I.L. @ The Movies
The FountainI liked this movie quite a bit, but I should be honest about my willingness to give a pass to a movie that presents me a lot of visual splendor (in lieu of coherent and down-to-earth plots, which seems to be some people's major beef with the film), which this movie has in spades (except for the bark that Bald Wolverine eats, which I swear looks like a cling-on). The director, Darren Aronofsky, found these dudes living in an ancient (well, like, 400 year old) cow shed in England who built a device they dubbed the "Microzoom Optical Bench" which can take a tiny drop of water and -- through a system of Victorian prisms and some digital cameras -- magnify it up to 500,000 times. Most of the f/x he got these guys to make are in the futuristic third of the movie's timeframes, and they look fantastic.Reading about the Bench immediately reminded me of something I'd read in an interview with Terry Gilliam. Gilliam was making Brazil and needed some convincing clouds during a scene in which one of the characters is flying through the air. They ended up shooting some high speed footage of some smoke wisps that Gilliam was really pleased with, and he made the point in the interview that it was the random and unplanned for results that made it so pretty -- and realistic. You just can't really get that with CGI; it limits you to only your imagination and takes out the role that chance plays in our experience of reality (and movies).So I say kudos to this trend in Hollywood, and maybe those British guys will get some more work, too.
Lost Post Alert!
For anyone interested in what my favorite album of the year is, please check out this post. Blogger posts things in an order based on when they were started, not when they are finished, so my long-ass review of some Brooklynite Noise-a-mancers got buried underneath a pile of referral posts. Please enjoy and check out some of their music if you're so inclined.
Too much of that gangsta music...
Other People's Postings
Look, I know this is getting out of hand a little. If I could turn my blog into BoingBoing, I would, but I can't. But I will stop just doing referral links one of these days -- soon -- I promise.Slate.comGo for the hilarious illustration; stay for the astute political commentary.
But what's a "hipster?"
Oneida -- Happy New YearIt's probably too early for this nonsense, but I'm giving HNY official Best Album of 2006 status. I first heard Oneida via a cut from their Nice./Splittin' Peaches EP (2005) that I think I culled from Pitchfork's pay-for-play download section. That track was called "Inside My Head" and has since appeared on as many mix cd's as I could shoehorn it into. (Refrain: "I'll tell you 'bout living inside my head / It's all fucked up now living inside my head.") "Inside" is the kind of blissed-out damage I perenially find appealing -- the sort of driven fuzzy freakout I talked about a little in this post.There's much to like about Oneida's sound, and they indulge a lot of different modes. Even on the afore-mentioned four-song EP they manage to hit four (or maybe three and a half) different sounds. The first track, "Summerland," caps its anxious folk primitivism with a great abstract sax explosion. Then "Inside." Then "Song Y;" which I now recognize exists in one of Oneida's main plays: computer funkery lead-in is joined by plucked acoustics and then gradually loops around itself until its interior tensions are exhausted. While all of that is going on we're treated to a nice falsetto soar of vocals, not unlike TV On The Radio's. There're key changes and other nice surprises, but it's the relentless staccato repetition that defines the song more so than anything else. Actually, this song probably wraps up a little early, as far as exhausting its tension goes. The last track, "Hakuna Matata," is more the kind of endurance rally that used to characterize Oneida's sound.And by "used to" I'm mostly pointing towards the first two tracks on disc one of Each One Teach One (2002), which together constitute thirty minutes of throttled sonic assault, especially the first, slightly shorter one, "Sheets of Easter." I don't really know what Oneida's stance on religion is. They have a split EP with Liars called Athiests, Reconsider, but I don't know how exactly they mean that title. There certainly is an ecstatic quality to their music, though. Disc two of EOTO is more varied and uneven, though there are some standout tracks. The opening title track is a relatively relaxed groove accented with some nice beeps and boops. It sounds a little like older Flaming Lips mixed with, oh, say, Sonic Youth. "Number Nine" stretches back to some classic psyche-rock postures (sitar figures, swirling backwards vocals) but adds a fresh veneer of noise. Later on there's also the whimsical "Rugaru," which always gives me the mental image of a smallish, drunken man navigating (or trying to navigate) a bicycle through an urban market in southeast Asia.There's an album apiece between Nice./Splittin' Peaches and both Each One Teach One and Happy New Year, both of which I will one day invest lucre towards; but it's not so hard to track their development with the evidence I have at hand and come to a judgement -- which is that Oneida have managed to stay very interesting experimentally while producing increasingly inviting songs. That they've primarily achieved this on HNY by embracing some folk signifiers shouldn't really be read as bandwagoning: their sticky-fingered approach has always been original and varied enough to allow them all the genre-morphing they could dream up. And besides, paying homage to the current fashions is just something all creatively successful bands are capable of. On the other hand, the now somewhat maligned term "freak-folk" could just as easily been coined to describe Oneida as it did Devendra Banhart, if not exactly in the same way.Also, and to their credit, it's not like they just decided to folk it up for the entire album. True, lead track "Distress" does start with some stilted, melancholic Simon & Garfunkel harmonies laid over some fragile shakes of noise, but that track ultimately reads as a prologue to the album proper: "Happy New Year," track two, which jars awake with jittery computer squonks mixed with what I think is a steadily plinked synth of some sort. It's a refiguring of the mood of the first track into a more propulsive beat and hardy tone. Next is album highlight "The Adversary," which might be another obtuse religious reference (or not, though "The Adversary" is, I think, one of Lucifer's titles in some Christian myths). Some of the lyrics say things like "No adversary you" and "No adversary I," so maybe it's more of a retooled appropriation. It's also apparently a term in cryptography.Up next is promo-ed mp3 "Up With People" which, along with the following "Pointing Fingers," hearkens back to Oneida's own past work, namely disc 2 of EOTO. I'm not so sure "Up With People" was the best way to promote this album since it's bereft of the touches of folk that crop up everywhere else, but it's a good song in and of itself and arguably has some of the folkiest lyrics of the album: "Sunlight shines on the top of the trees/the highest hills feel the sweetest breeze/you've got to get up to get free." But lyrics aren't really why I listen to Oneida; the kind of ecstatic confusion they want to create can't support much narrative, and with that out of the equation the lyrics' literal importance bows to instrumental import of the vocals, which mostly seem to exist to either reiterate or subtly twist the moods of the songs. It's true that a band like The Fiery Furnaces manages to incorporate a lot of narrative into some pretty confusing songs, but their whole musical tack seems wildly different than Oneida's, and besides, most of the Furnace's songs are literally about confusion, so they get a pass.After "Pointing Fingers" ends (note: probable least favorite song on the album; also the one most reminiscent of TV On The Radio, though that's just a coincidence, really), the album gradually turns back towards the folky sounds laid down in the first three tracks. The hypnotic, insistent "History's Great Navigators" cuts the difference pretty evenly, though the next track, "Busy Little Bee" hits the Scarborough Fairgrounds running with a strummed mandolin announcing the start of a suite of tracks which indulges the lion's share of Happy New Year's folk experiments. "Reckoning" pits shimmery flute-synth washes and vocals against the album's most fronted acoustic figures; "You Can Never Tell" chants lovers' apocalyptic secrets; "The Misfit" rounds off the set with an international paranoia of latin rhythmns, spy-movie organ, and air travel unease.Epilogue "Thank Your Parents" is the album's second longest cut (after "Up With People") and starts rather unassumingly with four bars of trap to which are gradually added a piano, the vocals, and then a very subtle drone organ figure that eventually dominates the soundscape. It's a great closer because it gathers up as much of the album's various forms as possible before sending them off on a wave both lulling and, somehow, triumphant -- which is a good a way to describe Oneida's disparate and conflicted sound as any I've read.An underlying (but important) reason that I've so fallen for Happy New Year is the excitement of discovering Oneida. It's entirely possible that I wouldn't be enamored of it if I hadn't also been so blown away by "Sheets of Easter," or charmed by "Rugaru." This is my justification for having gone through each of the cd's that I own for this post, which seems kinda excessive and is indeed the reason it's taken so long to write. Another reason is having listened to Grizzly Bear's Yellow House and Happy New Year back to back and, after hearing a ton of hype about Grizzly Bear, thinking that Oneida obviously had a better album that worked in much the same vein. This isn't any beef with Grizzly Bear, but thinking that an album you really like is being overlooked tends to stoke some passion (or it happens to me, at least). For the record, Happy New Year came out months before Yellow House.
Other People's Postings
How much should the Cons blame Rove? How much will they blame him, anyway?
Slate.com
The writer never comes out and says it, but what I gathered from this article (and honestly would have thought anyways, I guess I should admit) is that the Republicans probably should be blaming Rove quite a bit (or really Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al; basically the PNAC presence within the Bush administration or the realized synecdochic Bush), but that they probably won't -- the unrealized synecdochic Bush still offers the rest of his administration too much symbolic protection.
Laughlaughlaughlaughlaugh
Watching the Democrats kick hell out of the Grand Oil Party makes for fantastic late-night viewing. The House is locked down. The Senate is very, very likely to fall one vote over into Blue Territory (a slightly Yellowish Blue, but still). Butt-juice got axed. Ford didn't win, but he was maybe the most conservative of all the conservative Dems to revolt. I still would have voted for him, though.So mostly I switched back and forth between CNN's and FoxNews' coverage of the whole thing, which was like night and day. CNN had Lou Dobbs playing overseer and a dynamic Anderson Cooper jumping between and ring-leading two different desks. The first had three senior correspondents providing a lot of overall information in a fairly non-partial way. The second had two Dems (Cryptkeeper James Carville and someone from Clinton's admin whose name I should probably know) and two Reps (Radio shlock-jock Bill Bennet and some black Con who is not Alan Keyes whose name I should probably know). Cooper, who is not my favorite, hurricane-boy or not, did a good job of getting these big personalities to play off of each other without things getting out of his control.On top of that, they had Wolf Blitzer in front of a huge screen which the cameras could pan over for a myriad of different result displays. His partner (whose name I don't remember; I'm really going to have to get some pen and paper out the next time I do this) had his own gadget to play with down on one end; a touch-screen job that gave graphical overviews of the House and Senate that was as cool in its own way as the huge pan-screen, although often the information provided seemed a little redundant. I'd say the two had no chemistry, but maybe they did in a kind of odd couple sort of way: Wolf, the macho one with the expansive screen giving a lot of small, specific results; glasses-guy with the overall analysis on the small screen that he could manipulate directly. They spent a lot of time stepping on each other's shoes, especially Wolf having to deal with the nerdy guy's bad habits in Wolf's "territory." But all the reportage was done and maybe it was even a little endearing.And, so, FoxNews. Look, at this point maybe these guys are easy targets. Maybe they wanted to downplay their coverage because everyone associates them with the party against which the current winds are blowing. But their coverage was pathetic (or at least the presentation was). I've seen better from third-rate sports coverage. And the people interacting with each other kept making stupid partisan jokes with absolutely no one there to reign them in (like Cooper) or display some detached authority (like Dobbs). It was pretty pathetic. The graphics looked like something an 8 year old made in MSPaint. Maybe Rupe Murdoch needed to buy a couple of new yachts. Maybe the Simpson's movie is way over budget. Maybe this is their ass-backwards and cynical attempt at downplaying the Dems victory (I just noticed on the newswire that the Dems are claiming Montana. Woo-hoo!). All I know is that it paled in comparison to CNN's coverage.Which is probably another reason to not take FoxNews seriously, if you haven't already figured that out.The only cynical thing I have to say is that maybe Rove et al dropped this ball because they wanted a stronger run at the '08 presidency. (They may have even been testing out strategies with Arnold's CA Governor race; a comment was made that a team of White House staffers moved into his camp to resuscitate his numbers, which were about the same as Bush's.) If the Dems don't jump on this opportunity and get things done they'll be handing the momentum back across the aisle, sure enough. But I think Pelosi knows what it's going to take to get consensus out of her newly big-tented party, and I think her constituents back in San Fransisco are sophisticated enough to let her do what she needs to do. So I have high hopes. As long as those fuckers don't steal Virginia back from us.
Other People's Postings
Naughty by another's nature (I liked this post from another blog).Good Hodgkins
But what's a "hipster?"
So this will be a running column of sorts, hopefully, and in it I will talk about albums I like, or music in general, or other music blogs. Or whatever.So I got the newest Yo La Tengo recently, and let me be not the first to say that it kicks much ass. In fact, it's called I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, so I guess technically it beats much ass. YLT is a pretty quintessential OG indie/hipster outfit, but for whatever reason this is only the second album of theirs I've actually procured. The first, The Sounds Of The Sounds Of Science, I got based on how much I liked heavy-duty guitar freakout "Lovelife of the Octopus," which I downloaded from and then purchased from YLT's website, not long after I first got my laptop and some dial-up action going. But I never even loaded the whole thing into iTunes, which shows how much I actually listened to it (there were some other good songs, but still).Anyways, besides that I only occasionally heard YLT via roommates, parties, etc., some of which I liked (a track near the end of I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, one of their droney motorik songs but way more mellow than "Lovelife of the Octopus"; it probably sounds a lot like "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind," the opener on the newest) and some of which I didn't (pretty much all of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, which struck me as solid and accomplished but ultimately too polite (or something like that; however I indicted it at the time now seems more like an indictment of who I was at the time)).And perhaps I'm understating my point by having made that last bit (extra) parenthetical, because it's I Am Not Afraid...'s more fragile and atmospheric tracks that have really wowed me. True, "Pass The Hatchet" is and will probably remain my favorite, and sometimes their softness veers deep into what I consider Sufjan territory (I realize the chronology is off). Shit, basically I'm trying to say I think "Daphnia" is really, really wonderful -- a track I might not have liked four or five years ago but that I think is breathtaking in the here and now. There's plenty more to like, too; YLT's experience really comes across and they nail lots of moods: jangly throwback punk, shorter and poppier '60s psychers, still others that are hard to tie down to one genre.So you should all go out and buy it and love it, and play "Daphnia" on a cold and wet day. Trust me.
Picture of Making of Costume for Halloween Entertainments
eeeeeees niiiiiiice!!!
Halloween!
BORAT: Making of Costume for Halloween Entertainments was pretty much a success. I figure if random strangers point at me on the street and yell "Borat! Woooo!" then I must be recognizable enough. Hopefully I can post pics soon, too! Also: rocking mustache-strong-like-Stalin is pretty fun, although so many people thought it improved my looks that it became a little disconcerting; outside of Borat costume it mostly makes me look like a gay cop, like I should be clapping my hands onstage next to some dude in leather chaps or a construction worker or whatever. But it will last for a week or so, anyways, and I'll get to say things like "moustache rides five cents lol" whenever I might venture a little too deeply into my cups. See you there!
