for spreading. At least in that they can scoop it just as well, but when actually applying the butter to the bread (or other surface), you can adjust how much you're using by turning the spoon to leave some for another swipe. From mild shame to vindication in mere seconds.

And the Egyptian has their weekend midnight schedule up for January. I can finally see Se7en, and will almost certainly revisit Wet Hot American Summer, Dr. Strangelove, and The Matrix, none of which I've seen in a theater.

Whew.

Day 29

2008-11-29T19:54:00.000-08:00

AO Scott's article in last Sunday's Times Magazine, "The Screening of America," contains an infographic with the amounts of time people spend per year using various media. The article itself is remarkably ho-hum, regurgitated metacommentary on the state of film/video/television viewing, how and where it's done.

The graphic, though, I find far more interesting. Particularly because my data for the top and bottom categories would be so extremely different. I can predict with pretty good certainty that I'll have spent somewhere over 300 hours at the "box office," more than 25 times the average amount per person in 2007, and almost certainly no more than 50 hours watching "cable/satellite TV." Although vacation time spent with family could push me a bit over that, I'd still be comfortably less than 10% of the national average.*

I would probably vary less widely, though still not an insignificant amount, on broadcast TV, online, video games, and mobile (I don't really like watching anything smaller than a laptop, assuming that doesn't qualify), but home video/DVD is about right on the mark. It's tempting to try to interpret the categories as descending from least to most intentional, but that may be misguided for a number of reasons.

*The total consumption comes 40 hrs/wk. It's difficult to discern precisely how much overlap this entails, but certainly some of the hours spent reading magazines (why is there a single reading activity included here?) must simultaneously be spent watching one of these other screens. I'm assuming "online" means watching video online because 3.5 hrs/wk seems extremely small for all activities.

Day 28

2008-11-28T12:01:00.000-08:00

2008 Year-end Lists

Lists
Fimoculous
Largehearted Boy: Music Lists List
Largehearted Boy: Book Lists List

The rest have been collected in a rolling post which will probably be finalized some time in January.

Day 27

2008-11-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

There is, downtown at the corner of 8th & Olive, a bus stop with a sign posted. The sign says that due to construction the stop will need to be relocated for "about two weeks" starting August 27. To the untrained eye, the ground-level of the building looks only marginally closer to finished than it was pre-Labor Day.

Day 26

2008-11-26T00:01:00.001-08:00

Day 25

2008-11-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Watching Obama's weekly address I had a brilliant thought: You know what would really bring some change to America? If Ze Frank produced these things.

I don't know if framing the president-elect from forehead to lower lip would be frightening or hilarious or what, but it certainly would not be boring.

Day 24

2008-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

What to listen to in 2009, other than a month of post-punk? Maybe more radio/podcasts. This year I've largely been listening to the Resident Advisor mixes in terms of ephemeral audio, but rarely do they provide a context for lots of different types of tracks, mostly just a lot of great transitions within the same genre(s).

DJ /rupture, on the other hand, will include maybe ten different styles in a one-hour show. "New bass and beats plus live guests (musicians, DJs, poets) and an ear for the global south. Cumbia. Dubstep. Gangsta synthetics. Sound-art. Maghrebi. International exclusives."

Tim Sweeney is another fairly wide-ranging guy, within the confines of dance music. Largely disco and disco-revival (DFA, Rong Music, etc.) but inclusive of plenty more as well. Probably I thought of Beats in Space while reading the New Yorker profile of Cliff Bleszinski and Epic Games, founded by another Tim Sweeney.

I've also been listening to more talking heads at work recently: KCRW's Bookworm and The Treatment, and other odds and ends like the New York Declaration of the International Necronautic Society, mentioned in Zadie Smith's review of General Secretary Tom McCarthy's Remainder and the unaffiliated Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

Day 23

2008-11-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

Prior to seeing Synecdoche, New York, I commented that maybe I'd seen fifteen or so Philip Seymour Hoffman films. It turns that this was an underestimation. As of today I've watched nineteen. Here's an annotated list, in chronological order for me, complete with character names and number signs from IMDb.

# Twister (1996) .... Dustin Davis
Pretty much all I know is that I watched this movie and that Helen Hunt was in it. I would have to look it up to say any more.

# Almost Famous (2000) .... Lester Bangs
I think I watched this on DVD shortly after it came out, around the same time I would've first learned who Lester Bangs was. PSH was one of the few things I can recall really liking about it. Cameron Crowe has never struck me as particularly worthwhile.

# Punch-Drunk Love (2002) .... Dean Trumbell
# Magnolia (1999) .... Phil Parma
# Boogie Nights (1997) .... Scotty J.
# Hard Eight (1996) (as Phillip Seymour Hoffman) .... Young Craps Player

The PT Anderson films. Probably saw all of these on DVD 2002-2003. Magnolia and Boogie Nights turned me into a fan of PSH, along with John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall. Pretty much anybody who uses all three initials, really.

I can't really recall his role in Hard Eight. Punch-Drunk Love is more vivid in my memory, though I didn't really like it all that much.

# Love Liza (2002) .... Wilson Joel
# Happiness (1998) .... Allen
# Owning Mahowny (2003) .... Dan Mahowny
# State and Main (2000) .... Joseph Turner White
# The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) .... Freddie Miles
# The Big Lebowski (1998) .... Brandt

The remainder seen in college. State and Main was shown on campus. I'm surprised PSH hasn't worked with the Coens more. Love Liza I watched on tape, which is really uncommon for something not viewed with anyone else. Owning Mahowny was probably at the Lagoon Theater, but not particularly memorable.

# Capote (2005) .... Truman Capote
# Empire Falls (2005) (TV) .... Charlie Mayne

I remember seeing most of Empire Falls in a hotel somewhere with my family, but I don't recall where. Probably Arizona or something. Amanda and I watched Capote at the Harvard Exit in the little theater. Didn't recall until just now that Catherine Keener co-starred in that.

# Strangers with Candy (2005) .... Henry
# The Savages (2007) .... Jon Savage
# Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) .... Andy Hanson

I missed the first couple minutes of the Lumet film at BAM due to unfamiliarity with their showtime policy (they print the time at which the feature starts, not the trailers or ads) and would someday like to make amends. The Savages was at the multiplex in Chelsea. Amy, Swetha and I watched Strangers with Candy on DVD almost immediately after the Buckeyes lost their second BCS championship in a row.

# Synecdoche, New York (2008) .... Caden Cotard
# Charlie Wilson's War (2007) .... Gust Avrakotos

Not counting The Big Lebowski, which I consider more a frequently recurring social event than an actual movie, weirdly enough Synecdoche brings the tally of non-family members I've watched PSH films with to 7 women and 1 man. Odd.

---

Seven days left. I may need to pre-post the final five in order not to worry about them around Thanksgiving.

Day 22

2008-11-22T23:37:00.000-08:00

I got bored the other day and visited Idolator, always a bad idea. Even if the posts themselves aren't vitrolic and inane, the comments inevitably are.

The striking thing was how personally people react to lists. As some sort of attack on character or value. Much of the time I think this is a negative outcome of popism vs. rockism, the largely successful argument for all musical styles and sounds as potentially worthwhile, the idea that a critic or engaged listener ought to be not only open to but perhaps enthusiastic about hearing any/all things at any/all times.

Not that individual scenes (and they still exist) wouldn't or don't create their own internecine squabbles, but the discussion on Idolator re. year-end lists thus far suggests that debates aren't so much over the relative merits of individual works as charges of genre-ism, ie How dare your website not include my second through fifth favorite metal/country/teen-pop records on your list?

All this seems to have very little with the actual enjoyment and appreciation of music. In a pragmatic sense, that's what list-season ought to be about; comparing notes, figuring out what you might have missed or forgotten about, then putting your headphones back on, closing your eyes, and not worrying about it anymore.

Day 21

2008-11-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

Of all possible year-end lists⁺, this is probably the most reasonably complete. My year in cities, barring any unforeseen excitement.

Brooklyn, NY
Wayland, IA
Starkville, MS
San Francisco, CA
Oregon City, OR*
Seattle, WA*
George, WA
Myrtle Beach, SC
Vancouver, BC
(Orrville, OH)

---

⁺ I had high hopes of being the first person to bookmark this on Delicious. In fact, I came in second, but the first person did so weeks before the page was active, so it may still count as a moral victory.

Day 20

2008-11-20T22:17:00.001-08:00

Subaru definitely just followed up a "green-themed" PSA about recycling car batteries with a commercial featuring a family who impulse-bought a second Subaru because it was so awesome. Someone involved in the decisionmaking process must have caught the irony, right?

Day 19

2008-11-19T23:17:00.000-08:00

The urge to rethink a trip to SXSW 2009 is strong. Not so much that several purchases are coming up sometime soon, but more that movies and music are two of the things I already consume in the greatest quantities anyway.

I'd like to visit Austin and environs, but perhaps not when throngs of other people are doing the same. The majority of the bands will make it to Seattle within a year or two anyway, without impossible queues for entry. There are inevitably several films that won't see release, theatrical or DVD, for several years if ever, but they alone probably aren't worth the trip. And given that Cascadia has three film festivals anyway, adding a fourth to the calendar verges on overload.

How else to spend a week in March/April? The first idea that springs to mind is a second try at the trip up the West Coast that went somewhat awry earlier this year. Maybe a flight to San Diego, trains to Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco, and then a drive back to Seattle by way of Newport.

Or perhaps I'll think of something else.

Day 18

2008-11-18T20:02:00.000-08:00

I suppose what I like most about the TV on the Radio album is that it feels like they're saving "big" music from its traditional proponents. That is to say, when I listen to it I think of the Arcade Fire, Coldplay, maybe U2, but always in contrast. Particularly the vocals. The singing on Dear Science ranges all over the place emotionally, but assiduously avoids the completely overwrought, which is basically the one mode in which Win Butler, Chris Martin, and Bono vocalize, even when they whisper.

Beyond that initial impression, what strikes me about the sounds on the record, apart from the sheer range of them, is that nearly every song is beautiful in one way or another, either a trademarked Dave Sitek wail of feedback, or gloopy, shiny synths, or Tunde Adebimpe cooing low, or Kyp Malone gliding over top of everything with his unearthly, feminine falsetto.

One idea I had for comprehending the year in music is a system like The Album My Morning Jacket Should Have Put Out: Microcastle. In that vein these guys are probably filling in for both Wolf Parade and Hot Chip, neither of whom fulfilled my admittedly very high expectations.

Day 17

2008-11-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

Friday morning on the bus I saw the best poem ever. I tried to memorize it, but wasn't completely sure, so the Seattle Times had to fill in the blanks.

untitled
by Giovanni Paredes, age 6

I dreamt that a zebra was talking to me
I gave him some food
And walked away
The zebra followed me
I yelled, "GO BACK!"
He didn't want to go back
But he went back
Ate some grass
And then drove off
In a red monster truck

Day 16

2008-11-16T21:05:00.000-08:00

Listening to a KEXP "documentary" on Echo and the Bunnymen today, I was reminded that I never really followed up on reading Rip It Up and Start Again all that well. So between Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents' Day it's going to be all post-punk/new wave (1978-1984) all the time.

So once I glance at what I've got already, and look at what the library has to offer (unfortunately they only sort by "Rock music." and decade), it'll be time for a downloading spree the likes of which have not been seen since... volunteering days, maybe?

Day 15

2008-11-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

You'll notice if you're peering at this post on its original website that the design has changed, at least superficially. I was considering something more drastic, but that obviously has not come to pass. It may require a tweak or two eventually (still can't get the "Posted" and "Comments" items at the bottom to align on the right) but for now it's a pleasant change.

A perfectly valid moment to recall that I initially (February 2002) generated a few posts mostly so I could have some content around which to figure out how to use HTML/CSS.

Day 14

2008-11-14T00:08:00.000-08:00

A couple film-related lists.

I was talking to Jeff at the museum today (the new site design is outstanding) and, among other things, we basically broached the topic: Contemporary Hollywood cinema, hot or not?

Of course, it always seems to me that there is just a glut of good films to see, new or otherwise, but when I restrict myself to stuff I'd know about without reading film magazines, blogs, or other specialist media, the list gets fairly slim.

I'm going to leave very good (2 stars) alone and focus just on the great ones I've seen this year. The top group is very general releases, the second group English-language films you might have read about from, say, Manohla Dargis or Roger Ebert, and the third foreign-language films.

For the most part everything here played at least a Landmark theater in the Seattle area, or may by New Year's Eve. Still Life got a lot of press but played only at SIFF Cinema. Ashes of Time also isn't really either new or old.

It seems that it may take some work to find movies to really get enthusiastic about, depending on your tastes and aesthetics, but where to begin?

And then there is the list of directors I compiled, quantitatively analyzed by number of films watched.

It would be interesting to try to find some sort of very rough distribution for the numbers, a function several factors probably.

I took a college class on Capra and Wilder. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Hawks, and Bergman are all thrust at you over and over by most any film critic/historia. Ford is too, but in a different tone, and has less instant appeal to a lot of modern audiences. Wong and the Coens each managed a sort of critical consensus, albeit via wildly divergent styles and worldviews, at the right time. Godard seems to me probably the most revived director of the past five or so years that I've been paying attention to such things; I've seen films of his in at least three separate retrospectives, though none of course were exhaustive. Altman I'm a little surprised by, but he's another name that just comes up constantly, and he's readily available.

And what to say about Richard Linklater? Well, only that I suspect that if you had all the filmmakers on the list, living or dead, over for dinner, he's the only one who would offer to do the dishes, and frankly it wouldn't surprise me if he followed through.

Day 13

2008-11-13T00:14:00.000-08:00

According to eMusic's blog, 17 dots, "Reverb is so in right now."

You could pretty much replace that with, "Giving money to people named Andy Slabaugh is so in right now," and I would feel about the same. It's kind of sad.

The song/video they point to, "Come On Over In Your Silver Car" by Desolation Wilderness, is perfect. Almost enough to get me back reading the Forkcast every day.

Day 12

2008-11-12T15:48:00.000-08:00

I feel like they read my mind.

It might be hypocritical, but for the most part I try to avoid indie electronic mixes. The excesses of Justice and some/much of blog-house has something to do with it. It could also be that I prefer to listen to mixes of things that are new and strange, but that's not always the case. Most likely it's that a lot of stuff like this comes from bloggers who've listened to enough dance music, or dance remixes of indie hits, to cobble together an hour's worth of mix fodder.

The DJs behind Allez-Allez, though, have no credibility issues. Ewan Pearson, Lindstrøm, The Black Dog; the roster they've accumulated for their blog so far is as impressive as you'll find anywhere.

Nice to hear someone approach this stuff from the proper angle.

Day 11

2008-11-11T00:15:00.000-08:00

Interview

Bandmembers Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian DeGraw, Tim DeWit and Josh Diamond utilize all manner of percussion, keyboards and electronics to create a sort of melting-pot avant-pop, music that hints at everything from synth-pop to hip-hop to new age, from psychedelia to Middle Eastern dance music to Afrobeat.

I was expecting good things Monday night, a few less when Growing canceled, but was not prepared for far and away the greatest set of all time.

There have been reports aplenty of Gang Gang Dance's unpredictable and terrific live shows, but it's difficult enough to be clear and direct about music in the first place, let alone a sprawling improvisational live show. At their peak the band seemed to be using two to three percussionists, including a full drum set with plenty of kick, steel drums, and a drum machine, possibly either programmed or played, a bed of sustained synth chords, a higher and more melodic synthesizer line, one or two guitars, a voice kind of like Bjork in a pleasant but definitely otherworldly mode, and enough reverb and delay to swallow the crowd whole. Not to mention the spectacle of Liz Bougatsos shimmying around with waist-length hair and tallest heels I've ever seen a performer wear. The superlative sound at the Triple Door certainly didn't hurt.

For the most part, though, this will fall prey to what I'll have to call the Jan Jelinek curse. That is, even if the record is a not-bad reproduction of what they played tonight, I may not recognize it given the lack of lyrics, hooks, or anything traditionally memorable in a pop sense.

Day 10

2008-11-10T00:28:00.000-08:00

It is once again the season for skipping things. However, unlike in New York where Manhattan was too far away and Williamsburg too inconvenient, or two years ago when I was feeling either poor or depressed or something, this year mostly it's that there's just too much stuff.

Thursday I definitely stayed home from a movie because the weather was unpleasant enough that I really didn't feel like venturing out again. Several other at least moderately exciting events have gone unattended mostly because they didn't shout loudly enough from my calendar.

It is important to keep in mind that after about mid-January, though, culture comes to a halt, so we must stockpile memories to keep us warm during the dark and rainy hibernation.

Day 9

2008-11-09T19:45:00.001-08:00

DJ /rupture from a list/interview in Pitchfork:

A Popular Artist I'd Like to Fall Into Obscurity

There are so many people who are not worthy of their popularity. And, for the most part, I kind of disregard them. And it's weird that the rest of the world doesn't [laughs]. In a sense, I think my broad condemning would be for any of these bands that are doing the "we need the money, let's get together and tour 10 years later" thing. So, a band like My Bloody Valentine. People are so reverential towards them. Or the Pixies. They're both great bands, but at the same time I'm like, "Well, it's strange to see...." A band's import and meaning is constantly being shaped, and it's often totally out of proportion to what their past status was or what their current status would be.... I don't know, it's hard to explain.

I'm not actively wishing for people to fall into obscurity, but I'd rather see more obscure people getting more shine. I'm happy that Bob Dylan, who I'm not a fan of, can do what he does and endlessly entertain himself and stop innovating, like all of these big bands who have been around since the 1970s do. That's fine. They're becoming totally institutional-- they're like a museum at this point. People pay to go see dead artifacts. But what I'm more interested in is, wouldn't it be great if a young regaetta artist from the Reef Foothills can go do a show in New York and San Francisco and Chicago and do this weird little U.S. tour. A minor step out of the obscurity for these other people, I would be more interested in.

Day 8

2008-11-08T23:46:00.000-08:00

I was struck today by the way in which Barnes & Noble is, no matter how "corporate" or bland, still in a completely different league from basically any other type of big-box, mall-linked store.

While they didn't have several more obscure books I idly searched for, they did have say, Jameson on Jameson, a series of interviews with Marxist cultural critic Fredereic Jameson, which caught my eye. You certainly wouldn't want to have to limit your library to what could be found there, but I suspect such a restricted diet would be far more enriching than one limited to, say, Johnny Rockets or Victoria's Secret or Eddie Bauer.

Day 7

2008-11-07T00:39:00.000-08:00

I've noticed recently with long-term events like NWFF's year-long film series and SIFF passes going on sale, there's an almost inaudible nagging in the back of my mind. It arises because I haven't spent more than 15 consecutive months in one place since graduating high school. Even with absolutely no intention of going anyplace else, my mind stalls when attempting to contemplate anything past the start of spring.

My suspicion is that it'll take until about Thanksgiving 2009 to stop thinking in year-plus stages. Could be sooner.

Day 6

2008-11-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Northwest Film Forum presents an in-depth, yearlong exploration of the films of 1969, presenting a diversity of feature films, documentaries and experimental works that were seen on screens during that tumultuous year.

On their survey a few months back, the NWFF asked about paying for year-round admission, and while that didn't quite happen (personally I'd rather see Landmark or AMC institute something like that) this is a great deal as well; the year-long series pass is $69.

Last night I realized that, at least since I started earning a paycheck again back in March, I've only watched one video a month. This is perhaps less than optimal since it means that I basically never really choose which older films to watch, but just glean the good stuff from local repertory programs. And mostly that means (outside of NWFF) I see pretty safe stuff; not that it's not good (The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, and Notorious over the past month), but all the same it feels like a sort of cinematic malaise is beginning to creep over me. If only it were the new year so I could make some kind of resolution...

Day 5

2008-11-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Guardian

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world.

...

Rove's America was not just turned on its head yesterday. It was broken up and recast in a very different mould.

...

Mr Obama will take office in January amid massive unrealisable expectations and facing a daunting list of problems - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the broken healthcare system, the spiralling federal budget and America's profligate energy regime all prominent among them. Eclipsing them all, as Mr Obama has made clear in recent days, is the challenge of rebuilding the economy and the banking system. These, though, are issues for another day. Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America's hope and, in no small way, ours too.

The Nation

We are inheritors of this momentous victory, but it was not ours. The laurels properly belong to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the other martyrs who died for civil rights. And to millions more before them who struggled across centuries and fell short of winning their freedom. And to those rare politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, who stood up bravely in a decisive time, knowing how much it would cost his political party for years to come. We owe all of them for this moment.

Whatever happens next, Barack Obama has already changed this nation profoundly. Like King before him, the man is a great and brave teacher. Obama developed out of his life experiences a different understanding of the country, and he had the courage to run for president by offering this vision. For many Americans, it seemed too much to believe, yet he turned out to be right about us. Against all odds, he persuaded a majority of Americans to believe in their own better natures and, by electing him, the people helped make it true.

...

In this way, Obama redefined the country for us, but our responses involved generational differences. For younger people, white and black, his vision seemed entirely straightforward. It is the country they already know, and they expressed great enthusiasm. Finally, they said, a politician who recognizes the racial differences that are part of their lives and no big deal. For young blacks and other minorities, Obama's place at the pinnacle of official power lifts a coarse cloak that has blanketed their lives and dreams--the stultifying burden of being judged, whether they succeed or fail, on the basis of their race.

For others of us at an advanced age, Obama's success is more shocking. We can see it as a monumental rebuke to tragic history--the ultimate defeat of "white supremacy." That vile phrase was embedded in American society (even the Constitution) from the outset and still in common usage when some of us were young. Now it is officially obsolete. Racism will not disappear entirely, but the Republican "Southern strategy" that marketed racism has been smashed. Americans will now be able to see themselves differently, North and South, white and black. The changes will spread through American life in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. Let us congratulate ourselves on being alive at such a promising moment.

NY Times

Mr. Obama inherits a terrible legacy. The nation is embroiled in two wars — one of necessity in Afghanistan and one of folly in Iraq. Mr. Obama’s challenge will be to manage an orderly withdrawal from Iraq without igniting new conflicts so the Pentagon can focus its resources on the real front in the war on terror, Afghanistan.

The campaign began with the war as its central focus. By Election Day, Americans were deeply anguished about their futures and the government’s failure to prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of deregulation. Mr. Obama will have to move quickly to impose control, coherence, transparency and fairness on the Bush administration’s jumbled bailout plan.

His administration will also have to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in. Climate change is a global threat, and after years of denial and inaction, this country must take the lead on addressing it. The nation must develop new, cleaner energy technologies, to reduce greenhouse gases and its dependence on foreign oil.

Other than just a rare chance to feel unguardedly optimistic, Obama's victory felt visually striking: seeing a black man on that stage, delivering that speech. I can only hope it means more than symbolic hope for everyone in the country who's traditionally underrepresented, obviously African Americans but of course also poor Americans, female Americans, gay Americans, etc.

Day 4

2008-11-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

It's as good a day as any to update my walking map of Seattle. The fact that it is now always dark and frequently raining after work makes it much less enjoyable to stroll anywhere other than home, or perhaps some other place close and warm, so progress is likely to slow considerably.

As a reminder, the red indicates streets without sidewalks which I will ignore. The paler streets are those I've walked. The map stretches from 85th Street at the north edge to Jackson Street at the south. At this point I've pretty much covered everywhere regularly convenient and started on places that aren't, although that's not such a bad thing. The truly and deeply residential areas of the city along the west and east sides will likely be the last to go. Queen Anne is also a steep enough hill that walking down is not entirely enjoyable and walking directly up is foolish.

UPDATE: I should also mention that Seattle street views are now available on Google Maps. The house numbers are not correct, but the pictures are clear enough that you might be able to read them anyway.

Day 3

2008-11-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

It seems that Jan Jelinek has put out a new album under the name Ursula Bogner on his new label and invented quite a backstory. Given the lack of true obscurity in the age of the internet, I suppose PR like this fills a necessary niche in the musical landscape.

What excites me about this stuff, though, is not the pseudo-history associated with it, but the atmospheres it conjures in your head. Early synthesizer and computer music sounds like it's coming from some sort of fantastic place that may never exist. If I had some sort of public place to design--a bar, a restaurant, a coffeeshop, maybe even a club--this is exactly the direction I'd go in. Modernist furnishings and artwork, oscilloscopes and other odd and kind of outdated-looking electronic equipment, and most definitely background music like this.

Maybe the OHM compilation, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Farben records and drone music by Jelinek and others. Most certainly Keith Fullerton Whitman, particularly Multiples. Ghost Box records and library music.

The obvious name for such a place would be "Back To The Future," but just as obviously that would be an impossible name to use.

Day 2

2008-11-02T02:14:00.000-08:00

From the candidate statement of The Socialism & Liberation Party:

The United States is the richest country in the world. Every person should have the right to free health care, education, job training, childcare, affordable food and housing, and a good job with full benefits. Under capitalism, the wealth created by workers is unjustly controlled by the rich. Their economic decisions are based on maximizing profits, regardless of the cost to people or the planet.

Day 1

2008-11-01T02:04:00.001-07:00

November will see a blog post every day. I hope to stockpile a few to get started and cascade from there on in.

Most pertinent today is probably my successful Halloween costume at work, for which I dressed up as one of my two bosses and came away with such prizes as an orange "Happy Halloween!" tie featuring a mummy, and a few other odds and ends.

Also of note: the hordes of young trick-or-treaters milling around Market Street as I walked through Ballard after work. Somehow the costumes didn't strike me at first (the much larger adults were mostly not dressed up) and, not having visited the neighborhood for a long time, struggled for a while to remember if this is really what life was like outside of Capitol Hill. Then it clicked and I calmed down.

Up to Date

2008-10-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

I just finally made posts (not reviews, just ratings) for all the films I've seen to date; 172 this year (79 new releases) and 26 so far this month. Some of the data I'm tracking (just for curiosity) includes runtime, aspect ratio, pace for the year, and average rating. As of today, the average rating for 2008 is 1.83 (well below 2007) and I plan to see approximately 208 movies before the end of the year, although that always dips slightly just before Christmas.

Runtime and aspect ratio are more complex and will take quite a bit more work to see if I can make anything interesting out of those numbers.

Here are days of the week totals:

SU	MO	TU	WE	TH	FR	SA
25	21	23	26	15	26	36

I can't fully explain these numbers. Specifically, why do I basically never watch movies on Thursdays? I suppose it has to do with programming; it's kind of a throwaway day in terms of rare or old stuff that might play just once or twice. Northwest Film Forum will do weekend-only series and plenty of Tuesday-Wednesday slots. I expected Saturday would be highest, although I can't totally rationalize why I see fewer films on Sundays. Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday were the days to seem movies on campus at Carleton, though, so maybe I subconsciously ignore the cinema on that day in between and the day after.

Cornucopia

2008-10-20T23:31:00.000-07:00

I'm honestly not quite sure how this compares with when I was at KRLX, but it seems this year the avalanche of good new music has gotten out of hand. There's a ton of stuff I haven't gotten my hands on yet, and at least another good month of releases to go, but I'm already forgetting very good stuff that came out earlier this year, simply due to quantity. MP3 blogs became definitely unnecessary several months back.

iTunes is showing about sixty records I've liked enough to keep around so far from 2008.

2562: Aerial
Animal Collective: Water Curses
Antony and the Johnsons: Another World
Atlas Sound: Let the Blind Lead...
Beach House: Devotion
The Black Keys: Attack and Release
Black Mountain: In the Future
Blood on the Wall: Liferz
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
Booka Shade: The Sun & The Neon Light
Caribou: She's the One
The Clientele: That Night, A Forest Grew
Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours
Carl Craig: Sessions
The Dodos: Visiter
Ellen Allien: SooL
Fleet Foxes: s/t
Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant
Foals: Antidotes
Four Tet: Ringer EP
Fuck Buttons: Street Horrrsing
Gentleman Jesse: Introducing...
Girl Talk: Feed the Animals
Growing: All the Way
Hercules and Love Affair: s/t
Hot Chip: Made in the Dark
James Pants: Welcome
Jeremy Jay: A Place Where We Could Go
Kelley Polar: I Need You To Hold On...
Lindstrøm: Where You Go I Go Too
Loco Dice: 7 Dunham Place
Los Campesinos!: Hold On Now, Youngster
M83: Saturdays = Youth
Matmos: Supreme Balloon
MRC: Miniatures
Morgan Geist: Double Night Time
My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges
No Age: Nouns
Philip Sherburne: Salt & Vinegar
Ricardo Villalobos: Vasco
Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance, Vol. 1
She & Him: Volume One
Shearwater: Rook
Sian Alice Group: 59'59
Sun Kil Moon: April
Syclops: I've Got My Eye on You
These New Puritans: Beat Pyramid
Truckasauras: Tea Parties, Guns 'n Valor
TV on the Radio: Dear Science
Vampire Weekend: s/t
Vivian Girls: s/t
The Walkmen: You & Me
Wolf Parade: At Mount Zoomer
VA: Body Language Six (Junior Boys mix)
VA: Steppas' Delight (Soul Jazz dubstep compilation)
VA: You Are My Mate (Dial compilation)

I know I can only make good use of about a third of this volume, but the trouble is deciding precisely which third.

The Last 17 Books I've Read

2008-10-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find hard to actually glean any information from the visual clutter of Goodreads, so here's a list: the last 17 books I've read, abridged. If I can muster the fortitude I'll throw in some links, comments and maybe some more attractive formatting, but I'm already feeling a bit lazy from the longer, darker nights.

Personal Days
Park, Ed

Then We Came to the End
Ferris, Joshua

It Still Moves
Petrusich, Amanda

The Somnambulist
Barnes, Jonathan

Consider the Lobster
Wallace, David Foster

Tintin in America
Hergé

All the Sad Young Literary Men
Gessen, Keith

Gilead
Robinson, Marilynne

Vile Bodies
Waugh, Evelyn

Love in the Time of Cholera
Márquez, Gabriel García

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Martin, Steve

Black Postcards: A Musical Romance
Wareham, Dean

Shortcomings
Tomine, Adrian

The Extra Man
Ames, Jonathan

Heavy Weather
Wodehouse, P.G.

The Conscience of a Liberal
Krugman, Paul

Fox Bunny Funny
Hartzell, Andy

Vancouver: Thoughts

2008-10-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

I made a smart decision going to bed fairly early (thus missing A Christmas Tale) and sleeping in as long as made sense. It was the only way to survive the unending, thrice-delayed train journey home, finally opening my door after 2:30am.

Either I dropped a Canadian ten-dollar bill on the street, I will find it in my next load of laundry, or I accidentally left a 125% tip for a bowl of ramen.

It rained a lot.

I did not sightsee all that much, since I watched 9 festival films in about 50 hours. Mostly I just tried to walk a lot of different blocks downtown and looked out over Burrard Inlet for a while.

The pizza all seemed to have sesame seeds in the crust, and was at least passable. Thankfully nobody involved in making the pizza seemed to have unfounded delusions of "New York-style" thin-crust pies like too many places in Seattle. It's actually fiendishly difficult to get that style right, and there are so many other satisfying ways to make a pizza. The Japadog was as tasty as advertised.

I think what really makes the density in downtown Vancouver work is the attention to the pedestrian. None of the streets were overly wide, and all had excellent sidewalks, outward-facing street-level shops seemed mandatory, and mountain views were still nicely preserved in the midst of it all. Kind of sad to wander again through downtown Seattle and witness the parking lots, recessed towers, and uninviting malls. Admittedly the flat terrain was also a bonus.

I appreciated the fact that most of the films were screened inside a single multiplex, particularly one very much in the thick of things commercially. Traveling around the city is nice, but having to do so in a short time between films does not necessarily make for a pleasant experience.

Summer Hours was an uncommonly pleasant movie. I will certainly try to see Wendy and Lucy again when it plays in Seattle, but it's an emotionally draining experience. The Juche Idea is probably better the more seriously you take it; I was not really in on the joke until the end credits. Perhaps "serious" isn't the right word. Chelsea on the Rocks bored me a bit at the beginning, and I started to wonder if it was really just going to be a succession of talking heads, but it gained a lot through the unexpected dramatizations and some of the more jarring transitions.

What with the rain, time, and my general disinclination to photograph things that have already been endlessly re-captured, I didn't take any pictures. But I saw basically everything in this photo set. Throw in a shot of the Empire Granville 7 marquee, this view across False Creek toward downtown, and one high above Canada Place toward the mountains, and we're pretty much set.

Macroeconomics

2008-10-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

I've been shocked by the number of bizarre and dubious-to-completely false comments I've heard people making about the bailout plan over the past week. I guess if the media repeat "$700 billion" enough times it's bound to get everyone's attention. It would be nice if a few elementary macroeconomics lessons were included as well.

Today on the bus I heard two people spewing out alternate schemes, each of which seemed off by factors of 10, 100, or more. Getting the arithmetic right is pretty important at this scale. The underlying assumption seemed to be that $700 billion of taxpayer money would be going down a black hole while we hoped for the best. This same assumption is also what I think causes people to wonder what it would be like if we spent the same amount on worthwhile stuff like education, etc. In reality this is more of a risky financial move that won't likely earn a lot of money but won't probably lose it all either.

What this really suggests to me is that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about where the government spends money in the first place. The widening income gap and continually skyrocketing CEO compensation have been reported for years, if rarely on the front page in screaming type. Fiscal irresponsibility should not be shocking to anyone at this point, although at the least it ought to still be somewhere from frustrating to outrageous.

Then there's the simple fact that generally half of the discretionary portion of the federal budget is spent on defense each year, for FY 2009 about $650 billion total. From GlobalIssues.org via Wikipedia: "The 2005 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world's defense spending combined [6] and is over eight times larger than the official military budget of China."

If you are able to contemplate the scale of this factoid, and then recall precisely what the US military has done for us and the world in recent years (ie making the world rather less safe and US citizens much less welcome around the globe), and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are paid for with other money (around a trillion dollars for those two with more spending to come), with that money frequently paid out via exorbitant no-bid contracts to completely ineffective and ruthless companies, I honestly don't understand how you can even be fazed by recent financial news. Compared to where we normally spend our money, I'll be delighted to throw a few hundred billion dollars at the credit market for a change.

From Paul Krugman: "I’d rather see Dodd-Frank-Paulson, which is much better than the original plan, pass than not. The true cost to taxpayers will probably be close to zero, and it would buy some time. But I’m not passionate about this. The real financial rescue still lies in the future, probably under the Obama administration."

Old Sept. Blues

2008-09-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

I could talk your ear off about My Morning Jacket, in fact I already have.

Sometimes the depth of my reaction to the music they play makes me uneasy, like something that ought to be reserved for relationships with, you know, real people. I remember standing in the Ascot Room in 2003 completely baffled that they were playing to such a small crowd (~100 hardcore fans), and hoping that eventually the audience would grow.

It has and the experience is different. My ambivalence about certain songs on Z and Evil Urges certainly plays a part, but it's also weird to be assaulted by a light show and bludgeoned by enormous stacks of speakers. McCaw Hall sounded magnificent, but nearing the two-hour mark I found myself wishing for something a little less overwhelming. I believe the quiet parts are now generally louder than they were five years ago, but I could be wrong. It's also harder to ride the music to four or five monstrous peaks rather than one or two.

The prevailing feeling for me is one of an intensely intimate relationship that couldn't last at that level forever. Now it's complex and even bewildering, compulsive more than anything. Expectations are impossibly high and memories will always seem more powerful, more real than what's actually present and happening today. The music coming out of the speakers will never sound as good as the music I hear in my head--only louder.

Then again, I'd still probably give up every other amazing show this year for an enormous room full of people high-fiving each other the entire way through "One Big Holiday," or shivers from the old familiar reverb on something like "Dancefloors." It's all a little confusing.

MLB 2008

2008-09-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

The baseball season is (basically) over again, and really the only thing I noticed apart from the Indians somehow finishing at .500, was Albert Pujols. Reading about Chipper Jones' batting title, I noticed Pujols was #2 and went to look at his career numbers like I always do at the end of the season.

He's still comfortably ahead of Manny Ramirez in career OPS, as Todd Helton falls further away every year though he's currently still third. (Barry Bonds does not count as active, although even given his scandalous career the stats are so much better than everyone else's in the steroid era that he deserves some kind of recognition. Like if NASCAR had a drunk driving race and he lapped the field several times.) He's only finished below fourth in the MVP voting once in his first seven years. And he obliterated everyone else this year at the plate by slugging .050 higher than the next best hitter.

Sad, Sad Song(s)

2008-09-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

ADDENDUM: Apparently Hutch Harris has referred to music on the new Thermals album as "songs from when we were alive." Apropos and awesome.

I was thinking today, listening to Bon Iver, about how much I seem to love funereal* music. For Emma, Forever Ago is more precisely a breakup record, though if you didn't listen to the lyrics closely its solemnity could fool you.

Off the top of my head I listed three potentially top-50 records explicitly about dead acquaintances: Songs for Drella, Panda Bear's Young Prayer, and M. Ward's Transfiguration of Vincent. Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands sounds like it has to fit in here, but I've never read anything to qualify it conceptually. Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here technically qualifies, though mostly I was listening to that five or six years ago. As far as breakup records go, there's also Blood on the Tracks and probably a few more I can't think of right now. I can't go much further in such a conceptual vein, but there's a lot of stuff that feels similar.

This is an important contrast from another mode, let's call it "alienated nostalgia," in which you'll find Junior Boys, "Marquee Moon," Thom Yorke's solo album and others. I tried to describe this one back in August of 2006.

Of course there's plenty of overlap. My Morning Jacket used to work very close to funereal, particularly on the first album and parts of their second, though it's not a place they go very often anymore, except live. Joy Division are closer to alienation, though "Atmosphere" would be funereal and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is very deeply so. LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends"/"Someone Great" diptych. Scores of hip hop tracks are shoutouts to dead compatriots, though I specifically think of Bun B's "The Story," which was already sad/inspiring when his partner was in jail, and then attained a level of brutal irony when Pimp C died not long after getting out. Black Mountain is loud and funereal on their most recent record, and the Thermals are loud and frequently nostalgically alienated, though it might not sound as such at first listen.

Dubstep is another "hauntological" genre, though strictly hauntology would be a third field of its own. Burial is mostly nostalgically alienated, but Kode 9 & The Spaceape are more funereal. Shackleton's "Blood On My Hands" is powerfully funereal, particularly with likely reference to the World Trade Center towers.

Properly very little of this is goth and really not at all emo. The first requires moody wallowing and the second aggressive wallowing and for the most part this is constructive, forward-looking stuff. Making a monument to get past something rather recording oneself jumping back in the same, sad puddle.

*The only thing I've ever played for anyone eliciting the word "funeral" (except Band of Horses) is Sagor & Swing. More properly, that's the sort of music you might hear in a funeral parlor when you go in to discuss details with the mortician than at an actual funeral.

Last of the Summer Music

2008-09-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

TV on the Radio is great. I noted on Saturday that even though they might not be the most stunning live act, they're engaging and in contrast to almost every other band in existence, their set is energizing. Most of the time after a show, no matter how great it was, you might be buzzing a little bit but also a little worn out. TV on the Radio are inventive and interesting enough that they actually give back energy to the crowd, which is something special.

Mogwai is really loud. Like, loud with my earplugs in. I'm still not sure exactly why people get so excited about them, though I might figure it out someday. Fuck Buttons went exactly as expected, which is to say perfect. I've never been part of a more attentive (standing) audience. Half an hour into the set it was an extreme aberration when a couple started talking sort of loudly, and they received more annoyed glances than I've ever seen. In my opinion this reflects quite well on both Fuck Buttons and their fans.

Then there was Bumbershoot. The Walkmen were strong and made great use of a horn section. And "The Rat" is still amazing even though I haven't listened to it regularly for a few years now. I actually had sort of forgotten about the refrain near the end ("When I used to go out...") so it hit me extra hard; a nice surprise.

Man Man are obviously on a different level from almost all other bands. I still don't know what I'd do with that racket coming through my headphones, but in a live context it all makes perfect sense.

Black Keys played the only full set I saw on Sunday, and they did their thing as solidly as they always do. The Black Keys in a small room are to the Black Keys in an arena as a sports car on asphalt is to a sports car on gravel. Still a good time, though. The Shackeltons were kind of fun, The Whigs were kind of dull, Final Fantasy (I stayed almost until the end) was a good experience, especially the overhead projector art, if not my favorite set of music, and Tapes 'n Tapes sounded better than I'd imagined. Then again, everybody sounded great at the Rockstar stage.

Exactly the same way nobody (except The Thermals) makes any sense sonically in the Exhibition Hall. Dan Deacon played from a table on the floor, organizing a dance off, relay races, and a sort of square dance-type promenade thing which form a giant two-sided ring around the room. He also played with the house lights all the way on, claiming he'd prepared for an outside show in the sun. I don't know that I've ever seen security actually enjoy crowd control before, but they were obviously having a good time orchestrating the organized mayhem. I wonder how much they'd been briefed about this one beforehand. The sound was weird, and the bass actually only sounded good underneath the stairs.

Arthur & Yu were a revelation live, approaching the sonic richness of Fleet Foxes, which I hadn't expected from the demo-style fidelity of their album. I kind of regretted leaving early for Battles, whom I found amazing but still not compelling.

So now I'll probably take a break and skip The Juan Maclean (I don't relish anything approaching closing time in Fremont on a Wednesday night) and whatever else might happen prior to the Decibel Festival, when I hope to take in more electronic music than humanly possible. Highlights: Audion, sets in Volunteer Park, and Dixon very late Saturday night (4am?). It's very frustrating that My Morning Jacket precludes the ambient showcase, but I still hope to head over to Neumo's afterward for some of The Bug and hopefully all of Supermayer's set. Napping and strategically sleeping-in will be key.

And SXSW 2009 is very tentatively on the calendar. Plane tickets should be okay, and I'm sure hotel rooms are still bookable at this point. It'll probably be more film- than music-oriented, considering the insane stories I've heard about trying to get into the more popular shows there, but anyway.

Dragons & Tigers

2008-09-07T22:42:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver Film Festival just put up their full schedule yesterday, so I've been combing through to try and piece together a workable weekend, riding the train up Friday morning and back Sunday night.

I'll probably start out with a full slate of films and delete one by one as I decide I need more time to wander around the city. With the ten listed below, I'd have several hours both Saturday and Sunday morning and probably some time Saturday night to see the sights.

Friday

Hansel and Gretel (Yim Phil-sung)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
The Chicken, The Fish, and the King Crab (José Luis López-Linares)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)

Saturday

The Juche Idea (Jim Finn)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
Under the Tree (Garin Nugroho)
Teak Leaves at the Temples (Garin Nugroho)

Sunday

Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)
Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara)

Walking: An Update

2008-08-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-29T00:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-28T00:17:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Some Thoughts from the Capitol Hill Block Party

2008-07-26T23:21:00.000-07:00

Wow, they could really use some walk-lanes through the wall-to-wall crowds. Just enough for people to pass by without bumping and/or grinding everyone they pass along the way.

Kind of wish I'd headed to Truckasauras instead of Menomena, but at least I satisfied my curiosity re. the latter band.

Maximal music ought to take up as much space as possible. Girl Talk just felt weird in the open air, with a decent but certainly not great soundsystem. The main delight of his mashups is the precise moment when one song crosses over onto another, that locking precisely into place like a puzzle piece, which was pretty much absent yesterday. That loss of clarity means you pretty much just get the most audible layer at any one time, so it played much more like a DJ set than laptop wizardry most of the time. At least that's how it sounded where I was standing. Music that looms so large just feels indecent when it's outsized by buildings and clouds.

Oh man, The Dodos made the weekend for me. At times they felt like a link between the more rhythmically talented post-punks and the tribal folk weirdos, a really nice sweetspot if you ask me. Intense but joyous.

Throw Me the Statue have some nice songs, and on record it sounds like maybe Robert Pollard is singing, but tonight the vocals were just not there at all. Granted, the sound was generally a bit off for their set, but I was just baffled by how small and weak the singing was. With most bands I'm happy to settle for a better sound on record, but since Throw Me the Statue is a local band who also seem like great people, it's kind of a shame.

Listening to Ys this week, I was struck by how incredible it would be if Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes put out a split (double?) EP where they covered each others' songs and also collaborated on some sprawling new epic. This would work particularly well since the two seem to occupy different regions of the same strange folky planet; Fleet Foxes' forthright, reverberating harmonies and guitars occupy a different place sonically from Joanna Newsom's mewling solo vocals and lilting harpistry, but they'd fit together so nicely.

Another 2006 album I underrated but re-heard this week is International Pony's Mit Dir Sind Wir Vier, which sounds absolutely perfect now. More precisely, it sounds like the soundtrack to sitting at home during the morning in late fall, looking out a frosted window with no particular plans to go anywhere. Kind of like the beginnings of my long November-January breaks in college. I think I ignored it when it came out because it didn't fulfill my expectations of sounding exactly like the single version of "Our House," but thankfully that period has ended.

Same Old, Same Old

2008-07-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

Kottke linked to this post discussing IQ scores for NFL players by position. Searching for further speculation, I found Marginal Revolution's post, where the commenters go wild patting themselves on the back for understanding the situation and frowning at everyone else for thinking differently.

Many seem satisfied by simply figuring out the strong correlation between predominantly white and black positions and leaving it at that, although that seems a bit shallow. For example, why are players segregated like this? Correlation is easy but causation is much harder. Assuming that most football players at any non-kicking position are imposing physical specimens, are offensive linemen simply the smartest of those too slow to worry about running around the field all game? This would not necessarily imply that intelligence is vital, but the final distinguishing factor between similarly talented large, slightly slower players. Or are the less heavy players simply too dumb to fatten up and push people around in the middle? Either method, of course, excludes race-based assumptions when evaluating players' abilities.

Then again, why should this be surprising? The news item and concomitant discourse are at roughly the same level of sophistication as most studies on health, class, or just about anything else more complex than weekend box office figures. Readers (and those they then choose to "inform") get excited and start chattering after figuring out the What and the Who, frequently ignoring the When, concocting theories--either bizarre, reactionary, or vehemently contrarian, but always personal--about the Why without consulting the available evidence, and nearly always leaving out the How, when methodology is nearly always the determining factor in any news item of this sort.

Marauding in Midsummer

2008-07-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

These are all techno remixes, mostly by Germans. Superpitcher and Michael Mayer both have their hands in two of the tracks. You'll notice the second track is actually twice removed from the original as it's a remix of Ada covering the Yeah Yeah Yeahs's anthem from several years back. I'm not sure exactly how to label the first track since in some sense it's just a remix of the Rufus Wainwright song, but such a massive reworking that it's really a new work all by itself.

01 Rufus Wainwright "Supermayer Lost in Tiergarten"
02 Ada "Maps (Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas Mix)" [Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover]
03 Turner "After Work (Carsten Jost Mix)"
04 Heiko Voss "I Think About You (DJ Koze Mix)"
05 M83 "Teen Angst (Luciano Remix)"
06 The MFA "The Difference (Superpitcher Remix)"
07 Booka Shade "In White Rooms (Elektrochemie Remix)"
08 Junior Boys "In the Morning (Alex Smoke Remix)"

This mix brings two questions to my mind, the first of which is when exactly new Junior Boys material is coming. The second regards remixes from M83's latest album. Namely, why haven't there been any amazing ones yet? In addition to the Luciano remix here, Jackson's remix of "Run Into Flowers" is one of the few best things ever, and Superpitcher's mix of "Don't Save Us From the Flames" is a classic.

Download (64:46, 74.7MB)

SP20

2008-07-13T00:33:00.001-07:00

Another weekend, another outdoor festival. Two down and two [Block Party, Bumbershoot] still to go. Kevin and Andrew are at the very bottom of the above picture, just left of center, but I probably hadn't shown up yet. I believe this Flickr account is overflowing with official photography from Sub Pop themselves.

This was probably the most pleasant experience during the festival itself, smaller than Bumbershoot and Sasquatch yet more comfortable than the Block Party. The older bands were generally fun though not quite revelatory. Mudhoney was probably my favorite among the grunge set, though Eric's Trip was also fun. I didn't actually watch Mudhoney (heard them from the food lines) but Mark Arm was great fun during Green River's set, which brought out the grunge nostalgics in droves. If I recall correctly, Arm provided a lot of interesting stories for the Experience Music Project's oral history section.

Beachwood Sparks were the band I most wanted to see and aside from their sound being turned up a bit too loud, they were completely satisfying.

Iron & Wine satisfied far more than I expected, not in small part due to the fact that it was just Sam Beam, his beard, and his guitar. Fleet Foxes sounded much better than at Sasquatch, engaged the crowd and even playfully acknowledged The Fluid's idiotically soundcheck on the neighboring stage. Comets on Fire demolished everyone else on the schedule with a 20-minute blast of loud, heavy awesome followed up by some shorter slabs of the same.

Sunday I missed Kinski and Foals (who were apparently terrific) so I could have part of my weekend to, you know, catch up on things before the week got started again, having also been out all Friday night. Wolf Parade disappointed a bit, but it may have to do with the direction they're moving on the new record, which I haven't listened to yet since I'd been focusing on electronic music for the past several weeks. I might come around in time.

And there should be a new mix up soon with the best cover art yet. It'll consist of eight techno remixes, all with vocals, some from unlikely sources. Ear candy.

Saturday | Constantines, Eric's Trip, Seaweed, The Helio Sequence, Pissed Jeans, Fleet Foxes, The Fluid, Low, Mudhoney, The Vaselines, Iron & Wine, Flight of the Conchords

Sunday | No Age, Red Red Meat, Comets on Fire, Beachwood Sparks, Green River, Wolf Parade

Not Yet Titled

2008-07-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

The other night I dreamed that I was riding in a van and on the radio we heard Sigur Ros covering Daft Punk and it was the best music that had ever been made. Maybe it's Girl Talk taking over my brain.

2008: First Half Films

2008-07-02T23:23:00.001-07:00

*Cross-posted at the film blog.

Notable films so far this year, of the 100 I've tracked, ranked within each category. Not included are a few things from 2007 and other stuff I'd maybe already seen.

NEWER

Startling

Still Orangutans (Spolidoro)
Loos Ornamental (Emigholz)
Still Life (Jia)
Christopher Columbus: The Enigma (De Oliveira)
Eat For This Is My Body (Quaye)
Chop Shop (Bahrani)
Captain Ahab (Ramos)
Opera Jawa (Nugroho)

Good as Expected

Ballast (Hammer)
Pierre Rissient (McCarthy)
Shotgun Stories (Nichols)
Paranoid Park (Van Sant)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou)
Baghead (Duplass)
Great Speeches from a Dying World (Phillips)
Momma's Man (Jacobs)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Stoller)
Reprise (Trier)

Honorable Mention

Son of Rambow (Jennings) for cinematography
Blind Mountain (Li) for ending with an effective shock
Kung Fu Panda (Osborne/Stevenson) for fun

OLDER

Good as Expected

Sunrise (Murnau)
The Good The Bad and The Ugly (Leone)
Blade Runner (Scott)
Clerks II (Smith)
La Promesse (Dardenne)

Startling

Dead Man (Jarmusch)
Laura (Preminger)
Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger)
La Chinoise (Godard)
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Peckinpah)
Daisy Kenyon (Preminger)

Average runtime: just over 105 minutes.
Average score: 1.78 stars.
Seen in a theater: 77%.

Countries (including co-productions)

US - 55 films
France - 15 films
UK - 6 films
Hong Kong - 3 films
Italy - 3 films
Thailand - 3 films
Canada - 2 films
China - 2 films

Remuxed

2008-06-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

The time for a new Muxtape is now.

01 El Guincho "Antillas"
02 The Lodger "Good Old Days"
03 My Morning Jacket "Aluminum Park"
04 Jeremy Jay "Alpharhythm"
05 Belbury Poly "The Hidden Door"
06 M83 "Up!"
07 Johan Agebjörn ft. Sally Shapiro "Spacer Woman from Mars"
08 Sian Alice Group "Motionless"
09 Chromatics "I'm On Fire" (Bruce Springsteen cover)

Listen.

Not Helpful

2008-06-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

I was struck reading at work today how the Atlantic Monthly is kind of the mirror image of Reader's Digest. RD takes popular, vaguely conservative ideas or trends, repackages them into instantly comprehensible nuggets for a reader who will then feel informed but in an oddly limited fashion. The Atlantic takes the same ideas, puffs them into pieces far too long for their own good, packaging them together in such a way that the reader with several hours to spare will feel informed, but in an oddly limited fashion.

Both, then, achieve the same insidious goal of taking some portion of the ever-shrinking literate segment of the population and placing them on some sort of intellectual moving escalator-type illusion, apparently taking one step forward but actually propelled several steps back at the same time.

Upcoming Events, Jul 2008

2008-06-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

June ends with a belated housewarming, the first time more than two people have been in my apartment since... the hot water got fixed back in March. And now I have Victoria's Secret bags for whatever reason I might need them!

Next month Northwest Film Forum starts their Hal Ashby series (The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, with more to come in August) which has either occasioned or been preceded by at least three pieces, in Good Magazine, Moving Image Source, and The Stranger. They'll also be showing My Neighbor Totoro and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, which I'm very excited about (profiled in Cinema Scope magazine).

Old movies! I've been lamenting the fact that Seattle offers fewer opportunities to engage with classic Hollywoood, but July presents not only the Seattle Art Museum's screwball comedy series (My Man Godfrey (!), If You Could Only Cook, Talk of the Town) but also Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief and Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, all pre-1960 at least. And I've still got to see Wall-E, which I suspect might contend for my favorite film this year based on the limited intelligence I've reconnoitered thus far, along with The Dark Knight, Alexandra (which I skipped at SIFF), and the hopefully hilarious Step Brothers.

Kode 9 plays Chop Suey, much of the Sub Pop roster plays Marymoor park in Redmond, and everyone who's anyone plays Pike Street, for the Capitol Hill Block Party, perhaps the greatest event of the year.

The SIBF is not to be forgotten. And the hapless Indians come to town to face the even more woeful Mariners. I may be the only Seattle resident at all interested in the series at this point, but then I guess can just surreptitiously upgrade to some really good seats.

Vulcan

2008-06-28T00:49:00.000-07:00

While circumambulating the block during lunch today, I counted twelve different construction cranes visible in all directions. I wonder if there is another relatively lowlying block in the city that can see many more than that.

Untitled

2008-06-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

Today at work I was listening to Explosions in the Sky and thinking to myself that the sound design is why I like The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place but not Those Who Tell the Truth... so much. In other words, the former is generally a pleasure to listen to moment to moment, whereas the latter mostly involves impatient waiting for climaxes or other points of interest.

Beyond that, while this stuff makes for great listening when you want to really overdose on crescendo and melodrama, as background music guitars and drums don't seem to make as much sense to me as synths, sequencers and laptops, simply because electronic music tends to rely so much more heavily on highly refined or processed tone and timbre and the quality of the individual sounds, and much less on volume or histrionics. EITS share certain similarities with a lot of the dance music I listen to, though: long tracks heavy on repetition and adding/subtracting the same elements more than once, or at least outside of a verse/chorus structure.

Evil Urges, Thoughts

2008-06-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

A few comparisons to start: Listening to Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You... today, they struck me as very similar to My Morning Jacket. Gentle and extremely good-humored, they can and have covered every song under the sun onstage. They generally tend toward the sonorous and sedate, but can destroy you with distortion and intensity if necessary, particularly on stage. They both have penchants for clever sounds and sometimes wordplay, such that the more intense or less forgiving fans likely get a bit annoyed. Appearances in movies, rather than just soundtracks, etc. Yo La Tengo, however, are fifteen years older, and seem to provide a pretty good template for a very good, long-lived career.

My Morning Jacket's career arc thus far is also not dissimilar from Wes Anderson's, at least in terms of how I view the both of them. They're both five releases in, both starting out with three consecutively bigger and arguably greater entries, largely building on each other, then taking a big enough left turn with the fourth to throw off some or many of the faithful, continuing on in a similar vein with the fifth but also yielding some more satisfying results--if not measured strictly by early expectations now somewhat thwarted.

Purchasing the CD last week from Wall of Sound, the proprietor mentioned that it was pretty different from their previous stuff, also lamenting the lack of reverb and suggesting that it was the temptation to be radio-friendly leading them astray. (Tomorrow's NY Times article suggests that radio is indeed a bit frustrated with them, but that James & co. aren't terribly concerned.) As he operates a fiercely independent record store, few have more right to question a band's commercial leanings, but I'm not totally sure I agree. There are lots of reasons to get out from behind the wall of reverb, if perhaps none are totally excusable. At the same time, previous to some patches over the past couple years, these guys spent most of a decade touring relentlessly, absolutely exploding each and every night, so I really have no problem if they were attempting to sell a few more records.

It would indeed be sad if the band and Jim James never return to the reverberating silo, either literally or figuratively, but that gets at one of the core issues in music or any artistic sort of appreciation. Is the artist bound by a kind of law to repeat what he does best? Is it a sin to sound experimental yet mundane when routine heavenliness is attainable? Would it be more admirable to create new, less than blissful work, or to create none at all? Just what kind of authority does audience/critical opinion have in the work of the artist, if any? In terms of sales figures, quite a lot obviously, but I'm thinking more in terms of some sort of cosmic obligation. Would it be a punishable offense if, for whatever bizarre reason, Lebron James declared that he'd grown beyond slam dunks? (Jim James quote on life goals from the NYT: "Maybe I want to be a better basketball player.") Does the fan have any obligation in return for mindblowing services rendered in the past?

Has William Bowers written anything on this album? Is it the best thing ever? Most of what I've seen written on this album is not just disappointing, but more indicative of the failings of rock writing in general. It's either narrow-mindedly critical, or weak and slavish praise, never really engaging appropriately with the sounds on the record, at least in ways that I find interesting or fulfilling. Discussions of lyrics and personal genre preferences may have their place, but that place ought to hardly ever be a large or important one.

Q: Who really loves Z, and what are they thinking? How many of those songs run through your mind? Are you excited when they do?

This gets at precisely why I like Evil Urges and didn't like Z. The primary My Morning Jacket experience is still live, and therefore the mark of a great album from them is not how it sounds, but how the parts will sound, expanded, on stage, and correspondingly how that experience will suffuse your listening back at home for the months and perhaps years after.

Z had possibly two to three songs that fit this bill. Evil Urges may have as many as eight. Most importantly, vocal hooks are everywhere. Vocal hooks are earworms that will satisfy and sustain you even and especially when you're not listening to the record much less at the show. Z failed miserably at this. "Gideon" and "Anytime" sometimes run through my head, but not often, and it's actually a struggle to recall a lot of whatever else I may enjoy on there. I'm not sure I like "Evil Urges" on record, but the vocal hook sounds great in my head. I really like "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Part 2" on record, and it sounds even more awesome recalling it later. Oh, and that bit near the end where the low guitar roars in? Amazing. "Smokin from Shootin" is maybe not so great in my head, but it will destroy on stage. "I'm Amazed" is a bit boring in this regard, but at least it's not "Off the Record." "Aluminum Park" could cause riotous outpourings of joy.

This is not a great album (apart from perhaps the final third), and I don't think these guys can ever make one, because the impossible-to-fully-recreate live experience hovers over anything from the studio. In my opinion, it would have to be some kind of trackless double album where they play nonstop for two-and-a-half hours and James simply improvises over top of their jamming, creating themes and motifs which recur and then magically combine into like, a single five-minute wall of pure but strangely sonorous noise at the end, after which the recording emits a secret frequency which induces coma, from which the listener awakes several hours later with only delicious half-memories of the experience. That would be the only way that I could imagine being fully satisfied by a My Morning Jacket album completely on its own terms. Anything else basically provides new fodder for obsession while biding time until the next tour.

First Half 2008 Music

2008-06-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago [Jagjaguwar]
Caribou: She's the One EP [Merge]
El Guincho: Alegranza [Discoteca Océano]
Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant EP [Sub Pop]
Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes [Sub Pop]
Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend [XL]

These are the cream of my crop, with the Bon Iver head and shoulders over everything else. That record inspires the rare feeling of anticipation for each track, every single time I hear it. Like, at the beginning of each, since they generally tend to fade in quietly, I slowly recognize it and get excited, even though I did so for the last song and the one before it.

Re: Fleet Foxes, the EP was a bit of a surprise for me, but the album sounds exactly like what I was hoping for from what I'd heard early on. The Caribou single I've mentioned previously, and Alegranza is almost exactly what I was hoping last year's Panda Bear album would sound like, from early reviews and "Comfy in Nautica," but then I never really got on board with that one. El Guincho's is some kind of crazy sampladelic Spanish party record that just won't quit.

Animal Collective: Water Curses EP [Domino]
Black Mountain: In the Future [Jagjaguwar]
Bruno Pronsato: Why Can't We Be Like Us? [Hello? Repeat]
Four Tet: Ringer [Domino]
Fuck Buttons: Street Horrrsing [ATP]
Hercules and Love Affair: Hercules and Love Affair [DFA]
Junior Boys: Body Language, Vol. 6 [Get Physical]
My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges [ATO]
She & Him: Vol. One [Merge]
These New Puritans: Beat Pyramid [Domino]

Mostly I would consider all these to be very nice. Fuck Buttons, my favorite new live act of the year, are coming back with Mogwai in September. Hercules and Love Affair may be growing on me, or it may just be pleasant; not sure if it's addictive just yet. I listened the She & Him record just about to death back in March and it took a while for me to recover. Still not sure if it's as good as I originally thought it was, but still fine. The Shocking Pinks album/compilation from last year would be a strong entry if it weren't so... 2007.

Grand Archives: The Grand Archives [Sub Pop]
Hot Chip: Made in the Dark [Astralwerks]
Melchior Productions: No Disco Future [Perlon]
Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance, Vol. 1 [Paper Bag Records]

Had really high expectations all around here. Hot Chip are always spotty, both brilliant and maddening, but they're possibly less charming than they've been in the past. I haven't heard Remix Romance too much but there don't seem to be many improvements on Johan Agebjörn's original work, which maybe shouldn't be surprising. At first I'm pretty sure I was big into No Disco Future, but my last couple listens have been less than satisfying. I'll have to give it a few more chances over the next month or so. "Sleepdriving" is maybe the only Grand Archives song I really like.

Atlas Sound: Let the Blind Lead... [Kranky]
Beach House: Devotion [Carpark]
The Black Keys: Attack and Release [Nonesuch]
Blood on the Wall: Liferz [The Social Registry]
Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles [Last Gang]
Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours [Modular/Interscope]
M83: Saturdays = Youth [Mute]
Truckasauras: Tea Parties, Guns and Valor [Fourthcity]

Not sure about anything here just yet.

Black Angels: Directions to See a Ghost [Light in the Attic]
Gas: Nah und Fern box set [Kompakt]
Jamie Lidell: Jim [Warp]
Los Campesinos!: Hold On Now, Youngster... [Arts & Crafts]
Matmos: Supreme Balloon [Matador]
No Age: Nouns [Sub Pop]
Sian Alice Group: 59.59 [The Social Registry]
Sera Cahoone: Only as the Day Is Long [Sub Pop]
Sigur Ros: Album #5 [XL]
Sun Kil Moon: April [Caldo Verde]
Wolf Parade: At Mount Zoomer [Sub Pop]

Haven't really heard any of these yet. Sigur Ros did not impress upon my first listen at their site. Both Sera Cahoone and Los Campesinos played great sets over the past month. Simon Reynolds and Mark Richardson have boosted my hopes for Gas just devastatingly high, so hopefully they can be overcome.

"Singles are the lifeblood of dance music, but they get curiously little exposure outside of clubs. Specialist mags, websites like Resident Advisor and a few dedicated blogs like Little White Earbuds keep the flag flying, but for casual fans it can be almost impossible to keep track of what's happening in house and techno."
- Philip Sherburne

And I really have been listening to too many guitars and lyrics (read: safe and easy stuff) this year, so between These New Puritans at Chop Suey on June 16 and the Sub Pop 20th Anniversary festival July 12-13, rock music (and folk/country/etc.) and rock writing (unless it's in The Wire) are going out the window.

Odds & Ends

2008-06-10T23:42:00.000-07:00

SIFF is going well, even though I haven't been posting anything on it. (I don't really have time, as I'm always going to, at, or returning from a movie.) You can complain with good reason about the enormity and the corresponding glut of mediocre stuff at SIFF, but with a lot of research and hours poring through the guide, it's possible to re-program a pretty solid mini-festival.

That said, I feel somehow that I haven't really had time to think, or at least let my brain work subconsciously, over the past few weeks, what with the sustained moviegoing, Sasquatch, and so forth. This became particularly apparent when I left my phone in the break room at work long enough for someone to find it and bring it to the front desk, on the same day that I'd already left something else in there on a previous visit.

Adding some bands to the MySpace profile, I started to get really excited about Beachwood Sparks playing at Marymoor Park next month. Given that I've been listening to a lot of guitar-based, folky, retro stuff this year, these guys should really hit the spot even though it's been quite a while since I listened much to either of the albums.

There should be three massive posts (that aren't this one) coming soon. One on music thus far into the year, one of musings more or less concerning the new My Morning Jacket album and thoughts its release has spurred, and one on SIFF, though I'll also break that down into individual postings for the the film blog. I also haven't been listening as much, or as intentionally, to a lot of electronic and/or dance music this year, and I've been neglecting reading things that aren't on a screen, so hopefully those will dovetail after Sunday when I'm no longer out and about for at least three hours a night.

And while it still feels like early spring here in Seattle (and not the nice part, either) it is apparently hot and quite flooded in Iowa. I'll take festival films over sandbagging any day.

In Memoriam

2008-05-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

On our way out we stopped at the Wild Horses Monument, which overlooks I-90 near Ellensburg. The path was rather steep up to the steel horses, and on the way down I probably slid more than walked.

Saturday

I'm excited if and when I get to hear Fleet Foxes in a confined space. As with several other acts, they were dwarfed by the space, and the chatty, hyped-up guys behind us made it difficult to get in the right mood.

Dengue Fever and Beirut were both pleasant surprises, though I liked Beirut a lot more. For some reason they've always seemed a bit too self-consciously outre to me, but they sounded awesome. I've probably been subjected to one or both of the albums somewhere, a coffeeshop perhaps, because most of the songs sounded familiar even though I've never actively pursued them.

Joshua Morrison was a nice break from standing and listening.

Vince Mira's performance has already been noted by Douglas Wolk in his write-up for Pitchfork, and probably many other places, but it really may have been the highlight of the festival to watch everyone (with probably pretty low expectations) absolutely swarm the stage before the end of his first song. Musically it was pretty much what you'd expect from Johnny Cash covers, but the novelty of a powerful bass vocalist always stands out.

David Bazan is kind of the opposite of the Flaming Lips, which is really significant only because both of them made or attempted to make pointed political statements regarding Iraq. Whereas the Flaming Lips seem a bit ridiculous doing so in the midst of their technicolor circus, you can almost feel the concern and pain in Bazan's voice when he discusses US politics, empty displays of religion, or whatever other social/cultural topics he might broach.

MIA was another casualty of the vastness. Her sensory assault would probably be overwhelming in a good way in a dark room, but almost ignorable in front of the Columbia River gorge.

I'm glad to've seen Modest Mouse and not been disappointed, but I didn't really find their set all that memorable.

We checked out early during REM's set, partly because of rain, and partly due to only mediocre levels of interest on either of our parts.

Sunday

The Maldives sounded just fine and I wouldn't be displeased to see them opening sometime.

Truckasaurus brought the party, as they probably always do, but that wasn't a terribly common theme at Sasquatch. Electronics were generally scarce, as was dancing. The visuals weren't visible due to the sunlight ("We've never played this early before!") but these guys were perhaps the most enthusiastic performers of any I saw all weekend ("You guys are awesome! Look how many of you there are!").

J Tillman, Cold War Kids, The Cops and The Blakes all sounded okay, but I'm hard-pressed to recall any really exciting moments from any of their sets.

Neither of us were really in the mood for Mates of State, we discovered, so we caught most of Sera Cahoone's set, which was as strong as I'd remembered from a couple years back at the Capitol Hill Block Party, where they covered REO Speedwagon. Here they ended with "Delta Dawn," attributed to Tanya Tucker, though All Music Guide reveals that Tucker first heard Bette Midler sing it on The Tonight Show. Indeed, in addition to those two, Charlie McCoy, Loretta Lynn, Kittie Wells, Waylon Jennings, Bob Luman, The Statler Brothers, and Jody Miller all recorded it in 1972. Anyhow, it made for the best harmonies and maybe the best moment of the weekend.

The Kooks impressed with their stage presence, before Stephen Malkmus, Janet Weiss and the rest of The Jicks came on to jam the night away. At least until the sound got cut off around 10:30. We missed the Cure because, well, there's only so much that ought to be squeezed into one weekend.

Memorial Day

Yeasayer did their Talking Heads update on the main stage, which was maybe a little too much for them to handle.

Thao and The Get Down Stay Down were only on the Wookie stage, but even there they didn't sound quite big enough to really capture my attention. Kevin said he thought they didn't quite sound as good as they do on record, which I haven't heard much, so I'll take his word for it.

The Hives are another band I'm glad to have seen, even though I haven't paid them the closest attention recently. Pelle Almqvist could teach a lot of indie rockers a thing or two with his polished (and hilariously overblown) stage banter. At the same time, maybe no band takes themselves less seriously, as evidenced when, though I can't now remember why, the band froze mid-song eliciting greater and greater reactions from the crowd as they hit five, fifteen, twenty-five seconds of statuesque inactivity. There's almost no way I'd have laid down actual dollars to see these guys, so for me at least they were a really good part of the lineup.

Built to Spill could probably roll out of bed, strap on their gear, and launch into a terrific set without even thinking about it. I've never been able to hear them the same way on record, but live they just never disappoint.

Rodrigo y Gabriela and Flight of the Conchords both seemed to me to be pretty major novelty acts. Acoustic guitar wizardry is interesting to look at, but if virtuoso performing doesn't enthrall me with my eyes closed, I'm really disinclined to care.

Jamie Lidell sounded better experimenting with his equipment than he did at the beginning with just the full band.

The Flaming Lips are a curiosity. Really more of a circus than a rock show, it's hard to focus on the music, although I've never been a huge fan. Still, everything you've heard is probably true, and they do create an absolutely unforgettable stage experiences.

I also caught snatches of The Mars Volta and Delta Spirit. We packed up and left at 5 this morning to get back just in time for work, managing to catch an awe-inspiring sunrise as well. There'd been some guy on our walk back the night before yelling "Sasquatch!" and trying to get people to cheer. At that point he seemed mildly annoying. The next morning, however, I reversed my thinking when we spotted him perched on one of the irrigators in the campground, yelling the same thing at the rising sun. He is obviously awesome.

I got a few pictures, but even they don't really portray the scale of the gorge. It's effectively a fourth stage, one you can watch even while you're supposedly paying attention to one of the bands. On Sunday we were obsessed with watching the rain that seemed to be approaching for miles, only to see it move on across the river.

And the tent didn't leak!

Local News

2008-05-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time figuring out what I was going to do tonight in honor of the sun and heat after watching Cavs vs Celtics at Goldie's in Wallingford. Then I just kept walking, down through the UW campus in the direction of Mt. Rainier, across the Montlake bridge and up through Interlaken Park, which I'd previously only observed from above and never actually entered, and finally back down Capitol Hill.

There were many highlights, but perhaps best were the ducks sitting on the floor of Drumheller Fountain, apparently willing to wait a month in the dry basin while it undergoes renovations.

Tomorrow I hope to leave the city for the first time in nearly three months to visit scenic Shoreline. Or, rather, simply to see a movie there, since Flight of the Red Balloon's run ended at the Varsity yesterday.

Progress

2008-05-16T00:21:00.000-07:00

My apartment took some big steps this week, welcoming both a stand/table, abandoned by the curb, for the TV (and a government-subsidized digital converter) and a couch, which just today Amanda helped me haul from her place around the block. That is to say, I watched a startlingly clear version of The Office's season finale tonight, and nothing was touching the carpet!

Brian's old receiver, which had been acting up since I brought it out of hibernation, also started to function more-or-less correctly again, such that I now have two speakers instead of one, and the TV hookup no longer causes a constant hum.

I also escaped the clutches of Bank of America by finally completing the setup of a new checking account at a local credit union, with a shiny new debit card.

And I got hired at work. The temp agency even sent me a congratulatory flower!

Springtime Explosion

2008-05-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

Mostly electronic, but also raucous. Starts moody then gets progressively more exciting.

Two covers here: track 01 is a Syd Barrett song and track 06 is indeed a GNR remix, though different enough that it nearly qualifies as new.

01 Belong "Late Night" [St. Ives]
02 Shocking Pinks "This Aching Deal" [DFA]
03 M83 "Graveyard Girl" [Mute]
04 Caribou "She's the One (Hot Chip Remix)" [Domino]
05 Four Tet "Wing Body Wing" [Domino]
06 DJ Donna Summer "Sweet Assed Child O' Mine" [Cock Rock Disco]
07 Fuck Buttons "Bright Tomorrow" [ATP]
08 Andrew WK "McLaughlin Groove" [NPR]

Springtime Explosion (34:15, 39.4 Mb)

Work Listening

2008-05-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

Caribou: She's the One [Single] x3
Juno Soundtrack
Junior Boys: Body Language Six
Black Mountain: In the Future
Decemberists "The Crane Wife, Pts. 1-3"
Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant EP
Four Tet: Ringer EP
Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours
Mobius Band: City vs. Country EP
2005 Top 12 Tracks
Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance, Vol. 1
Midsummer Meander
Bruno Pronsato: Why Can't We Be Like Us
Vampire Weekend: s/t
These New Puritans: Beat Pyramid
2006 Dance (Lite), Pt. II

After a year off, I'm back listening to music at work, which is definitely a good thing. Listed above is the past week.

The "She's the One" single is tremendous. I hadn't recalled the original in that much detail from back when I was listening to Andorra, but it's both melancholy and fluffy, and in 12/8 time. The Hot Chip remix speeds things up and reconfigures the pulse into straight eighth notes while adding a stutter to liven things up. Kelley Polar's version is possibly insane but unforgettable. The original lyrics are about an unfaithful yet alluring girlfriend; Polar introduces a mythical prom night story in which the lovers are sent to hell, making Dan Snaith's refrain ("Sheeeeeeeee's the one") all the more ironic.

I'm not sure if this is accurate, but listening to Bruno Pronsato seemed to rewire my brain into a sharper state, like some movies and rarely other music have done, as if my perception is somehow heightened. It could have been the caffeine, but I'll be interested to give that album another shot to see if there are similar results.

I was appallingly bored listening my favorites from 2005, though last year's dance mix and the sampling from 2006 sounded much better. I'm hoping to figure out a new one including the above-mentioned Hot Chip track, something from the new Four Tet EP, and Fuck Button's noise-anthem "Bright Tomorrow."

One Two Three

2008-05-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Last night's show at Neumo's was interesting but not great. Mobius Band were pleasantly good, and finished with maybe the only time I've heard the original "Loving Sounds of Static," as the Junior Boys remix is so good I've never tired of it.

Black Kids were about what I was prepared for. They looked and sounded very young, Reggie Youngblood seemed to still be growing into the role of a frontman. The vocals were hit or miss, but at least they played a new and terrific (if unfortunately titled) song, "Look at Me (When I Rock Wichoo)."

Cut Copy had two things going against them. One was last week's Simian Mobile Disco show and the other is In Ghost Colours, their new album, both of which sound(ed) excellent. The sound for Cut Copy's set was just okay, and they're not the most attention-grabbing act onstage, so I took off probably midway through.

On the plus side, if I would happen to get bored in the middle of a three-band bill, I can always walk the six blocks home and wait them out. Haven't got the chance yet, but maybe someday.

Upcoming Events, May 2008

2008-04-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

A ton of good movies coming up next month. Northwest Film Forum has a Belmondo vs. Mastroianni series including 8 1/2, Breathless, La Dolce Vita, and Le Doulos, as well as a John Boorman film starring Marcello Mastroianni called Leo the Last which I hadn't heard of previously. They're also showing Shotgun Stories, which has a terrific trailer, and some George Méliès films.

SIFF Cinema has several titles for United Artists' 90th anniversary, and I'm most excited about the westerns: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and The Magnificent Seven. Then, of course, SIFF the festival starts on May 22, though they're not revealing the schedule for another week and a half. I think I have fourteen tickets or something, from back when I got my membership.

Next week Cut Copy continues the dance-rock-electro explosion started last Sunday by Caribou and Fuck Buttons (both thrilling), and perpetuated by Hot Chip (once was enough) and Simian Mobile Disco (terrific sound and entertaining live PA/synthesizer/sampler set). M83 and Apparat show up Memorial Day weekend. Vetiver, Tokyo Police Club, and Kid Dakota (opening for Cloud Cult) will be less electronically oriented.

I believe Darren Jackson (of Kid Dakota) tops my list of live shows with at least six, maybe more. At least one as a member of Camaro and one as a member of the Olympic Hopefuls, both at the Cave at Carleton, three as Kid Dakota there and one at the Triple Rock (a great record release show) with Low and Fog. My Jim James tally is five, David Bazan's at four, and Junior Boys & The Thermals are holding steady at three.

Pitchfork 500

2008-04-17T03:18:00.000-07:00

I find it odd that according to Google Blog Search no one has yet blogged about Pitchfork's forthcoming book on 500 of "The Greatest Songs Since Punk," titled The Pitchfork 500.

It's not coming out until November, but I stumbled upon it when searching for other stuff by Scott Plagenhoef after finishing up his 33 1/3 book on If You're Feeling Sinister. He spends most of the book placing Belle & Sebastian in context as descendents of the C86 crowd, or more precisely, Orange Juice and the Smiths (and, of course, Velvet Underground), and detailing their relationship to Britpop, the British music press, their fans, etc. Plagenhoef actually avoids describing the music on the titular album until 20 pages from the end. His main gist is that, due to the internet and MP3s, Belle and Sebastian may be the last band to find success so incrementally since even demos are instantly available to everyone worldwide on MySpace before a band even signs with a label. The death of scarcity/secrecy.

DMV

2008-04-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

I suppose the DMV is probably as effective a place as any to embody the differences between Seattle and New York. In New York I believe I spent nearly three hours there to get a photo ID, at the end of which I was handed a piece of paper with no picture, and told that my ID card would arrive in the mail in around three weeks. I honestly would've preferred punching myself in the face on a crowded sidewalk.

Today I showed up at the downtown Seattle department of licensing at 2:30. I was seventeenth in line, but the general competency of everyone on both sides of the counter meant that I was back outside, with a temporary driver's license (photo included), by 3:00.

On an unrelated note, I just recalled that the highlight of my somewhat limited year in music thus far has been Bradford Cox (and bassist) doing a short and hilarious cover of Collective Soul's "Shine" at the Atlas Sound show last month.

Pedestrian

2008-04-02T17:51:00.000-07:00

I had some idea when I went to New York that I might want to try to walk around all the streets of Manhattan. While I did plenty of walking there, I didn't really have the time to go quite that crazy, so now in Seattle I'm seeing how much of the central part of the city* I can cover. Thus far I haven't been very methodical about it, although eventually that will have to be the case. I'm keeping track on two maps, one north and one south of the ship canal. As of this afternoon, here is my mostly haphazard and laconic progress, via the two maps stitched together.

* I'm defining central as below N 85th St and north of Jackson; arbitrary, of course. Initiall, I want to cover the area south of the ship canal and more or less this side of the Seattle Center.

Click the map to see a slightly larger version.