Feeding the Sumo

Graduation Day

2011-09-26T16:38:00.001-07:00

Hi! This blog has officially moved to a new home with a new name, and even a new entry! Wow!

You will find brand new material (and all the old entries and comments, too) here: http://dailyfriction.wordpress.com/

Please add the new site to your RSS or Follow it or whatever it is you kids do these days. I apologize if there's an automated way to do this and I don't know about it.

Thanks for reading!

The latest and greatest season mix

2011-06-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

"Almost Anything" - Spring 2011

1. Friendly Fires - Live Those Days Tonight
2. My Morning Jacket - Holdin' on to Black Metal
3. Here We Go Magic - Hands in the Sky
4. Dodos - Good
5. Beastie Boys ft. Nas - Too Many Rappers
6. Land of Talk - Hamburg, Noon
7. Tune-Yards - Bizness
8. LCD Soundsystem - Pow Pow
9. Wild Nothing - Chinatown
10. The Mountain Goats - Estate Sale Sign
11. Junip - In Every Direction
12. TV on the Radio - Will Do
13. Peter, Bjorn and John - (Don't Let Them) Cool Off
14. !!! - Heart of Hearts
15. Radiohead - Codex
16. Panda Bear - Afterburner
17. Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean

Annotations:

-This was a tough one to put together because there were a LOT of close calls. I would've loved to include Crystal Stilts' "Through the Floor", Battles' "Futura", and Iron & Wine's "Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me", but a CD's only 80 minutes.

-Also Fleet Foxes' "The Shrine/An Argument", which I have the clearest memory of from seeing their concert in May. Awesome show and awesome song, but it was just too long for the mix, and "Grown Ocean" is no slouch at all (the more I think about it, the more it feels like my favorite song on the new album).

-"Pow Pow" is supposedly the last song LCD Soundsystem ever made, so it feels like a fitting representation of the season that saw the band bid us farewell. (Too bad it wasn't actually played at their farewell show, but oh well.) Speaking of, I never got around to writing up a blog entry about the retirement of one of my all-time favorite bands - and experiencing their last show via webcast in a house full of friends - but maybe I'll get around to that at some point.

-John Darnielle does righteous anger better than just about anyone, and I'm not saying this was an angry season for me (could've been, but wasn't), but you can't help but get swept up in his enthusiasm on songs like "Estate Sale Sign". Darnielle sounds more alive here than he has in a good while, and the rest of All Eternals Deck is pretty great, too. Also: Pomona gets another shout out!

-Junip is the new band of Jose Gonzalez - who everyone in the world except me is already familiar with, I think. The production alone on this album, and this song especially, is just incredible. There aren't many albums that make you feel like you're in the room with the dudes while they're playing, but this is one. Now I have to go out and track down Gonzalez's other work, too.

-I dunno if it's a happy accident or I'm just that awesome, but a lot of the transitions just KILL on here. "Good" into "Too Many Rappers" shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, and the fade from "Codex" to "Afterburner" feels sublime to me. Overall I think this is one of my best sequencing jobs yet, so allow me to pat myself on the back.

In the great bus ride of life, there is no brake pedal

2011-04-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

I recommend that you click the comic to read it at the widescreen jumbo-size in which it was intended to be seen! Whoa!

Frequently Avoided Answers

2011-03-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Yep, still doing these.

2011-03-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

"All Best Guesses" - Winter 2010/2011

1. Grouplove - Don't Say Oh Well
2. !!! - All My Heroes are Weirdos
3. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home
4. Circulatory System - Overjoyed
5. Cut Copy - Where I'm Going
6. Peter, Bjorn & John - Second Chance
7. Kanye West - All of the Lights
8. The Chemical Brothers - Swoon
9. Wolf Parade - Cave-O-Sapien
10. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round
11. Smith Westerns - Weekend
12. Vampire Weekend - Holiday
13. Iron & Wine - Rabbit Will Run
14. The Go! Team - Buy Nothing Day
15. Deerhunter - Fountain Stairs
16. Donovan - Season of the Witch
17. Sufjan Stevens - I Want to Be Well
18. Oh No Oh My - Summerdays

(Who knows how long any of these links will last, so listen early, listen often)

The End of the Neon Meate Dream

2010-12-18T15:34:00.000-08:00

Whatever you may think about SPIN Magazine, a little over a decade ago it was solely responsible for introducing me to Captain Beefheart.

Back when most websites had MIDI soundtracks and ugly wallpaper best viewed with Netscape Navigator, the blog culture hadn't yet developed and magazines were basically the best way to keep up with the culture of music. Or at least, they were the best way for young turks like me, voracious readers and anxious learners just discovering the world of music beyond the mainstream.

One month, nestled between articles on the new exploits of Christina Aguilera and the Beastie Boys and whoever else was a curious piece on a man who hadn't released a record in nearly twenty years. His name was Captain Beefheart. He looked nothing like anyone else in the magazine, and the article went to great lengths to explain how his music sounded like nobody else's, either. It explored the early years of his career, his spark of popularity, and then his retreat into the California desert, severing all ties with the music industry. Though he had spent nearly two decades as a recluse and many of his albums were difficult to find, his wildly experimental concoction of blues, folk and rock continued to inspire artists to that day. And the album widely regraded to be his masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, had just been re-released.

For a culturally suffocated midwestern teenager like me, looking for anything at all to help separate myself from the Abercrombie-clad high school herd, desperately if need be, this was like discovering the holy grail. I found a copy of Replica and purchased it sight unseen (no small feat for me; in those poor days, I would heavily vet every album at Streetside Records' listening station before purchase). I took it home and put it on, listening with a half-frown because parts of it were so jarring, but also with a half-smile because I was prepared. This was an album I knew I would not love on first listen; it would require some effort from me, but it would be worth it in the end. I reminded myself that, according to the article, this was the all-time favorite album of Matt Groening, of all people.

I listened to it over and over again. I played it for my friends, and I even played it for my parents. I wrote a five-star review of the album in my high-school newspaper. I don't remember specifically how I described his sound, but I'm pretty sure I quoted "Fast and bulbous!" somewhere in there. And I took immense pleasure in playing the album for the rest of the newspaper staff, a grin both wicked and smug plastered to my face when my fellow teenagers cringed or yelled "turn it off!" or "this is terrible!" or just left the room.

I rarely made it all the way to the end of the album. 28 tracks of Captain Beefheart was a little much even for me, but that didn't really matter. I considered picking up other albums like Safe as Milk, but still being a neophyte (and, frankly, an idiot kid) when it came to music, I had figured everything else could only be a diluted form of Replica, so I passed. At that time, though, those were only details. I had found a brash badge of individuality and I did not hesitate to show it off. And I was beginning to realize, too, that you could appreciate music without always wanting to listen to it: this music, so intensely honest and unflinchingly enthusiastic, most definitely had its time and place.

I was also really proud when one of my friends purchased The Spotlight Kid of his own volition. To me, still, there are few better things in life than knowing you've helped someone discover a new favorite artist.

I went off to college and began working as a DJ at the radio station, quickly finding myself surrounded by like-minded individuals who were far more versed in indie rock than I. And anyone can tell you that a group of liberal art school hipsters can get pretty insufferable: their codes of necessary knowledge and aloofness are as strict as anything they loudly rebel against. So while I came in not knowing Merge from Matador or Ian Curtis from Ian MacKaye, I did possess one unshakable piece of indie capital in the form of Mr. Beefheart. Our fiercely underground library included most of his albums - all on vinyl, of course - so I played him on my show whenever I could.

Eventually I realized that my show needed a name, and I settled on "Captain Beefheart Rides Again". That meant (to me, a least) that I had to play at least one Beefheart song per show. It was a shtick, but one I was more than happy to repeat. Usually I played songs I knew from Replica, but I would branch out every now and then, too. One day I finally dug out the vinyl copy of Ice Cream for Crow, Beefheart's final studio album, and played the title track. It was my virgin listen, and I was as curious and confused by it as the first time I had heard any other Beefheart song. It was ramshackle crazy, its blind enthusiasm unspooling at speeds almost impossible to conceive. Even his voice sounded more surreal than usual. But this is what I should have expected from the man, I thought: the unexpected. Always.

Then the phone rang. I picked it up; it was a listener.

"Slow it down, man!" He bellowed.

"Uh, what?" I thought for a moment that this was his way of saying I was playing so much great music that he could barely handle it.

"The record, man!" He said. "You're playing it too fast!"

I looked at the record player: it was at 45 RPM. I switched it to 33 RPM, and the hyper jamming slowed to a dirty, bluesy stomp, Beefheart's signature howl now as deep as I remembered it.

"Oh shit," I said, and thanked the listener.

But I regretted fixing the RPM in the middle of the song. In some ways, it felt like it would have been more appropriate to let it run at the same crazy speed. For Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, there almost seemed to be no one right way to play a song, or sing, or even maintain a rhythm. Theirs was the sound of ultimate musical freedom, with all the highs and lows and rushes of inspiration and quagmires of confusion that come with it.

After college, I listened to Captain Beefheart less and less frequently, and eventually stopped altogether. Too much time spent keeping up with the music culture and its symbiotic relationship with the blogosphere. SPIN magazine continues to this day, though I haven't read it in years. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to get an editor to sign off on a Captain Beefheart article back in the late 90s, but I hope they're continuing to take those risks. It's one of the only articles I still remember from that era.

Captain Beefheart's real name was Don Van Vliet. He passed away yesterday, at the age of 69.

The more I think back on my minor obsession with the man's music, the more I realize I didn't really understand much of it at all. But that's partly the point, I think. With that unique authorial voice, that singular outlook which inspired such a daring and unforgettable body of work, any of us would be hard-pressed to say that we truly understood a man who began his career with Frank Zappa and ended it in the desolation of the Mojave.

My familiarity with his work didn't end up being as encyclopedic or everlasting as I thought it would, but Van Vliet still had an undeniable effect on my musical tastes, strengthened my appetite for experimental art, and helped show me the endless possibilities that creativity can offer beyond the measured pleasures and well-trod roads of most other artists.

If I had ever been able to meet the man, I would have liked to thank him for that.

This Fall (but without The Fall)

2010-12-13T18:06:00.000-08:00

"I'll Sleep When I'm Rich" - Fall 2010

1. Pavement - Box Elder
2. Crystal Stilts - Shake the Shackles
3. Kanye West - Power
4. Shit Robot - Take 'em Up
5. Of Montreal - Enemy Gene
6. Sufjan Stevens - Get Real Get Right
7. Sleigh Bells - Straight A's
8. Hot Chip - Hand Me Down Your Love
9. LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
10. Klaxons - Echoes
11. No Age - Glitter
12. Tokyo Police Club - Bambi
13. Caribou (Manitoba technically) - Skunks
14. Land of Talk - Goaltime Exposure
15. Les Savy Fav - Yawn, Yawn, Yawn
16. The New Pornographers - Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
17. Los Campesinos! - You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing
18. Arcade Fire - Suburban War

For lack of time and interest in discussing every single song, select annotations below!

-A few years back, I would have killed to see Pavement in concert. And now I've seen them twice in one year, which feels weird, in retrospect. Partly because I was a little underwhelmed the first time I saw them, and kind of apathetic about the second show. Not that they sounded bad; just very ramshackle and lo-fi, which is really how they should sound live, I guess. Both venues I saw them at (Coachella main stage and, worse, the Hollywood Bowl) were way too big for their "just a bunch of dudes" charm - something like the Henry Fonda or (yeah, right) The Echoplex would have been perfect. But I end up feeling like that about most indie rock acts I see at the Bowl, so...who knows. At any rate, "Box Elder" was not a song they played, but is one that I really hoped they would play, so here it is.

-Again on the concert train, I have an Of Montreal song up partially for the Halloween show I attended (and partially because its themes are similar to a script I'm working on right now), but just realized I forgot to include a Janelle Monae song, too. Whoops. Maybe that'll go on the deluxe re-issue 10 years from now. At least this one half-counts.

-Sufjan Stevens is an interesting case. I wasn't really a fan of his, I guess, "singery-songwritery pleasantness" on previous albums (whether that was true or just my perception of him), but his new work, at least since his Dark Was the Night offering "You Are the Blood", has gotten pretty nuts, and "Get Real Get Right" is a pretty perfect example, overstuffed with nervous strings, impending-doom horns and dizzying vocal acrobatics that grab you by the ears and demand your attention. I also realized after maybe a dozen listens that the song has a Christian overtone that's pretty blatant once it's uncovered, but - I can relate to the idea of needing to get your shit together for whatever reason, religious or otherwise. So, many reasons to include it here.

-The Sleigh Bells/Hot Chip/LCD progression is a pretty blatant chronological snapshot of their awesome Hollywood Bowl show a few months back - one of my favorite concerts in recent memory (and maybe of all time). "Straight A's" as a song is about as loud and brief an encapsulation of Sleigh Bells' set as possible, and "Hand Me Down Your Love" is, well, one of the few Hot Chip songs I haven't put on a mix yet. "Dance Yrself Clean" was the first song LCD played, and it immediately knocked me for a loop: I never expected them to play that song, and it signaled the beginning of a show full of awesome surprises, focusing on the best parts of This is Happening with some welcome throwbacks to the band's first singles. And unlike bands I mentioned earlier, LCD is completely wired to play gigantic venues; they play with such force and enthusiasm that they can't help but envelop even the sprawling Hollywood Bowl. Did I mention I was in the fourth row? Yeah, it was a great concert.

-I've been listening to a lot of Caribou lately, but honestly had no clear frontrunner to symbolize this. I feel like a lot of his music works better in album form than individual tracks - I've had Swim on heavy rotation for months, but I'd be hard-pressed to list my three favorite tracks from it. But I've really appreciated "Skunks" for a long time, all the way back to 2003 when Caribou was Manitoba, so it felt as appropriate as anything else.

-Another one of my favorite albums from this year, still, is Romance is Boring, but the Los Campesinos! track this season is from 2008's We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, a strange 2008 release following the band's smash debut album earlier that year. It really is LC!'s Amnesiac, overall not as strong as the album released months prior, but it does feature some of the band's best tracks, from "Ways to Make it Through the Wall" to the title track to the one on this very mix, "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". One of the few LC! songs that's a definite grower, this one is less about Gareth's tragicomic character sketches and sugary mixed-gender shoutalongs than it is about the band's secret weapon, multi-instrumentalist Tom Campesinos!, whose melodies keep the songs together when all else seems seconds from bursting at the seams. Even if the song wavers into melodrama occasionally, it's an easy flaw to forgive every time that soaring guitar chorus washes everything else away.

-The Arcade Fire track here was very nearly "We Used to Wait" - and it's tough, when I'm considering a track that got really big and popular and possibly over-played during that season. The hipster part of me says "fuck it, dude, you missed the boat, now it's cliche and you won't even want to hear it again for a long time", while the realist part says "fuck you, dude, you can't pretend you don't sometimes discover a song at the same time as everyone else." And then they fight for a while, until a third part of me shows up and says "uh, dude, it's all about what the song says to you, not anyone else." And this third part is always right. So, whether I missed the boat on "We Used to Wait" or not, here's "Suburban War", another in a long line of Arcade Fire tracks that seems permanently relevant to me and, I'm sure, to a lot of you.

Based on a true story.

2010-10-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

At least the music never stops.

2010-09-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

Been way too long since I've posted anything...since I've written anything. That's something I need to rectify. In the meantime, here's my summer mix, finished early but titled late.

"Too Many One-Way Streets": Summer 2010

1. White Rabbits - Percussion Gun
2. Arcade Fire - Month of May
3. The New Pornographers - Crash Years
4. Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars
5. School of Seven Bells - Babelonia
6. Janelle Monae - Tightrope
7. The National - Conversation 16
8. Band of Horses - NW Apt.
9. Midlake - Rulers, Ruling All Things
10. Four Tet - And then Patterns
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Bottled in Cork
12. Wolf Parade - What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go this Way)
13. Vampire Weekend - Taxi Cab
14. Big Boi - You Ain't No DJ
15. Caribou - Hannibal
16. Broken Bells - Mongrel Heart
17. Tokyo Police Club - Not Sick
18. LCD Soundsystem - Home

It's that time again.

2010-05-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

This was at first really easy and then really hard to sequence. Eventually decided, fuck it, the nine-minute track goes first. Most of these are Coachella bands/songs, though the songs chosen aren't always "oh yeah they played that one well".

"Spring 2010: 7 of Out of 10"

1. LCD Soundsystem - You Wanted a Hit
2. Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill (Ring Ring?)
3. Broken Social Scene - Forced to Love
4. Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
5. MGMT - Flash Delirium
6. Gorillaz - Empire Ants
7. Vampire Weekend - Giving Up the Gun
8. MUTEMATH - Armistice
9. Pavement - Trigger Cut
10. Dirty Projectors - Knotty Pine
11. Hot Chip - We Have Love
12. Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension
13. Public Image, Ltd. - Careering
14. The Besnard Lakes - And This is What We Call Progress
15. The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
16. Spoon - Out Go the Lights
17. Los Campesinos! - This is a Flag. There is No Wind.
18. Working for a Nuclear Free City - The Tree

2010 Tunes: a Campesinos for All Seasons

2010-04-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

Of all the bands I’ve come to truly love over the last few years, Los Campesinos! has been one of the most problematic to recommend to friends. Their 2008 debut album, Hold on Now, Youngster… hit a very specific wavelength of shout-along post-twee anthemic indie rock so confidently and completely that – well – it became difficult to recommend the album to anyone who wasn’t looking for exactly that sound. And is it the kind of thing you’d even know you were looking for until you heard it, anyway? At times overcaffeinated and bouncing off the walls, at others deceptively maudlin and veering close to over-smart, it was nevertheless a record that always gave 110%, a breakneck ride through the weird wonderful world of seven barely-adults from Cardiff that, OK, you kind of have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong: I am there, often, and when I am the music is fucking great. I’ve just found that this isn’t the same for everyone.

But, good news: my friends won’t be able to use that excuse much longer.

The band’s “proper” sophomore album, Romance is Boring, has just been released and I’m honestly surprised how spectacularly these guys have managed to balance their sound. The album as a whole sounds a little more centrist, but it’s barely at the expense of losing anything that makes their sound so unique. If anything, they’re just growing up and branching out, but staying true to themselves all the while.

It’s there even in the first few notes of the album, a slight variation on what I call the LC Riff. If you know the band well, you have heard the LC Riff. It’s a fairly simple but memorable melody – usually played on violin but sometimes synths or otherwise – that appears in many variations across the band’s work. It only shows up at the end of Hold on Now, but pops in and out of a good chunk of odds-n-sods collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, often late in the song – check out 3:00 into “Ways to Make it Though the Wall” – always slightly different but an unmistakable callback, a motif, a wink to the fans, whatever. It’s here in full force from second one on Romance, immediately welcoming you to familiar territory. But 30 seconds in it takes a turn into new territory, measuring its time and building up to the big release, with Gareth Campesinos! welcoming you to the album with a phrase you never thought you’d hear him say: “Let’s talk about you for a minute”.

Already in this first minute, they’ve spelled out their mission statement. And, OK, Gareth does spend only a literal minute in second-person before returning to his hilariously pessimistic autobiographical sketches, but hey, baby steps. The song soon submerges into feedback, glides around in it for a minute, seems to meander. And you start to wonder if maybe these guys are losing their way already. But then it roars back to life, so goddamned triumphant that it brings along a whole horn section (pay attention to these horns; they’ll be back), one more killer verse from Gareth, and then, yes, a short spoken-word outro, because this is still Los Campesinos, right – and it’s done. As far as opening tracks go, it’s not a barn-burner in the vein of “Death to Los Campesinos!”, but it does set the tone for the rest of the album pretty perfectly.

The next two tracks are the album’s lead singles, and while I’m not sure I would have chosen the same ones (probably because most of my favorite parts of the album hinge on the word “fuck”), they’re more than worthy as catchy gateway drugs for new listeners. The title track in particular has a great dirty southern rock feel to it, another new direction for them. There are actually a lot of neat new flourishes all over the album, no doubt thanks to musical mastermind Tom Campesinos!. There’s the aforementioned horns, the stringy guitar scraps winding under “We’ve Got Your Back”, the blown-out punk fuzz of “Plan A”. Weirdest and most interesting is “I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know” (title aside), a detuned inversion of that LC Riff getting ground around in a thick hyperspeed mash. It’s thrilling stuff. Dunno how they’ll replicate it on stage, but still, thrilling.

It’s great to see how everyone’s stepped up their game here, from Harriet’s violins to Ollie’s drums. Aleks’s presence isn’t as widespread as it used to be - which makes sense given that she’s on her way out of the band - but her contributions are more varied and vital than ever, maybe because of their infrequency. At once sarcastic ice queen on “I Warned You, Do Not Make an Enemy of Me”, judgmental conscience on “A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State” and needling huckster on “Plan A”, she’s become far more than an easy vocal counterpoint, and her presence will be missed.

(Side note: is anyone else really wary of the new lineup? Not that it has anything to do with my hopeless crush on Aleks (well, maybe a bit) or new acquisition Kim Campesinos! personally, but the fact that Gareth’s new vocal counterpart will be his sister places the band dynamic in a fundamentally different light. Like any band with mixed genders and intensely personal lyrics - The Smashing Pumpkins, The xx, hell, Fleetwood Mac - a lot of the fans’ morbid fun comes from speculating on the romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, between the band members, and how those inform our listening experiences. The listener who thinks they must have hooked up has a different experience from the one who thinks he must have a huge crush on her and the one who thinks she must think he has a crush on her and so on. But when you’re talking about two siblings, all this speculation falls away - unless you have a really twisted view of them, which I don’t. Still hoping for the best with Kim, but there’s no denying that the Los Campesinos! of 2011 will be a very different beast.)

But this is also an intensely personal album for Gareth. The word is that most of his lyrical illustrations are only barely fictional, and I don’t think he’s even changed the names of old flames (I can’t believe that the Charlotte to whom he writes letters on “Heat Rash” isn’t the same Charlotte he thanked in the liner notes of We Are Beautiful), yet he doesn’t shy away from details whether hilarious or depressing. Only on “Who Fell Asleep In” does it become a little too much, a slow confessional dirge that’s missing most of the trademark Campesinos humor and vitality. And it’s not a matter of just being slow; by contrast, late-album track “The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future” is hardly fast, but carries such epic weight and emotion (and plenty of Gareth’s trademark oddball character sketches) that it easily becomes one of the band’s best tracks.

In fact, Romance is Boring has one of the best late-album sequences I’ve heard in a good long while. From the off-kilter “I Warned You” to “Heat Rash”, a steel-eyed regret that swells into a towering anthem with the return of those fucking horns, through “The Sea is a Good Place” to proper album climax “This is a Flag. There is No Wind”, a vitriolic shout-along that doubles back to familiar territory without once forgetting all the new ground they’ve tread. Here, after the shouts and the choruses and crescendos, the LC Riff comes rolling back in, ready to send the album out on the same note that ended Hold on Now, Youngster. But then it magnifies and bottoms out, and the band comes roaring back in - “Our friends have put the two of us on suicide watch!” - and our expectations are gloriously upended once again. This shit is exhilarating.

It’s a perfect end to the album, though it is followed by one more track: the fittingly-named “Coda: A Burn Scar in the Shape of the Sooner State”, which is just Gareth, his glockenspiel and a gloom of guitar feedback. It’s a hugely abrupt comedown from the previous song, but in context it feels important, a lament of personal failure aimed at… maybe one of the girls named on the album, maybe the departing Aleks, maybe all, maybe none (see? It’s fun to theorize). It’s such a downer that I usually want to skip the track - though that just starts the album over again. And I am always fine with that.

So, yes, it gives me great pleasure to say that this is my favorite album of theirs, and so far my favorite album of 2010 - which, in a year already filled with new releases by Spoon, Hot Chip, Gorillaz and Massive Attack, is really saying something. It’s exciting to hear and watch one of your favorite bands really maturing and improving, especially when they produce the kind of sound that speaks to a wider audience - without selling themselves or their fans short. It’s a rare triumph of a (technically) sophomore album, and hopefully just one more step in a long and successful career.

2010 Tunes: More Quickies

2010-04-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

Some more quick reviews! Hooray!:

Vampire Weekend - Contra
Much as I’m not a fan of their whole Ivy League aesthetic, I’ve still found plenty to like on Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album. Songs like “Cousins” find the band at their most energetic heights yet, while others like “White Sky” further refine the kinds of breezy tropical horizons the band hinted at two years ago. Ezra Koenig seems to have really benefited from his horizon-broadening side projects with The Very Best and the like, even if his love of over-enunciating exotic words causes songs like “Horchata” and “California English” to veer into over-precious nursery rhyme territory. And then there’s “Giving Up the Gun”, an instant classic that’s an unabashed stab at radio play while still feeling like a fresh direction for these guys. It’s just another one of the contradictions that make Vampire Weekend such an interesting band, even if not every hat they wear is to your liking.

These New Puritans – Hidden
I was a big fan of these guys’ labyrinthine debut album, Beat Pyramid, which was awesome in part because it was so obtuse, providing a listening experience that felt like an excavation. Their follow-up retains a lot of TNP’s flavor, echoed horn loops and all, but also feels more straightforward, ironically enough. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot to mine here, but it seems that even the puzzles themselves are too well hidden on this album to really excite the hunt for meaning. Sure, there are songs on here that can stand on their own (“Hologram”, “Attack Music”), but as a whole the album does seems to have too much, well, Hidden for its own good.

Turzi – B
When I first heard “Baltimore” on the radio, my immediate reaction was disbelief that Primal Scream had a new album out already. OK, sure, partly because of Bobby Gillespie’s guest vocals, but there’s no denying that Turzi’s darkly urban electro-rock gives the song a distinct feeling that it could be called “Exterminator 2.0”. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either, especially when the music on most of the rest of the album speaks for itself. A lot of “political” artists lean on either long-winded manifestos or cheesy sloganeering to get their point across, so it’s really refreshing to hear a set of (mostly) instrumentals that just feel like protest music. And, true, without a specific target or worldview, you could argue that it’s not a real political statement; I’d argue back that it least this won’t go stale after six months.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Gorillaz was originally conceived as an anti-band; four cartoon avatars who provided the surreal facade of a faceless and numberless band. That was almost immediately undone when fans found out who was involved (“omigod! Damon Albarn and Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator!?!”). Then came Demon Days, probably my favorite Gorillaz album because it’s the least Gorillaz-like, basically an Albarn/Danger Mouse vanity project first and some vague attempt at “anonymity” a distant second or fifth. Plastic Beach, now, feels like a serious attempt to get back to that anonymity through such sheer volume of guest singers, musicians and producers that only the vague notion of this as a “concept album” can really keep all this together as any kind of unified piece. That’s not really my bag, but in the age of mp3 downloads and iTunes singles and “the death of the album” (whatever that means), it’s probably exactly what they’re going for. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by a guest list that includes Mos Def, Gruff Rhys, Lou Reed, De La Soul, Mick Jones, Joe Simonon, fucking Mark E. Smith and, uh, Snoop Dogg. The more I look at this as less of an artistic statement and more of a big fat crazy party where each rock luminary gets a turn at the mic, the more it works for me. Is it in too poor taste to end with “Everyone gets a turn with the Plastic Beach”?

Mix well and serve

2010-03-31T10:40:00.000-07:00

My seasonal mix-making continues. Tracklist posted without commentary this time, since I've been doing a lot of music writing lately as it is (more short reviews tomorrow and then another nice long one on Friday).

"Live Hard" - Winter 2009/2010

1. Vampire Weekend - Cousins
2. Phoenix - Courtesy Laughs
3. Beach House - Silver Soul
4. Spoon - Mystery Zone
5. Yeasayer - ONE
6. Atlas Sound - Quick Canal
7. Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
8. Hot Chip - One Life Stand
9. Four Tet - She Just Likes to Fight
10. The Twilight Sad - Cold Days from the Birdhouse
11. Bear in Heaven - You Do You
12. These New Puritans - Hologram
13. Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid with You
14. Massive Attack - Paradise Circus
15. Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State, or: Letters from Me to Charlotte
16. Wilco - Everlasting
17. Girls - Lauren Marie

2010 Tunes: Transfer Pending

2010-03-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Spoon - Transference

Transference has a couple different meanings. A quick internet search reveals that it means, uh, “the process of being transferred” (thanks, dictionary.com!), but also that it’s a psychoanalytic term for taking your feelings for a certain thing and tying them to a new (and often unrelated) thing. Like if you spend your life scared of clowns because one murdered your parents, transference occurs when you begin to fear your roommate because you catch the dude trying on face paint.

So if someone (let’s say a band named “Spoon”) decides to name their new album Transference, is it because they think it illustrates this curious and not-exactly-desirable process? Or causes it? Or is it because Britt Daniel “just thought the word was really pretty”?

Well, shit.

Spoon is one of those bands whose popularity only grows faster the harder they try to dodge labels and meanings. But that hasn’t stopped critics from trying, and with every new album come a flurry of descriptors ever harder and faster and wronger. (Yes, “wronger”. That’s how wrong.)

I have a theory on this and it’s completely self-serving, but oh well: I think their best album is Gimme Fiction. That album found a great balance between the band’s fun-loving and cerebral tendencies, really unequaled before or since. And this was the album when Spoon really started to blow up, but nobody called it at first. Critics thought the album was pretty good, fans wanted more “Stay Don’t Go”, etc. And suddenly: commercials. Bigger shows. Stephen King calls “I Summon You” his song of the year. Near-stupid levels of popularity. And then everyone realizes: oh shit. This album was actually really good.

Fast-forward two years: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga drops and critics fall all over each other trying to be The First to declare this album An Instant Classic. But, really? It’s just another good Spoon album, with the requisite broad hits (“The Underdog”), textural experiments (“The Ghost of You Lingers”) and late-album filler (“My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”) intact. It opened the floodgates to bigger concert venues and a critical jizz-fest, sure, but suggesting that this is their best album is basically a slap in the face to Fiction, Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell.

And here we are again in 2010 with Transference, which finds our boys keepin’ on keepin’ on, and the Quest For New Superlatives is back in full force. These guys are “brilliant innovators”, “scientists of the studio”, “uncompromising visionaries”, etc. And, guys, I know we have to flex our vocabulary muscles and all that, but let’s take a step back for a minute.

One of the few negative – if funny and a little unfair – criticisms of the album I’ve heard is that it’s “a perfectly good collection of b-sides”. I can see where this comes from: a lot of the album is sparse, and some tracks sound like they could be demos – because, actually, some of the tracks are the demo versions, which the band reverted to after tossing out slicker versions. Using demos on your proper album is a ballsy move – so credit for taking the risk, at least – but there’s a reason for this: it’s because demos typically sound pretty janky. And these demos are no different; they don’t get a pass just because they come from Spoon. I love the exaltation that songs like “Trouble” contain “the gritty promise of demos”, as if they’re exciting because they point to the possibility that they might one day become better or, at least, more. But, guys, this is the album! If there’s any “more” it’ll be a Neon Indian remix or an alternate take on disc 2 of the tenth anniversary re-release!

Which raises the question: is a demo still a demo if it ends up on the album? Is a b-side still a b-side if it’s “Yellow Ledbetter”? This album’s layers and juxtapositions might bring about a lot of beard-scratching discussion and postulation, which is fine, but it seems to come at the expense of a lot of fun. It’s a shame, because there is fun to be had here, like in the mish-mash enthusiasm of “Nobody Gets Me But You” and the groovy outro of “I Saw the Light” that grows into its whole own Thing. But there are also attempts at levity - like that “Whoo!” tacked into the coda of “Written in Reverse” whose enthusiasm I just don’t buy.

But this might be unfair. Spoon are allowed to go in different directions (isn’t that what we should want from our favorite bands?), and it’s ridiculous to get upset when they don’t just record Kill the Moonlight Pt 2. But it’s hard to ignore the first thing that makes Transference stand out: its jarring transitions. Second track “Is Love Forever?” bottoms out under its own strain barely two minutes in; “Mystery Zone” sounds so good on the radio until it cuts out, mid-word, rather than hitting what would assumedly have been a peak of ascending notes and sharper strings. How many are really happy to be dropped from these heights straight into the muted, wobbly tones of “Who Makes Your Money”? Probably not a lot. Look, these guys are trying to tell us something with this. This is not the sound of them fucking up; it the sound of them trying to teach.

OK, but what? On further listens you realize there’s actually a lot of stopping and starting on “Mystery Zone”, musically and lyrically. At times Daniel seems to be having trouble forming coherent thoughts. Later, “Out Go the Lights” sends him in a couple narrative directions without settling on a single one. Gradually, it becomes clearer that if these guys are trying to say something, it’s that they don’t know what to say. A quick googling of Transference criticism comes up with telling adjectives: “discombobulated”; “fumbling”; “transitory”. If I wanted to be a total dick, I’d ask: if you don’t know what you’re trying to say, why are you saying anything? (The fact that I didn’t delete this question after typing it out, though, means I’m at least half a dick. Maybe three-quarters.) If this is them being off-the-cuff and uninhibited, why does this all feel like such a carefully crafted experiment?

But, again, I have to back off, because this is assuming a lot. Playing a set for KCRW a few weeks back, they were asked why they included some of the controversial cuts and halts on the album, to which they responded [something to the effect of] “We just felt like it”. The whole interview was a little awkward – the band seemed less interested in explaining their music than just playing it – and it could have been an easy dodge, but you know, why not give these seven-album-deep indie pros the benefit of the doubt?

For me, it’s mostly that there’s a lot to love on Transference, but the roughest parts of the album really subtract from the whole (that smash-cut ending to “Is Love Forever”? It’s just sloppy, with the vocal echoes cut a fraction of a second after the rest of the song), and the closest possibility to a method behind the madness – that the band is just, you know, saying whatever – isn’t nearly a compelling enough reason to appreciate that. It’s not really that postmodern or daring; it just seems half-baked. It’s a shame, because that effort to teach sullies a lot of what could have been another classic from these guys - if that’s what they even wanted in the first place.

2010 Tunes: Quick Hits

2010-03-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

Dudes, I said this earlier but I still really mean it: so far 2010 has been a pretty crazy year for music, and it's only March. May in particular is gonna be extra special, with new releases from Broken Social Scene, The National and LCD Soundsystem! And there's another 7 months of the year after that.

But there's already been several noteworthy releases this year, and I felt like writing about a bunch of them. So over the next few days I have a bunch of quick reviews and two longer ones coming up, check them out if you're curious to know what I think about certain things. Oh, and if you're curious, samples from most of these bands should be available over on ye olde playlist -->

So here's what I've been listening to...

Massive Attack - Heligoland

Always glad to see these guys back, even if it takes 5+ years between albums. So far I’ve found this album much more interesting than 100th Window - either because they’ve included more guest stars or do more with them this time around. It’s weird to hear Elbow’s Guy Harvey make a guest appearance, and weirder still to hear Damon Albarn on here (I feel like his appearance automatically makes “Saturday Come Slow” a Gorillaz song), but overall most of it works. For the purists, too, “Girl I Love You” is a great Horace Andy track while “Rush Minute” evokes the tense, shadowy 3D tracks of old. All in all, a good collection, and hopefully a sign of more frequent output from these guys in the near future.

Four Tet - There is Love in You

I hadn’t listened to these guys for years - not since my college disc-jockey days of playing as many 6-minute songs as I could find to make the job easier - and I’m starting to regret that. There is Love in You is a great collection of spacey electronic beats, at times soothing and at others thumping. Lead single “Love Cry” has built up a lot of excitement on the blogosphere - pretty impressive considering the thing is nine minutes long and the first half of it is build-up! So, great, now I have another artist’s back catalog to go through. Thanks a lot for being so good, Kieran Hebden!

Hot Chip - One Life Stand

Maybe my standards were too high for a follow-up to my #1 album of 2008, but I’ve found most of this album pretty underwhelming. Maybe also because, of their fairly bifurcated tendencies, I’ve always been much more in favor of the monster jamzzz while One Life Stand falls more heavily in line with their tender side. There are a couple worthy barnburners in “Thieves in the Night”, “We Have Love” and the title track, though they can’t quite reach the apex seen on previous albums. “Alley Cats” is probably the finest song on the album while also serving as its clearest microcosm: A little dancey, a little sentimental, it rattles a bit in the middle when Joe Goddard’s sleepy vocals threaten to derail the entire rhythm (I don’t know what Goddard’s deal is on this album; his papa-bear vocals are usually a welcome contrast to Alexis Taylor’s, but here he sounds either too slow or too doped-up or, Christ, even too auto-tuned to really enjoy. Sad, because I like the guy!), but then Taylor’s sublime vocals roll in, lifting all of us up; “you painted a song”, says he, and suddenly all is right with the world. Maybe I’m being too hard on these guys… sure, there are a few missteps (don’t get me started on “Slush”), but at least these guys are still trying new things, and I’m sure a lot of this will grow on me more over the coming months.

More tomorrow!

Would Recommend: Action Button

2010-01-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

I remember a year or so ago reading frustration - from, oddly, several unconnected places around the internet, as if part of some miniature unconscious zeitgeist - that video games, despite having become a huge cultural and commercial force of entertainment, didn't have much in the way of real criticism. In other words, lots of publications telling you how a game does x well and y not-so-well, but very few sources really trying to beyond and find something deeper. Which, I had wondered, might have had something to do with the inherently interactive nature of the medium itself, since "art" and "statements" and all that would seem to take a backseat to the bigger question of "can player 1 jump over this pit".

But, I have been proven wrong, at least by one website. Action Button Dot Net so far seems to be doing a great job of providing the kind of deeper insight I never knew I needed about my once-favorite mode of entertainment (now probably my third, but who's counting). The site design may strike you as off-putting as some review lengths (seriously, you think my writing is long-winded, check out more on FF XIII than you may ever want to read), but what's here is really good, insightful and unapologetic, and has made me rethink some of my own gaming opinions one way or another (though I still love Mario Galaxy).

Of particular note are the reviews of their 33 favorite games of all time. Check out their review of my number one and their number two, Super Mario Bros. 3, fascinating (the review) and enlightening despite taking 10 minutes of reading time to actually begin discussing the game in question. There's a particular bit that especially spoke to me, which I'll quote here - but behind the cut, since it works better in context of the review, so go read that first, seriously, I'll wait, my blog's got time--

--and so in talking about how part of the game's magic is inextricably linked to the times before Gamefaqs when gameplay was about discovery and trading secrets with friends and how often half the fun just came in running the little plumber around and trying shit and playing not to see how the story ended or to get all 101% of the hidden secrets but just to play the fucking thing, Tim Rogers asks:

"Did all this psychological kleptomania really spew from Super Mario Bros. 3, a game we played so much that it became literally incorrect to not crouch before jumping to catch the falling magic wand at the end of the airship boss battles? (The only true way for Mario to be victorious is for him to split-second-snap out of flying crouch and into triumphant standing, wand upraised.)"

...I mean... yeah, that-- that was me, in a nutshell, really. Me and my friends, growing up and playing this game. This paragraph is actual truth, what you might call Earned Resonance. And part of it's nostalgia, sure, but not at all the same kind you get from discussing, say, or The Goonies or Saved by the Bell. It's almost like the Internet isn't making the world a smaller place, just showing us how small it's always been.

Anyway: thumbs up. Would Recommend. Check it out if you like reading extensive, thoughtful essays on video games, and especially if you believe the medium's about more than just pressing buttons for a few hours. Which, if you're a real gamer, you should anyway, right?

2009: The Year Freak Broke

2010-01-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

It’s weird to me that my main motivation for finishing this list was to want to move on and start talking about the music of 2010. The new year is looking great already! Not that 2009 wasn’t also excellent. There was a lot of great stuff, most notably from established artists who found serious success in evolving their sound (they make up half of this list). Some exciting newcomers in here too, though; I’m excited to see where all of these guys go from here, whether we hear from them next in 2010 or 2020. At any rate, here they are: my Top 10 Albums of 2009.

10. Bear in Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Something about Bear in Heaven feels weirdly out of time. There’s something very familiar about this sound - maybe even retro - it remains hard to categorize. “Shoegaze without the gazing” might get you almost halfway. It’s a swirl of sound and texture - at times hazy and at others energizing - that still manages to pack in more poppy hooks that most actual “pop” albums this year. Weirdly against the grain of a year that itself felt against the grain, Beast Rest Forth Mouth didn’t need any tricks or gimmicks to stand out on its own merits.

9. Atlas Sound - Logos
Bradford Cox’s “solo” work can be pretty fucking contradictory, but that’s absolutely its intention. Just look at the album cover: that’s Cox himself up there, but with his face blurred out and a big hole where his heart should be. It’s a fitting illustration of an outfit that is primarily Cox’s, but easily shifts and grows to fit the ideas and abilities of his guest performers. It’s unfortunate that the tracks without guests comparatively suffer a little, but Logos still has “Walkabout”, the great Panda Bear song that could have been, and “Quick Canal”, the best Stereolab song never written. And that’s high praise indeed.

8. Mew - No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away
Mew’s angular nü-prog sound is, in some ways, as obtuse and uncool as the frustrating title of their new album. But there’s something to be said for letting go occasionally; OK, not just letting go, but really pushing everything to 11, as they do time and again on “Repeaterbeater”, “Hawaii” and “Vaccine”. Though not as immediate as some of their earlier albums, No More Stories finds them pushing in new directions; check out the fractured breakbeats on “Introducing Palace Players” and the unexpectedly uplifting piano riffs on “Sometimes Life isn’t Easy”. The album begins, fittingly enough, with a timeshifting haze of a track that makes as much sense played backwards as forwards. Its title? “New Terrain”, of course.

7. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
The entire industry of musical criticism fell all over themselves this year in praise of Animal Collective’s eighth album, and while I don’t think it’s the end-all of Indie Rock in 2009, it’s impossible not to recognize the genius and musicianship that created some of the year’s strangest hits. From the woozy gallop of “Summertime Clothes” to the near-goofy exuberance of “Brothersport” and, oh yeah, the completely inescapable “My Girls”, there’s no question that without Animal Collective, 2009 would have been a far more somber and less interesting year.

6. Dan Deacon - Bromst
Bromst found tireless party boy Deacon growing up and growing out, giving out without giving up. Using his classical training to create a dense album as thoughtful and adventurous as it is boisterous and party-ready. Nowhere was this evolution more apparent than at his live shows, where a 13-piece backing band did justice to every diverse melody and instrument used on the album, while Deacon himself still bopped over his turntables in the thick of the crowd, never once forgetting that even a thinking man’s party is still a fucking party.

5. Yacht - See Mystery Lights
On his own, Jonah Bechtolt provided a fun and optimistic - if somewhat gimmicky - counterpoint to a lot of the dour, over-thinking indie dance scenesters of the last few years. But the addition of Claire Evans with See Mystery Lights evolved the band from what could have become a novelty act into a full-blown musical force. They’ve gone from appropriating DFA to becoming one of its tentpoles; and if, with LCD Soundsystem increasingly silent and The Rapture unraveling, the movement’s old guard is beginning to fade, at least it’s in the hands of these two promising youngsters.

4. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
For my money, “1901” is the song that ate the world this year; you’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfectly-formed 3 minutes of pop-rock anywhere else in 2009 or even the last several years. Lucky for us, Phoenix didn’t stop there, rounding out the rest of the album with so many other high-energy jams that you might confuse these elder statesmen of indie for the scrappy new kids on the block.

3. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Worst initial reaction I heard to “Stillness is the Move”: “Who the fuck is this, Mariah Carey?” It was as easy to hate on the Dirty Projectors as it was to love them in 2009, which I guess just comes along with sudden explosions in popularity. True, their howling, staccato tendencies aren’t for everyone, but those with an open mind will quickly discover that this twisted variant of pop has an intensity and addictiveness all its own. You’ll find it in “Stillness” and “Cannibal Resource” among others, but it’s Bitte Orca’s arguable centerpiece - the two-pronged rafter-shaking primal scream from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian 3 minutes into “Useful Chamber” - that blows out the doors and really shows the heights that can be reached when you start looking in new directions.

2. Passion Pit - Manners
The common description of this album has been “like MGMT but the other half of the album is good too”. And… OK, it’s not entirely inaccurate. The latest Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere, Passion Pit offered up a serious collection of jams this year, and while this kind of music can have a short shelf life (see: The Go! Team; MGMT, again), Passion Pit has actually been able to overcome this with daring, thoughtful composition and, seriously, that back-end of the album doesn’t hurt (Why “Let Your Love Grow Tall” hasn’t been made a single, I will never understand). There will of course be a new Indie Dance Music It Kid From Out Of Nowhere in 2010, but the question isn’t “who will it be”; the question is “can they outdo Manners?”

1. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
How much of our listening experiences do we owe to ourselves? Listening isn’t just a passive activity: every time we press Play, we’re also bringing our thoughts and desires and wants and preconceptions to the table. And everything we feel or know or think we know colors what we hear, which is why the same source material can give two people radically different listening experiences. So how much of my enjoyment of Veckatimest comes from my knowledge of the sheer amount of attention-to-detail work that Grizzly Bear put into their new album? How fair is it that our shared appreciation for Albums Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts helped them secure a spot on this list above other albums I’ve listened to - and maybe even enjoyed - more this year? I couldn’t tell you. But any kind of intellectual second-guessing does a disservice to the masterpiece that Veckatimest is, from the opening thunder of “Southern Point” through the ethereal “Two Weeks”, the rollicking swell of “About Face” and the hard-won triumph of “While You Wait for the Others” all the way through to the measured, delicate end of “Foreground”. Sure, the listener will always bring their own opinions, but they’d be hard-pressed to argue with an album of this exceptional caliber.

Honorable Mentions

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There are Mountains
Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Metric - Fantasies
Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

The Fall 2009 Mix - Now with Annotations!

2009-12-15T16:48:00.000-08:00

As you may know, I put together quarterly mixes - I guess "Playlists" except I really do still burn them to CDs - as a kind of musical diary of the previous season. A lot of the music gets chosen because it has some sort of resonance with the people, events and feelings of the time, but some of it also gets put on just because I like it a lot. The actual tracklists for these things only ever get put up on my blogs, so if I lose them I'm boned, but oh well, here's Fall 2009.

I'm also adding short annotations for each song, for the first time. It's kind of a writing exercise for me and I may stick with it or not in the future, so let me know if you like it or think it's horrible.

Music overload after the jump...

"A Few Pebbles Short of an Avalanche" - Fall 2009

1. The Walkmen - Brandy Alexander
"Stop talking and listen to me. I'll tell you of every dream."
I've been listening to a lot of You & Me lately, but for some reason this short slow-burn hidden near the end of A Hundred Miles Off spoke loudest to me this season. Part of that's admittedly because I wanted to try a framing concept with this playlist, to do with dreaming and living and how we try to connect the two. Hamilton Leithauser's no stranger to waxing poetic on exactly this kind of thing, so who better to start with?

2. Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
I like the slow, otherworldly build at the beginning of this song - it's a nice segue from the setup at the end of the last one. It builds into one of Yeasayer's most straightforward pop songs yet, and whether you think that's good or bad is up to you. These guys have kind of unjustly been derided as trying to ape Animal Collective's bid for more centrist freak-rock in 2009, but I don't get that. Isn't there enough room for everyone in this sub-sub-genre right now? Space may be dwindling, but it's clear these guys are having fun while they can.

3. Mew - Beach
Arriving late because you stopped to smell the roses - it's something we can all relate to. Distractions are everywhere, and what at first feels like the most important thing in the world can evaporate like any ephemera. And "Beach" is, appropriately, a sunny, poppy clearing amidst the post-prog hills and valleys of No More Stories..., though no less engaging for it.

4. The Dodos - The Strums
"So children, kill your teachers, kill your parents, then kill your preachers"
There's something kind of amazing about such a blunt statement coming from dudes known for their unironic and typically romantic songs. There probably wasn't a better anti-authoritarian screed anywhere else this year, if only because it came from such an unexpected and understated quarter.

5. Ra Ra Riot - Can You Tell
It's pretty on-the-nose, but I like it. RRR does some really tight, catchy pop-rock that doesn't reinvent the wheel, but still has a welcome place in my library.

6. Bon Iver - Brackett, WI
Its parts aren't much - all haunted vocals and collapsing chord progressions - but like any great Bon Iver song, they add up to much more than you'd expect. Yet another reason I regret being so late to the party for the Dark Was the Night Red Hot compilation.

7. Animal Collective - Taste
"Am I really all the things that are outside of me?"
Continuing themes from another song you might have heard, this song is actually almost its opposite: downtempo instead of dancy, fearful and reactionary instead of triumphant and forward-thinking. Wouldn't make a great single, but it resonates. You look back and, with a realization of horror, you may think: "Is this how I'm going to live my life?" Well, is it?

8. Phoenix - Sometimes in the Fall
I saw Phoenix play the Greek Theater a few months ago. I generally hate big concert venues in L.A., since most of the seats end up getting taken by industry types or celebrities or bored rich motherfuckers or whoever - basically a whole crowd of people who are only there to hear the band play their hit single, if that. Behind me at this show were a group of kids that couldn't help but fill the void between songs by screamsinging "Sometimes in the fall, fall fall FALL!" whenever they could. It wore on me a little, and Phoenix never did play it, but damn if I wasn't right there with them, a few actual fans in the crisp chill of a fall L.A. crowd.

9. The Flaming Lips - Watching the Planets
It's just such a crazy, layered song that that you're constantly finding new things to like about it - the camouflaged bassline, Karen O's shrieks, the pound of drums so heavy you feel they might explode any second. A lot of Embryonic is purposefully obtuse and abstract, but this is the album's perfect entry point - placed, of course, right at the end.

10. Built to Spill - Car
A Spin Magazine article once described a lot of Doug Martsch's songs as (more or less) "epics that sound like throwaways, and throwaways that sound like epics". I always thought the first bit sounded like a back-handed compliment, but the second is right on the nose with this sub-3 minute track from 1994's There's Nothing Wrong with Love. At first understated, it blossoms into a play-to-the-rafters exploration of love, dreams, blissful ignorance and the true nature of all things. And then, not even three minutes in, it's over. Throwaway? Not in the least. Epic? Absolutely.

11. Bear in Heaven - Lovesick Teenagers
"Lovesick teenagers don't ever die. They will live forever."
A spiraling meditation on growing older, wiser, and realizing you haven't changed as much as you thought. Oddly as dark as it it optimistic, it's an appropriate illustration of reaching out and flying as high as you can - before you crash into the ground.

12. Passion Pit - Folds in Your Hands
Don't let sub-par Youtube videos and Talk Show appearances fool you - Passion Pit is a hell of a live band. Playing some songs straight and remolding others ("Seaweed Song" somehow becomes more evocative and unique as a solo piano ballad), the band nailed pretty much everything when I saw them a few months ago. Of particular note was this song - maybe because I wasn't that familiar with it, I was floored when the 1:22 breakdown kicked in, they knocked it the fuck out of the park and I found myself caught up in the joyous current of pogoing hipsters. I hadn't known it well before, but now there's no way I'll forget it now.

13. Yacht - It's Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want
The obvious reason being that my home life is about to be upended as I move to a new apartment, but that's not to belittle this song on its own merits. See Mystery Lights is a hell of a sophomore evolution for a band that used to be a one-man (and fairly one-trick) outfit; their jump to the DFA label isn't surprising, since suddenly they seem to be one of the only groups trying to push the boundaries laid down by label pioneers LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture. You can track the sound's evolution as a microcosm in this track alone, but chances are by the 7-minute mark you'll just want to give in and dance.

14. Islands - Heartbeat
OK, no doubt auto-tune is the Great Satan of 2009, but every now and then it's actually used appropriately - see most of Kanye West's Heartbreak and 808s and, well, this song. The weirdly faux-emotional pitch shifts are a surprisingly good fit for a cheery song about jilting an ex-lover. Not that I want an auto-tune indie trend in 2010 (I really don't), just a nice surprise here and there.

15. Grizzly Bear - While You Wait for the Others
Continuing a theme: there comes a time when even the nice guys of Grizzly Bear have to say "enough is enough". Maybe you tried really hard (or maybe you didn't), but if things don't work out, there will come a time when you're asked, kindly, to make your way. Veckatimest is lyrically a fairly inscrutable album, but this song, tucked away near the end, has enough emotional resonance to make up for the rest of the album all on its own.

16. Health - We are Water
A mercurial murk of hollow vocals and searing guitars, the soundscape of this song is everything its title suggests. How can we, as people, even try to stay in one place, to do one thing, to feel one way? We put up our walls and make our decisions and follow our plans. But underneath it all, we're as temporal as any of the weather. We're slaves to our emotions and our fears and a thousand things beyond our control. We are capricious and petty. We are opportunists and survivors. We are elemental. We are water.

17. Franz Ferdinand - Lucid Dreams
I've spent way too long arguing with my friends over which version of this song is the best. I seem to be in the minority thinking it's the album version (the one included here). Where the single version takes a while to get going, this cut almost blasts out of the gate from the beginning, and doesn't let up until the electronic morass at the end (which, admittedly, I could do without). The tribal drums, too, really set this apart from the band's other work in a way that the single version can't claim. The more I think about it, the more I feel like we're supposed to like both versions together, as if the single cut is there to lay down the groundwork, and the album version is meant as a very specific call-back that still pushes everything forward. Still, if I have to choose one, it's this. So there.

18. Oh No Oh My - I Painted Your House
"Perhaps it's time we grow..."
Somehow, this is one of the saddest songs I've ever heard, a cheerily bittersweet song about genuinely trying hard - and failing. It still gets me most every time. But while it'd be easy to wallow in defeat, the important thing is that this song doesn't. Still, after everything, you've got things to build, places to go. If your painting didn't do the trick? It's OK. You can always come back later with your guitar.

Missed it by that much.

2009-12-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

November was the first month since starting my blog earlier this year that went without a single update.

Shit.

I consider this a wake-up call. I do have things to say (I promise), I just feel a lot of my posts ended up much longer than I'd planned, to the point that I became wary of having to match new post sizes to the monoliths that came before.

That, and people tell me my posts are too damn long anyway. Ha.

Well, it's probably true. All our attention spans are shrinking, especially when it comes to internet content. When I fire up Google Reader over breakfast, I usually skip anything I can't get the gist of in a few seconds. No reason to expect my readers to be any different (but here's hoping!).

So, anyway, short story shorter: more content coming soon. In smaller, bite-size chunks. For Democracy!

And some kinds of love are mistaken for vision

2009-10-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

What's more important in our artists: success or happiness?

I mean, yes, obviously, it is possible to be both successful and happy. (And here I'm defining "success" from an artistic/critical standpoint, not commercial, which brings about its own set of issues.) A lot of great music, literature and visual art has come from artists in positive mindsets. So this shouldn't even be a choice worth discussing.

Right?

Maybe. Look, it's not an entirely uncommon idea that artists often produce their best work when they're miserable, depressed, paranoid, jealous, etc, place your favorite descriptor of an unhappy life here. Let's pretend for a second that this has a kernel of truth - those with an axe to grind probably have something more interesting to say than those who are just hanging out, right? If so, it can create a problem for an artist's followers and fans. Do you wish your favorite artist the best in life, or do you want the quality of their work to remain as high as possible, no matter the cost?

Quick example: One of my favorite bands is The National. Lord knows I can't recommend these guys enough. They write some of the most beautifully depressing music I've ever heard. And they're perfectly allowed to write happier songs, too - a lot of their newer, comparatively more positive stuff is good, but I always feel like they're better at illustrating a whiskey-soaked, heartbroken 3am comedown than describing the best way to make their girlfriend laugh. (Maybe it's me.)

Some friends and I went to see their show several weeks ago, and we were blown away by their performance and musicianship as usual. But we also noticed singer Matt Berninger seemed to be having a tougher time of it than usual. Struggling with some of his more personal lyrics. Nervous, abortive physical maneuvers around the stage. Lots of screaming. It was the kind of intensely awesome performance we hadn't seen out of him since maybe '06. And we (arbitrarily) decided that he must have broken up with his girlfriend. Which in turn made us think "cool, now he's going to start writing darker music again."

Which is a pretty fucked up thing to think, leap of logic or not. As an artist, your fans are bound to gravitate toward certain works, and what they might expect from you is not necessarily what you want to provide (our frequent concert shout-outs requesting one of the most depressing songs ever written always go unheeded, sadly). It's a divide that comes with the territory. But it's another thing entirely for fans to desire a quality of life for the artist.

Ideally, yes, we would like our artists to be happy/comfortable/rich and also to continue producing excellent works of art. But if you have to choose one result over the other, what would it be? Is it even a choice where, after having made it, we could still feel comfortable with ourselves? It's a burden I wouldn't want to have to bear, though it's a choice I feel I sometimes unconsciously make about artists I genuinely respect.

And, if someday my writing finds a fanbase and some level of popularity, it's also something that many strangers may be quietly theorizing about me. Which is pretty fucking creepy.

If it's 100 degrees, it's still summer.

2009-09-28T23:26:00.000-07:00

Every season I make a mix tape/mix cd/playlist of the stuff I listened to over those few months. I don't keep a diary or scrapbook or even make very personal entries on web journals like this, so the songs and sequences I choose for these mixes form the closest thing to an autobiographical account of my life as any of us are going to get. Some seasons are more obtuse than others.

I've been doing this since 2003 and haven't missed a season yet (even if I'm late here and there). If you poke around elsewhere on the net (and if you care) you might find previous mixes, but I'm going to start posting them here from now on because why not, I have a blog so why not use the damn thing.

The Summer 2009 mix is called "Chameleonic Tendencies" and it goes like this:

1. Passion Pit - Moth's Wings
2. Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
3. Yacht - Psychic City
4. Atlas Sound ft. Noah Lennox - Walkabout
5. Animal Collective - For Reverend Green
6. Volcano Choir - Island, IS
7. Dirty Projectors - Useful Chamber
8. Mew - Vaccine
9. Phoenix - Armistice
10. Miike Snow - Sans Soleil
11. Yeasayer - Tightrope
12. Nine Inch Nails - Discipline
13. Grizzly Bear - About Face
14. White Denim - Regina Holding Hands
15. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
16. Sufjan Stevens - You Are the Blood

(BONUS QUESTION: I never have more than one song from an artist on a single mix, but I kind of cheated twice - you might even say three times - on this one. Can you find them?)

Not So Fast.

2009-08-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

I really liked The Hurt Locker, but I'm not sure how I can explain the damn thing to you. The film has been called a lot of things: Epic War Journal, Suspenseful Thriller, Action Extravaganza, Insular Character Study; the list goes on. It's a little bit of each of these, but not really all of any of it, which makes the thing so hard to categorize -- but is also more than a little responsible for its success.

"War Movie" is probably the most obvious and misleading of its descriptors. Sure, almost all of it takes place during a war, and most of what we learn about the characters comes to light because of (and is heavily informed toward) a life of neverending battle on Whatever Constitutes The Front Lines These Days. But it's not at all your typical Hollywood peacenik "My God, War is Hell" diatribe, which might have made for some quality post-Vietnam stories but can't seem to find an audience with this century's ever-jaded audiences.

A lot of critics have been calling this the first great film about the Iraq War, and I think that's exactly because the film isn't trying to be. At least, not exactly.

The Hurt Locker does something very simple: it seeks nothing more than to tell a story in the best way it can. Nothing gets in the way: not ideology, not inflated egos, not mass-market paranoia.

Wait, in Hollywood? (This is probably why it started as an arthouse film, only growing to wide release thanks to overwhelmingly positive word of mouth. Look, I don't need to tell anyone that arthouse fare is generally better-written and more insightful than the average megaplex feature. I guess the reason this film throws these differences into such sharp relief is that, on first glance, it looks like it belongs at the megaplex, what with the explosions and expansive sets and even Guy Pearce. We all have such strong expectations of how a film like this typically behaves, and Locker so deftly subverts them within its first ten minutes that you can't help but sit up and wonder, now more than ever, why more films can't not just look but also feel so real.)

Locker explores a small number of characters in a wartime situation that happens to be Iraq. The rationale for the war is never explored; the soldiers' place in an infamously contentious situation never outright questioned. There are no grandstanding judgments or righteous crusades, no Ultimate Antagonists without or within. Even the protagonist, who suffers from a kind of cowboy-action-hero syndrome, is shown as neither Perfect American Hero nor out-of-touch goofball. The film explores these characters and how they live with a situation that exists beyond their control or understanding. And it's that deceptively simple framework that produces results far more interesting and surprising than anything you're going to see in those other war movies that decided they were going to be "important" from day one.

It speaks to a larger idea of what's supposed to be important versus what is important; the divide between intent and execution. If you're creating something, there should never be such a divide - unless you're creating some experimental wankery about artist vs. audience and all that, and if so, best of luck to you - but how do you ensure that intent is execution? It's the same deceptively simple answer as before: make sure your intent is to tell your story the best you possibly can.

That may be unfairly reductive, especially when many have to deal with the whims of financiers, editors, deadlines, feeding one's family, etc. But I see it more as an umbrella term with a lot of possible manifestations, like Keep Revising, Do Your Research, Let the Story Tell Itself. Don't Discount Someone's Feedback Because They Don't Understand Your Big Ideas. Do Not Expect to Win an Oscar. And however many other rules you can think of.

And this extends to other walks of life too. If all you can think about at the office is getting that promotion, you're not going to be able to put in the work necessary to earn it. If you're killing yourself always trying to look flawless for the opposite sex, you won't be able to loosen up and actually engage with anyone. (This last one, I am still working on.)

So the moral of the story is... well, I guess you could boil it down to one of many familiar idioms, in one way or another. Look Before You Leap. Don't Count Your Eggs Before They're Hatched. It's All in the Follow-Through. You get the idea. But just spouting the idiom kind of takes away from all the work you put in to get to that point, and the understanding you reach from having achieved that knowledge on your own. Which, I guess, is an inverted way of saying what I already said. Maybe this wasn't so hard to explain after all.

But how does it make you feel...?

2009-07-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

So far, one of the most critically-praised albums released this year has been Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca. I like the album a lot, though I'm kind of surprised to see just how wide a range of accolades it's received; for all its arhythmic constructions and obtuse lyrics, the thing seems well on its way to the kind of success enjoyed by more mainstream-friendly bands like Spoon and TV on the Radio. (2009 has also, of course, been The Year of Animal Collective, but that's another story.)

I read a recent interview with Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth, hoping he would illuminate an album which I enjoy but have a hard time understanding. But maybe understanding isn't really the point. When asked about the meaning behind the album's title, Longstreth said:

"There's not really a literal meaning to draw out of the phrase. But I like the way the words sound together. I feel like there's some kind of sense just in the relation between the two. Sort of like, "please please me" or something. There's a part that's sort of gentle, and supple, and then there's a part that's barbed, and demanding. "Bitte" is a polite word, but it's sharp."

And later on, with reagrds to the same phrase used in the song "Useful Chamber":

"Lyrically, it's just the sense of the words become aural rather than literal. I guess I don't think of it as dodging and weaving in terms of coherence, or you know, like as you were saying, emotional forthrightness.
"But yeah, one of the beautiful things about music is how simple and direct a line of communication it is. And I guess what I want to do, and what we want to do, is try to make music that feels good, and feels expressive-- even as it does so in a new vocabulary."

In other words, it's not really about the words in the context of linguistics or grammar; it's about the meaning behind those words, an almost subconscious association we make between sound and expression.

An emphasis on lyricism over syntax is nothing new in the world of art, of course; you could look at James Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake or even half the nursery rhymes your mother sang to you at bedtime. Even in indie rock: reading an interview with The National frontman Matt Berninger, I was kind of disappointed to hear that they'd actively avoided specific interpretation while putting together one of my favorite albums, Alligator. (At the time I guess I wanted a back-pat for "cracking the code" or whatever. I'd like to think my listening habits have since changed.)

Even Edgar Allan Poe, a poet obsessed with details and structural minutae, has also long championed the meaning behind the words above all else. But Poe also admitted that discovering meaning was no easy task. Near the beginning of "Eleonora", he writes:

"the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious - whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret."

Now, I've always been pretty awful at poetry. Legendarily awful. And maybe it's because, as Poe speculates, I'm not all that mad. (Though I do daydream a lot.) Though now I'm thinking it's because I may just be too literal. And really, the media I'm writing for at the moment are too consumer-oriented to dip into the pool of subconscious; can you imagine if an episode of Lost was a stream-of-consciousness Paean To Summer, where all the actors shirked their lines and instead gesticulated, hummed and bellowed nonsense to each other for forty minutes?

Actually, I would totally watch that.

But I can't be totally jaded about this, right? Surely there's some example of modern filmmaking or television that expertly splits the difference between syntax and feeling; something less stilted than broad comedies but more accessible than The Tim & Eric Awesome Show. I mean, right? Maybe?

Watching out for myself

2009-06-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while because - I swear! - I've been doing a lot of work towards getting my projects together, researching, rewriting, all that. I've also been trying to watch more films lately. I've seen very few movies over the last few years, because planning to spend 2 hours watching a movie often strikes me as a colossal waste of my free time, because think of how much other stuff I could be getting done in that time, right (even if not much actually ends up getting done, but it's the thought that counts, I guess?). But I find it's easier to commit to that time if I know I'm going to think critically about the film I'm about to watch, in terms of its script and story structure, and how I can use that information to better my own process.

In other words, I've been on the front end of the screenwriting process for so long that I need to regain a clearer view of the back end; it does no good to sit around and assume I know what studios are looking for if I don't get out there and see the kinds of stories they do pick up, and which ones are successful.

(Granted, many scripts purchased or optioned never see the light of day, and those that do are often rewritten and mucked about with by studio, director, actor, test audience, etc. So it's an imperfect science. But, like everything else, if you can't predict the future you should at least try to make an educated guess.)

So I engaged a few recent films with my Critical Writerly Eye, hard-forged from constant peer review and structural study, to see what I could see. Results and SPOILERS! after the jump.

Slumdog Millionaire: Oscar®-Winner for Best Picture 2008! Wow! This movie must be amazing, right? I had high expectations, which were mostly filled out by Danny Boyle's typically expert and unique direction, strong performances from many age groups of actors, and some really beautiful locations. It's impossible not to feel for Jamal and his eternal quest for Latika, and there are some incredibly emotional moments in the film. But the resolution left me feeling a little flat, and it took me a while to figure out why.

For all its skill and flavor, the Slumdog story is missing one of the cardinal components of what constitutes a "structurally sound" script: its protagonist, Jamal, has no real flaw. Sure, the guy is a little nerdy and does have to resort to crime at a young age to survive, but none of this causes an internal struggle that must be overcome in order for Jamal to succeed in his quest (to win Latika and, to a lesser extent, to be able to support her financially). Even Jamal's status as a Slumdog in caste-obsessed Mumbai takes the form of an external impediment to his success; we get no hint of internal turmoil when he strives and searches in settings and lifestyles far beyond his own. Jamal simply continues on his single-minded quest to win Latika and succeeds at the end, his personality remaining the same as it was at the story's beginning (even, arguably, as it was a decade earlier in the character's life).

Is this a bad thing? It may depend on your point of view. If I had brought this script to a peer review, I almost certainly would have been lambasted for such an omission (and would have been referred to several memorable protagonists who do have to overcome an inner obstacle over the course of their journey, like Lethal Weapon's near-suicidal Sgt. Riggs or As Good as it Gets's misanthropic Melvin Udall). But I've spoken with several writers about this and most seem strangely OK with it. Most of their reasoning has to do with it either being adapted from a book, or purposefully trying to feel like a modern fairy tale. I understand both of these points, but I'm not sure I agree with either one. Would Slumdog have been better and more interesting if Jamal had a deep flaw to overcome? Maybe. I personally find it hard to root for idealized characters, but your mileage may vary.

District B13: Watched this for research on Parkour and freewalking. A French film that went by with not a lot of fanfare in 05/06, it was a really enjoyable action flick with a fairly solid script and enough humor to keep the whole experience really enjoyable.

As noted, Parkour was a huge component, thanks in no small part to the presence of co-star David Belle, who actually helped create the Parkour movement in the late '90s. His Parkour sequences are breathtaking to watch; you're not likely to find this stuff anywhere else (though Casino Royale has a pretty good sequence in its own right). In fitting with the Parkour aesthetic, his movements aren't flashy or aggressive (he's typically running and escaping, not fighting or showing off), but they're no less impressive for their ingenuity, proficiency and audacity. (The hour-long making-of doc on the DVD does reference Parkour, though I was hoping for more than a brief mention of one of the film's most unique dimensions.)

Story-wise, there are a few ridiculous and inexplicable moments, sure, but for the most part it's solid and even fits a few cool spins on old ideas here and there; the typical action tropes of "tacked-on love interest" and "bad guy gets his just desserts" do surface, but here too, a little innovation goes a long way. Even the clichéd "some problems can't be solved with violence" message really fits - again, in no small part thanks to the philosophy behind Parkour. At any rate, I enjoyed the film a lot.

Terminator: Salvation: Woof. The less said about this, the better.

The Hangover: Absolutely hysterical. And as a broad, high-concept comedy, this is exactly the kind of film I stand to learn the most from. If there's one thing the script does best, it's the sheer volume of real jokes, packed into almost every line; and here I've been using entire scenes to build up to one punchline! Everyone in Hollywood has been amazed that a film with no bankable stars has made so much money. I'm not, really, and anyone who's seen the film probably shouldn't be: with such a funny script (finely acted by all involved), easily explained to Joe Public and more than able to be cut into a hilarious trailer, why wouldn't droves of people want to see it? Some even twice, because they were too drunk to remember much of it the first time, appropriately enough?

As with most broad comedies, the bellylaughs do disguise some plot holes and character development, though it's far more infrequent (and the quibbles more minor) than you'd expect. The gang's visit to the Tyson residence doesn't move the plot or their quest forward (especially glaring since the rest of the scenes do such a good job of this) - it only shows them, via security camera feed, that their missing buddy Doug was with them at that point in the night, which doesn't really propel the story anywhere. And this is further complicated by a later discovery of photos of the night, which show the guys going off to Tyson's after they put Doug to bed? I also would have loved for Heather Graham's character to have evolved past the typical sweet-smiling, ever-understanding love interest typical in broad comedies like this. At least she's a hooker. (Which is probably the first time I've ever used that phrase.)

Finally - and this might say more about me than it does the movie, but - in keeping with my focus on plot, structure, character, etc, I felt there was a lost opportunity in the character development of Phil (Bradley Cooper), so deftly introduced to us as he swindles his students out of money for his Vegas trip. Here's another kind of misanthrope, who will nevertheless pull out all the stops for his best friend; I wanted to know more about this guy, especially when he says early on, and with very little irony in his voice, "I hate my life". I saw this as the starting point for his character's journey over the next debaucherous days; but, as he marshaled the search for Doug, kept his motley crew of groomsmen alive and motivated, and finally reached the wedding only to lovingly embrace his wife and son, I realized that journey never came. Maybe that "telling" line was poorly delivered or poorly interpreted by me; maybe his character scenes got cut (we'll see when the DVD comes out). And maybe it's just in my head: I brought this up to my friends as we left the theater, and they didn't seem bothered. They actually liked that it wasn't a Thing; that if his character did evolve, it happened beneath the surface. Maybe because not everything needs to be fully explained, or it would have detracted from the laughs, or it just wasn't necessary. It bothered me, but again, there's varying mileage.

***

So what did I learn? I think after all of this I came out with more questions than answers. When it comes to writing and story structure, do "rules" really count for anything? Am I already interpreting movies in a far different light from most other people? Am I paying too much attention to the plot to be able to forgive or enjoy the rest of the film? Is there an incorrect way to watch films, or a correct way to watch anything? Or should I, you know, sit back, shut up, and enjoy the ride?

I wish I knew.

Adventures in Short Fiction #03: Inverse

2009-06-03T15:09:00.000-07:00

(haven't posted much lately since I spent a few weeks in Japan and I'm now working heavily on a new series... so here's another short story from back in the day.)

Melinda's parents wanted their child to be smart. A noble idea, certainly; but, as if secretly ashamed of the idea of education, or just doubtful that their little girl could operate without a sugar coating, they decided it would be best to educate her through a cornucopia of "edutainment" products. Most of these were cheap videos starring googly-eyed anthropomorphic puppets who, over the course of 22 minutes, learned various life lessons about sharing or the Dewey Decimal System while singing catchy songs about shapes or the letter B. As an only child with working parents, this was Melinda's primary method of learning and communication for a good while; where some parents used flash cards or read the newspaper to their children, Melinda got The Mayor of Math and Geography Gina 2: Greece's Pieces. At first she was a little insulted by these egregiously obvious attempts to pass off learning as recreation. Not because she disliked learning; the tyke loved it, and that was the problem. The parts she found interesting, such as lists of prime numbers and the average rainfall of the Amazon basin, were regularly obscured by pedestrian story arcs featuring skittish wallabies or jive-talking rodents. But Melinda's folks mistook her sieve-like thirst for knowledge for a serious interest in edutainment products, so the videos, activity books, snack packs and Sing-a-Song cassettes kept coming.

Before long, Melinda had grown accustomed to digesting information in bite-size, song-accompanied chunks. She memorized the entire soundtrack to Timothy's Tiddlywinks and couldn't count to ten without seeing Ensley Elephant carefully climbing up that infamous flight of stairs. In grade school, Melinda would make up songs to help her learn state capitols, and constructed a menagerie of puppets to ease memorization of the Declaration of Independence. Though these endeavors were generally successful, they didn't improve her grades - her methods of learning were just too complex and time-consuming to keep up with her ever-increasing workload. While the rest of her sixth grade class was memorizing lines of Shakespeare word-by-word, Melinda was designing 16th-century garb for a dozen glassy-eyed Montague monkeys and Capulet squirrels, pondering each puppet's motivation. In middle school she found that the good grades expected of a "weird dork" like her were getting harder to attain; she redoubled her efforts, inventing bookfuls of rhyming couplets which formed an impenetrable map of the foundations of her knowledge. Lunchtime was mostly spent alone, furiously scribbling through sketchbook after sketchbook. To the other kids, she began to seem less "eccentric" and more "nuts".

High school found Melinda suffering two nervous breakdowns (the first fueled by heavy amounts of Mr. Pibb and Mountain Dew freshman year; the second, much later, from LSD and battery acid), developing three different eating disorders, and single-handedly derailing a 10th grade production of "Guys and Dolls". During English tests she would mutter convoluted rhymes under her breath at breakneck speeds, grunting when she tripped over her own tongue. Her graveyard shift at Wal-Mart funded her ceaseless search for rare Etiquette Goats merchandise (only $75 for the rainbow shirt - original pressing!) and whatever other edutainment-related nostalgia she could revisit from the days when everything was simpler. She even flirted with a brief puppet-crafting career, until one of her more twisted creations caused a boy to wet his bed for a month straight. One day at lunch, a popular girl decided to steal Melinda's sketch book to prove some kind of point; neither her parents nor the principal could understand why Melinda retaliated by trying to bite the girl's nose off. Stanford was pretty much out of the question by this point.

Thirty years on, life is still interesting. Melinda now lives in a treehouse in Sarasota filled with hundreds of stuffed animals and notepads full of scribblings, strange loops and formulae that would baffle cryptographers. She speaks in fragments and symbols, cooing quiet, garbled melodies as she sews new clothing for her puppets. She has created a rickety, steam-powered machine which paints perfectly careening mobius strips of any size or color; her mind houses a 10-year oral history of her synthetic housemates which dwarfs Ulysses in scope and grandeur. Her life might have turned out far differently if she could remember how to connect with people; but that's far behind her now, the possibility an old uninteresting relic. Maybe someday her sidewinding genius will be recognized and appreciated. It just has to be communicated first.

The Geometry of Identity

2009-05-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

I have this batshit theory that character traits may actually work across a multi-dimensional spectrum, and that formalizing such a spectrum may help us more easily understand and identify character type and... well, honestly I think it would help with a lot of things. It's probably too complex for someone like me to be able to define, but I could at least get the ball rolling.

Imagine something like a color wheel, but with gradients of personality instead of hue. There's basically an infinite amount of sets of axes that could be plotted around the center point (which I guess would symbolize the most balanced/boring person in existence), with each axis symbolizing one extreme versus its opposite (selfish vs. selfless, fearless vs. paranoid, etc). This is kind of headed in the right direction, but it seems too focused on defining traits as inherently "positive" or "negative" to feel very accurate or useful to me.

But anyway, just like the code E62802 defines a specific point on a color wheel, so could the name "Jack Sparrow" define a specific point on the personality wheel. If you can see the point at which their personality resides, you immediately discover a lot about them. Their opinions, ideals, how they would react to certain things. Or - more importantly, if you're a creator - you could use the chart to get a sense of what needs to be shown to the audience, and what can remain a mystery.

So here's a way-oversimplified mock-up:

It's pretty arbitrary and comes nowhere close to describing the full spectrum of our personalities, but still, for example.

Let's say we start watching a film. In the first scene, the protagonist gives some bum five bucks. Okay, the guy's not too selfish. So if we're following along on the wheel, we could black out some areas where we're pretty sure his personality won't fall:

(We don't go all the way up to the midpoint, since a trait in the center can swing either way depending on the situation.)

In the next scene, a biker narrowly misses hitting him on a busy street. Our protagonist yells "Watch it, buddy". Fairly normal behavior, sure, but not exactly lenient. So we can further amend our wheel:

The next scene is on the bus, where our protagonist strikes up a conversation with a stranger. "I just lost my job and can't afford medication for my wife," says the stranger. "With the economy this bad, I don't know how I can hope to keep her healthy."

"Don't worry, sir," says our protagonist, "something will turn up, you'll see. No problem is insurmountable."

Pretty damn optimistic, right? OK, we're getting a good bead on this character now:

Finally our protagonist arrives at a nondescript old building. As he enters and prepares for something, we realize he's at his job. He cleans himself up and heads into a dark room... where a bloody, broken man sits tied to a chair. Our protagonist sharpens a knife. Only shit, this guy is a TORTURER. And, we find out, he works for a shadowy right-wing group that has taken domestic terrorist watch into its own hands. As he approaches his quarry, we make the final big change to our chart:

Didn't see that one coming, huh?

But it's pretty much in line with what we've seen so far, and that's the power of the whole thing. Once you have a good idea of the spot your character occupies on the chart, it becomes much easier to decide what to tell your audience, and when to tell it for maximum dramatic effect.

If limited stories (i.e. feature films) are about the protagonist overcoming a major character flaw, then open-ended ones (i.e. television series) are about slower character evolution. Your movie hero will (ideally) jump from one spot on the chart to another by the end of the film, while serial characters will move slowly along different axes as they encounter new situations. And all of this can be easily charted and predicted in similar ways to what we've just done.

The question is, I guess, how far do we take this methodology? How much can, or should, we reduce our personalities to geometric formulas and loci? And, someone who's not me, please weigh in: does this idea even work in the first place?

Adventures in Short Fiction #02: Kind of a Reach

2009-05-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

"What does it look like?" Simon barked, standing over a giant red barrel, sweating, wrench in hand. "I'm transcending, goddammit!"

The red barrel had been sculpted to look aerodynamic. It had fins, vents and a papier-mache nose cone which wasn't quite the same shade of red as everything else. The back end had a fuse sticking out of it. "Right now?" I asked. "This second?"

"Soon enough," Simon said, beckoning me over. I noticed the barrel was sitting on a thin wooden track which led down the hill and up to a lip at the edge of a small cliff, a natural ramp if ever there was one. I was beginning to piece together Simon's machinations.

I admired the barrel's paint job, looked over blueprints hastily drawn in the dirt. "You're not really going to--"

"Yes! I am, of course I am," Simon said, approaching me. "How else am I going to activate my crown chakra in this bloody countryside? I'd like to see you escape Kamadhatu without a propulsion unit."

"I don't... what?"

Simon strapped on goggles and a large, pointy backpack. "You could see all of this if you used your third eye." He stepped into his barrel, lit the fuse on the back. "Don't blame me if you find yourself stuck in samsara for all eternity."

Something exploded on the back of the barrel, sending it ricketing down the track. It careened up and over the edge of the cliff, the jigsaw craft actually achieving some bastardized form of temporary flight. At the height of its arc, Simon flung himself from the cockpit, hollering like a drunken Briton playing at cowboys. His backpack exploded into two vinyl archangel wings, which carried him up and away from the plummeting barrel, and for the briefest moment he actually hung in the air, weightless, the afternoon sun casting his titanic shadow all the way back to the hill. Then his left wing snapped off, and he tumbled into the woods below.

Searching the underbrush for the crash site, I came upon the barrel, hopelessly shattered beyond repair. Bushes rustled behind me; Simon appeared on the scene, muddied, bloody and grinning, the sparkle in his eyes almost as evident as his newfound limp. I offered my shoulder, but Simon wouldn't take it, couldn't stop smiling.

I was a little surprised to find he hadn't become jelly on a rock somewhere. "Holy hell. You alright, Simon?"

"Better than alright. The things I saw, you couldn't imagine."

"Well then you'd better tell me, I guess."

Simon stopped, grabbed my shoulder, gazed intently into my eyes. "A catapult. It's going to be the biggest you've ever seen, a great elevator of taught rope and steel to the heavens. I start work on it tomorrow."

I walked Simon home as he spoke to himself in complex equations and theological riddles, arguing with and then apologizing to himself. I left him there on his front lawn, drawing diagrams and formulae in the dirt, scratching away at answers either buried in the ground or lost in the sky.

Adventures in Short Fiction #01: After a Fashion

2009-05-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

(I'm working on some new content for this blog - honestly I am - but in the meantime I thought it'd be a not-terrible idea to post some short stories I've written over the last few years, some of which first appeared on my malnourished livejournal account. So it may be new to you! This one, as you probably saw above, is called "After a Fashion".)

"Don't you have a Face-Plant Squid yet?" Carrie asks from behind a black, oozing protoplasmic sac, its sleek tentacles wrapped through and around her blonde curls.

"No, I don't," I say. "Should I?"

Carrie rolls her eyes a little. I can't exactly see her eyes anymore, but something about the shifting squid tells me she is. "Well, uh, yeah," she says. "You better hurry before they run out."

A quick walk through the neighborhood shows me Carrie was right to worry. Everybody's got these things on their faces. Small green ones on the kids, a giant purplish one on Mr. Bantam. Well I'll be damned if I'm going to be the last Edmunds High sophomore to get one of these before the weekend.

A block away from Mel's I start to see large groups of the lucky bastards. They must just be hanging out, watching the lamers like me showing up late to the party. And is that...? FUCK! It is! Arnie Griff, captain of the chess team has one too? How did I miss this?

In front of Mel's, I have to step over a few Squid-enhanced motherfuckers who've fallen over and are spasming uncontrollably. Those guys must have been so pumped they couldn't take it. I get in the store, and lucky me, Mel says he's two minutes away from closing, but he'll give me a brand-new Face-Plant Squid for thirty-five dollars.

Dammit! Only twenty-five in my pockets. I need ten bucks and I need it fast. Outside I see some dude stumbling around. I ask him if I can please borrow ten bucks, oh please man I really need it, I'll pay you right back. Jerk-off just kind of staggers away, mumbles something, totally ignores me. I go shake him a little. "Hey asshole!" I yell. "I said I need ten bucks!" Suddenly this dude shrieks, tenses up like I scared him or something, falls over. Dude doesn't move, I see a little blood come out of his ear. His Face-Plant Squid starts wriggling, unattaches itself from the guy's face, which looks weathered and sucked dry to the bone. The squid bounces away into an alley. The dude wheezes a little, then stops breathing.

So after a moment I decide not to pursue the squid into the alley. I'm gonna want a NEW one, not some used old thing that might be defective. And this dead dude, is he really gonna need ten bucks? I check out his wallet, and sure enough, today's my lucky day, ex-President Hamilton stares me right in the face.

I run back into Mel's. Nothing can ruin my mood now. I fork over the cash and Mel disappears into the back room. Man, any minute now I'm gonna be just like Carrie and Ted and probably the whole football team at this point, and yeah even Arnie Griff, but I guess you can't have everything. I'm already planning my weekend out when Mel returns with my squid: who I'm gonna call, where we're gonna go, how many new friends I'm gonna make. Mel lifts up the squid and its tentacles shoot out at me, raspy, pulsating. Deep within the squid I see a hole open, sharp pincers draw out towards my skull. I hear a low, hungry roar that gives me goosebumps.

This is gonna be so awesome.

The Coachella Report for 2009

2009-04-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

Quick Notes on my Coachella Experience for 2009 (images pillaged liberally from flickr):

-This year was probably my least stressful one yet, at least in terms of transportation, parking, traffic time and logistics. I can't say the same for all my friends, but it's nice to know I'm getting the weekend procedures down to a workable science, even if I fought with "parking enforcement" more than once.

-Friday felt hot only because it's been relatively cold for so long; Saturday was hotter and made me really start to feel the burn; Sunday was an outright blister of a day that flattened everyone who ventured outdoors for more than a few minutes. Coachella was a week earlier this year specifically to AVOID this. Now it looks like next weekend's gonna be fairly reasonable in comparison. Oh well, B for effort.

-Los Campesinos! were easily the most fun band of the weekend, though that was pretty easy to predict. There were technical difficulties galore - I don't know whether this was because the band themselves set up everything, or the general sound problems that seemed to plague every fourth band we saw that weekend, or what - but it was a small price to pay for the kind of infectious enthusiasm you only ever get from bands this young and this new to the circuit. They seemed to be in awe of the size of the crowd, to the point that a quarter of the band decided "fuck it, I'm crowd surfing" as the show drew to a close, drummer knocking over his set in the process and all. I'm not an expert on their gigography, but I don't see how this show couldn't have been one of their best.

-I'm the one guy on earth who didn't really know the Ting Tings, so I ended up going to see them as kind of a last resort, but it turned out that 1) I actually did recognize a lot of their stuff and 2) They totally rocked the house. That's a hard thing to do when "They" is two people without a stage show and "house" is the fucking Sahara tent at Coachella, so there you go.

-Hilarity at Coachella #1: three hours before McCartney is scheduled to appear, Alex Kapranos takes the stage in a George Harrison shirt. Franz Ferdinand was better and looser than when I saw them four years ago, but I wish they'd kept the extended jamming of songs like "40 ft" to a minimum for such a short festival set. They didn't go that heavy on Tonight songs, but some of those they did play were head-scratchers ("Turn it On" but not "Lucid Dreams"?), but overall still a good time. It's kind of amazing how, after all these years, "Take Me Out" still sounds so amazing.

-Fearless crowd navigation got us up close for Leonard Cohen, whose band provided probably the best-sounding set of the day. Amazingly, this guy still sounds exactly like he did forty years ago. I'm not overly familiar with his stuff but I assume we got most all the hits: "First We Take Manhattan", "Everybody Knows", "Hallelujah", etc.

-We got almost to the front of the stage for Silversun Pickups, and I'm glad we did: apparently the crowd flocking to this secondary stage was MASSIVE. Maybe because this was essentially the coming-out show for their brand-new sophomore album (Glass House show doesn't count). But they ripped through material old and new alike, and still found some time for very appreciated crowd banter, which seems a rarity these days (maybe I'm seeing the wrong bands). I was struck by just how genuinely happy and appreciative these guys were to see so many fans there to support them - they probably could have spent half their set thanking us. And the crowd was so enraptured that they probably would have been fine with it.

-I did not see much of Paul McCartney, and I only half regret it. Exhausted from over six straight hours of walking/standing/dancing, I was about ready to pack it in. And I figured I'd decide to leave or not based on what McCartney was playing. So of course all I heard was his solo stuff: "Band on the Run"; that awful new single of his; some silly "ho hey oh" business. It didn't help that the one Beatles song I did hear, "Eleanor Rigby", sounded awkward and out-of-tempo. So yeah, I left. And I was bummed when I heard echoes of "Live and Let Die" as I got to my car - would've liked to see that one, especially with the fireworks and all. Some of my friends who did see it told me it was beyond an amazing concert experience, and that some of my favorite Beatles songs ended up getting played. I mean, I'm glad they enjoyed it, I guess I just wasn't into hearing "Helter Skelter" and "Lady Madonna" if it wasn't the real deal.

-Saturday I didn't get to see Ida Maria. Too bad, but why did she have to be scheduled at 1:30?? We were barely awake by then.

-Arrived to see most of Dr. Dog, who were pretty good. Caught one song from Amanda Palmer, who recruited the Lucent Dossier dancers from the next tent over for some crazy theatrics. Also caught part of Henry Rollins, which turned out to be a "spoken word" set - but it was more like him telling us about his life than free-form poetry or whatever. A lot of it was interesting and funny, but we were in the mood for music and carried on.

-The coolest piece of Coachella's ever-revolving installation art pieces this year was The Hand of Man, a giant metal hand which was strong enough to pick up, drop and smash mid-size cars (and did so, frequently). It was controlled by actual festival-goers via a fancy Power Glove-type apparatus - pretty rad idea, though I was never able to take part.

-Wish I knew Superchunk better. We caught the last few songs, which were super energetic - especially closer "Slack Motherfucker". These guys definitely have a '90s alt-rock aesthetic - which is now apparently nostalgic, making me feel ancient by comparison. Good stuff, and I'm sure the fans were more than pleased.

-Hilarity at Coachella #2: I overhear a guy ask his girl, completely matter-of-factly, "so what's in your pussy"?

-TV on the Radio is such an iffy band live. I don't know if their stuff doesn't translate, or they make the wrong choices during translation or what. I thought their set was mostly good when I saw them at the Wiltern in November, even if they couldn't nail what made "Golden Age" and "DMZ" sound so great on record. At the Coachella stage, a second awkward rendering of the former made me not want to stick around for a possible second chance at the latter. But I'd been planning on leaving early anyway to see these next guys...

-Fleet Foxes took the stage just before sundown, and the transition from day to night only intensified the band's ethereal performance. These guys nailed every aspect of their sound, from deep echoing vocals to pounding rhythms to extra little instrumental flourishes that (unlike some bands I'd just seen) served to enhance the songs instead of changing them. The band may not have thought so, but for my money this was probably the best performance of the weekend.

-I gave MIA a second chance after last year's debacle, and I'm glad I did. This time there were few technical glitches, no overuse of gunshot clips, and a less angry crowd. MIA herself was more into it too - dancing, joking, postulating like a third-world dictator - and she just had a baby! The visuals were great too, a good mix of interesting animation and glowstick-lined dancers who looked like neon skeletons dancing in the desert dark.

-Caught bits of Mastodon and Coachella staple MSTRKRFT. Also saw several songs from Gang Gang Dance, whose electronic beats translated much better to a live setting than I'd have given them credit for. Chalk it up to live drums. Two sets of them. And I wasn't the only one enjoying myself - I was a few feet away from TVOTR's Kyp Malone, and (apparently) a few feet further from the girls of Los Campesinos!.

-Sunday I had to run through 101-degree heat to make the Friendly Fires set on time, but it was completely worth it. Missed No Age, which is a shame, but sleep is really nice too. FF is another young band with something to prove, and they brought a real playful intensity to their set. I wonder how many people were in there just to escape the oppressive heat, though.

-I ventured into the Mojave tent for Fucked Up's set, and within three seconds I'd noticed 1) The lead singer was in the middle of the moshpit; 2) He was bleeding copiously from his forehead; 3) there was some sort of weird stench reminiscent of rotting artichokes that intensified exponentially as I got closer to the front. Numbers 1 and 2 made me want to stay, but number 3 forced me to get the hell out of the tent before I threw up. I don't know what it was; I can stand the smell of sweat and vomit and all that other fun stuff, but this was something on its own planet of ripe. Maybe next time, guys.

-Hilarity at Coachella #3: Flabby white dude walking around in a Borat bikini. All that effort to dress up and he still purposely flashed people left and right.

-Saw bits of lots of Sunday afternoon bands. Peter Bjorn and John were kind of lackluster; Antony and the Johnsons is just not my thing; Clipse canceled. Oh well. X felt like an Important Band I Never Got the Chance to Know. I know they're important and should be seen and all that, but after seeing so many upstart young turks giving it their all to rock your face early in the festival, it was hard to get into a show that looked essentially like my friends' parents playing in a punk cover band.

-Father of the Year award goes to 20-something Douchebag in front of us at My Bloody Valentine - remember, their show is so loud that they handed out earplugs to everyone at the festival that day - who was too busy dancing to notice that his two-year-old daughter was covering her ears in pain for the first few songs of the set. When she got tired and wanted to sleep, dude went to the trouble of letting her lie on the ground between his feet. In the middle of a General Admission crowd. With people walking around and through them constantly. IN THE DARK. If the drunk, lumbering asshole from the Silversun Pickups crowd had been there, that girl would not have a face anymore. As opposed to just not having any hearing anymore. PARENTS, DO NOT BRING YOUR KIDS TO LOUD CONCERTS. ALSO, DON'T BE DICKS.

-I'm glad I got to see Public Enemy, but - in keeping with a disturbing trend for this year's festival - their sound felt way off, with absolutely no bass in the mix (even during "Bass in your face!") and Flava Flav rapping over his own vocal track. Flav did some stage diving, sure, and these guys are still eerily relevant, but "Don't Believe the Hype" was all I really needed to hear before I was ready to head elsewhere.

-Other evidence that Sunday was the Day of the Unimpressive Reunion: My Bloody Valentine was good, but played the same show I saw last fall (this may be my problem more than theirs, but still); they really stuck to their guns by retaining their Sonic Holocaust for the festival setting, but I can't imagine they made many fans out of the casual set for doing so. Later, Throbbing Gristle played us some creepy industrial music that felt very revolutionary for its time, but was too droning to keep my interest that late in the evening.

-Though really, how can you complain when the dude's rocking a kingly robe like that?

-Oddly enough, some of the most fun I had Sunday was watching Devendra Banhart. People like to hate on the guy, and I'm admittedly unfamiliar with his stuff, but coming in not knowing a thing, I had a real blast. The music was the perfect combination of chill and dancey as the sun set, and the crowd loved all of it. Something about a fan's sign reading "HEY DEVENDRA IT'S MY BIRTHDAY, BROTHER" really made me smile. He played a new jammy song "Rats" which everyone seemed to love on first listen; oh yeah, and he brought up HAR MAR SUPERSTAR for the last song, thankfully to play maracas and not to strip. Why Coachella stuck this popular band in the tiny Gobi tent while other bands had been struggling to fill even half of the Mojave tent throughout the afternoon, I may never understand.

-The Cure played us out as we headed for the car. I've never been a fan but they sounded good, and I'm told they were in the middle of their third encore when Coachella actually pulled the plug on them - which is a shame, but damn, so much music!

-Overall it was another great concert experience - there were some disappointments and I wish the scheduling had worked more in my favor, but we'd all like a perfect life, wouldn't we? Now that we're all crammed back into our desks and office buildings, I think the thing I already miss the most is that brief situational fraternity you have with everyone around you in the crowd: you may never know their names and you might not get along in real life, but here, for a few minutes, you're all dancing as one to your favorite music, the briefest part of something indescribably bigger and deeper than yourself. All lives fraught with the meaning between the chords. Something that, at the end of the day, you know is more than worth it. Bring on the next one.

Music is the Blood of Life, Part Two

2009-04-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

My week has suddenly become very busy sprinting to finish a script - fingers crossed I got a bite that leads somewhere - but I did promise a Coachella-related article, and I thought it'd be good to mention the bands worth seeing BEFORE the set times are posted (whenever that ends up happening), just to keep my opinions free of timing and technicality, I guess.

Anyway: as always, many many bands worth seeing at Coachella. Frankly, there are very few bands playing that aren't worth seeing, and there's something great and refreshing about wandering aimlessly from tent to tent, discovering new bands on the strength of their live performances alone. But vague road maps are pretty nice too; after the jump, I'll mention some of the bands I'm most interested in seeing, for one reason or another.

Fleet Foxes (Saturday): 2008's indie darlings will soon be playing in front of one of the largest crowds of their career. I've never seen these guys live, so this should be a highlight for me. I hope their sound translates to a wide-open desert setting, so far away from the closeknit acoustics of their studio recordings and abandoned French alcoves. But whatever, I'm going to rock out as much as any other beard-having hippie in the crowd.

Leonard Cohen (Friday): I'll admit to not knowing much of this guy beyond the Essential compilation, but what am I gonna do, not see this guy? From everything I hear, he puts on an amazing live show - and this guy is in his 70s.

Friendly Fires (Sunday): Shorter festival set times are actually a benefit to bands with only a handful of songs to their name (The weird tour for Gorillaz' first album awkwardly bloated the setlist with as much filler as possible, including playing "Clint Eastwood" twice), so I'm looking forward to a concise and catchy show from these newfangled youngsters. Really danceable stuff like "Paris", "White Diamonds" and "Skeleton Boy" might make these guys this year's MGMT... for better or for worse...

Gang Gang Dance (Saturday): "Crazy post-globalization electro soundclash" will accurately describe maybe a few minutes off of St. Dymphna. This shit is seriously nuts, and I can't wait to see how it translates to a sweaty desert rave.

Franz Ferdinand (Friday): Their new album might have gotten really mixed reviews, but I like a lot of it, and there's no way they won't put on a super-energetic show.

Mastodon (Saturday): Fuck it. I'm going elbows-out in the mosh pit, so you better watch out.

Los Campesinos! (Friday): Finally, I get to see these guys! I'm going to be selfish and hope they focus on their first album over their pseudo-b-sides-collection We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, which hasn't really gelled with me yet. Regardless, this looks to be a uniquely hyper show that will probably end up one of my highlights of the weekend.

Fucked Up (Sunday): Not a huge fan of their music, but their live shows sound so insane that I kind of have to go for the spectacle alone.

Ida Maria (Saturday): I at first got her confused with the band Oreida. Then with Mirah. Then with Rainer Maria. Et cetera. But in actuality, this is a Norwegian lady whose really fun rock-n-roll sounds kinda like Bjork fronting The Hold Steady. Her live shows are supposed to be nuts, non-album singalongs and all, so it should be a good time.

My Bloody Valentine (Sunday): OK, well I just saw these guys recently so I will probably skip their set, but you should go. And bring earplugs, seriously.

There's plenty of other acts I'm sure I'll check out - Chemical Brothers, No Age, Paul McCartney why not - but I'm still down for other options, if you think I'm missing anyone that looks to be pretty awesome. Suggestions?

Music is the Blood of Life, Part One

2009-04-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

I hope you've noticed this widget off to the side. ->

Call it the soundtrack, or the jukebox, or the playlist. Whatever. This is basically my shorthand for sharing music with anyone who's curious. If you haven't tried it yet, don't be scared - all you have to do is press play. It doesn't want your money or your email and it will not give you a virus. You can skip to any song at any time, and it'll play the entirety of each song as many times as you want. It's a fun little gadget (if legally dubious, currently), and I update it with new songs regularly, even if I'm not posting written entries as often.

But it is a Playlist, the shaping of which I (of course) take way too seriously. As in: there can never be more than one track from an artist on there; keep it short and simple; nothing sticks around forever. I appreciate the medium of the Playlist for what it is, but I'm still at heart the kind of old-fashioned music listener who generally purchases and listens to his music by entire album or not at all, who can't opine on one song without relating it to the other tracks before and after it. So, if I want to share my thoughts on albums as a whole, the Playlist on the right is not exactly the best way to do it. But I guess that's why God gave us writin' hands.

With my 3-day Coachella experience just a week away, I've been doing a LOT of listening lately. Trying to familiarize myself with bands who I've always heard about but never heard, etc. And I'll post something about the Coachella Bands to Watch For next week (since nobody else seems to be doing it!), but in the meantime I wanted to talk a little bit about some bands I won't be able to see there, though I really wish I could, and their new or upcoming material. Four albums worth your time:

Dan Deacon - Bromst
The subtitle to this album could be called "Jams Grow Up"; though there's plenty of party still on Deacon's follow-up to 2007 freak-riot Spiderman of the Rings, his sound has clearly matured in interesting and unpredictable ways. Now sporting live instrumentation (with marimbas!) and further musical diversity, this guy has hit the blogosphere sweet spot with a seemingly limitless unspooling of positive reviews and goodwill. You'll probably agree once you give a listen to some of his new album on his myspace page - start with "Red F" and "Get Older".

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Instantly fell in love with these guys when they premiered pseudo-first-single "1901", so far the Most Perfect Pop Song of 2009. Seriously, there are so many hooks and payoffs in these three minutes alone that you wonder what they could have possibly saved for the rest of the album. Well, actually, plenty: the nine tracks of Wolfgang are similarly chock-full of exciting gems, from opener and maybe-actual-first single "Lisztomania" through "Lasso" to extended jam "Love Like a Sunset". If you missed their appearance on SNL last week, you can see most of their (three!) performances here.

Metric - Fantasies
Hard to believe It's been four years since the last album from these guys - their debut reissue and 2006's solo album from Emily Haines don't count. It hits stores next week, though it's already available for legal download and you can stream the whole album for free on their site. (I love that artists are doing this now, by the way - it shows a solid amount of faith in their own product, as well as the fans who are eager to support the band but are even more eager to hear new music.) The album has really grown on me over the last few weeks. Metric's sound isn't exactly going to revolutionize the scene, but it's definitely more fun and immediate than most of the other big releases this year. I'm also a bit biased, because I think Haines has one of the sexiest voices in rock and roll right now; she doesn't have the range of, say, Neko Case or Leslie Feist, but she sings with such a confidence and mastery of her own limitations that it becomes its own unique experience. My favorites right now are "Satellite Mind", "Gimme Sympathy" and "Collect Call", but check out the whole thing at the link above.

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There are Mountains
I'm a sucker for great cover art, fine - but the debut album from these shamble-rockers has enough glorious freakouts and intricacies to please any Pavement or Broken Social Scene fan. This has already been pegged as the great indie road trip album of 2009, and I hope to be able to verify that for myself in the coming months. Check out opener "And the Hazy Sea" or lead single "Wind Phoenix" (among other songs) on their myspace page.

There are also lots of other albums I've barely had time to digest: Doves' Kingdom of Rust; Japandroids' Post-Nothing; Peter Bjorn and John's Living Thing; The Decemberists' The Hazards of Love (OK, not so hot on the last two yet). And that's not even counting Coachella bands! It's been a great year for music so far, and there's no reason to think it won't keep on keepin' on. To be continued...

This ain't no pedestrian shit!

2009-04-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been ignoring the Blog lately. I've actually had some very productive days in the last two weeks, getting a lot done creatively (if not in other areas). I've had some great new script ideas and it's been taking a lot of time to shape them, to figure out what works and what doesn't. But it's all been really energizing in that new-idea way. Sometimes when you get the momentum you just have go to with it, because who knows how long it'll last?

I actually made a decision earlier this week to try to change my way of living. (Sounds pretty radical, I know, but hopefully it won't turn my world upside-down right away.) Basically, I need to shift my focus more to the creative, to self-expression. I need to look at areas in my life more as how they would benefit me creatively than how they would benefit my social life or my bank account. Not that I'm going to quit my job, turn into a hippie and throw my TV out the window, but I do feel like a lot of aspects of my life are fairly devoid of creativity - and, in a few cases, actively retard any form of self-expression. So I want to do what I can to reverse that. It won't be easy or immediate, but no permanent lifestyle change ever is.

(Weirdly enough, when it comes to changing aspects of your life, I think the slower the better: ten years ago I couldn't have imagined exercising 2-4 days a week. Now, thanks to a slow immersion into that lifestyle, it's weird if I don't get that much exercise. And technically I should be exercising at least 5 days a week, so there's still room for improvement; again, it's the slow immersion that's key.)

So it's starting off relatively simply. I'm keeping a stack of notebooks around, and am trying to get into a habit of using them to record any flash of a good idea I have. Creativity can't be controlled or predicted; so, if my mind is shooting out random ideas, I have to be ready to catch as many of them as I can. I figure one for names, one for plot points, one for funny stories, maybe a dream journal, and so on. Many, many creative types already do this, and I've known about the technique for a while, but I've shied away from it for so long because God, it's so much more work... but actually, even more than that, my egotism has always convinced me that if Idea X, which occurs at let's say 4:45 pm on Friday, is a truly good idea, of course I'll keep it in the back of my mind until it comes time to fit it into a suitable story I'm writing, whether it's 9 pm on Friday, or Sunday afternoon, or six months from now. Surely my brain will help me and hold onto Idea X for as long as I need it, right?

Well, that's a laugh.

For me, part of being able to improve your craft is recognizing your faults. And it goes deeper than "I don't know much about Science" or "I have trouble writing female characters" or whatever. It's an embrace of the idea that You, Yourself, Are Not Perfect. You are not going to just remember every awesome detail or name you think up on a whim. Your first draft is not going to be flawless. Your grand ideas are not beyond criticism. Most of your "original" stories have, actually, already been told by someone else before you. None of this is a knock on your skills or your drive; it's just an acknowledgment of our shared histories and our very human imperfections.

It's the same in many other fields. Kobe Bryant didn't get to his skill level without improving his weaknesses first. But for us to improve our own weaknesses, we have to be able to recognize them. And sometimes that can only be done through trying new things, a third-person perspective, or sheer, brutal honesty.

Anyway, keeping the notebooks around (or, if I'm traveling, the Notes application on my phone) is a good start. It's admittedly a small step, but hopefully a serious first one on the road to a lifestyle that's more attuned to (and a greater product of) my creativity. Maybe it'll lead me to other, greater ways of harnessing my creative potential. Maybe someday, God forbid, I'll even be that hippie wearing homemade clothes and painting the dog. At least that hippie will also be exercising 5 times a week.

Gods in the Machine: a coda for BSG

2009-03-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

This weekend the finale of Battlestar Galactica aired, bringing a satisfying end to one of my favorite TV series. I thought I’d talk about that, since I seem to be into talking about things these days, and I want to hear your thoughts too.

But, seriously – MAJOR SPOILERS for the finale and the entire series up ahead. Seriously, I’m not holding back, even the photos are going to be massively spoilery. So don’t keep reading if you’re not caught up. You’ve been warned!

There seems to be a pretty wide consensus that Battlestar started off as an amazing show, but then somewhere in Season 3 started to drop in quality. I’m not sure I’ve ever really shared that view. I don’t know if people just didn’t like some of the writing decisions, or didn’t like some of the Cylons becoming good, or whatever. Some parts of the last season meandered here and there, but no show’s perfect.

But I will say that, as the show went on, it started to frustrate me in its decisions of what to show and what to assume the audience will infer. I don’t want a show to hold my hand and explain every little point, but I did feel there were some major opportunities for exploration and illustration that the show consciously ignored. Especially in Season 4: I really wanted to spend more time with the newly-activated Final Five Cylons, seeing how realizing their true nature had changed their lives. Watching them trying to keep their secrets on a ship with very little privacy. (We did see hints of this when they’d hold Secret Meetings here and there, but I didn’t feel that many of those scenes spoke to the uniqueness of their situation. They almost could have been a band of common saboteurs and most of the scenes would have played out the same way. But then again, maybe that’s the point?) After the big midseason reveal of Ellen as the final Cylon, God(s), I wanted to see someone react to it! Even her husband’s reaction was truncated by the Executive Producer credits. We can only assume everyone else learns this; and an off-handed gaffe of Lee’s the next episode does reveal that at least someone was told, but it’s unclear exactly who, and seriously, who wouldn’t love to have seen his reaction to this news? Or Bill’s reaction, or Six’s? I don’t know.

Which is my roundabout way, I guess, of saying that I didn’t really expect the series finale to wrap everything up in a neat little bow. It’s just not how the show rolls. We do get a lot of answers, some great character moments and satisfying payoffs. I was surprised and impressed by the climactic battle during the first half (how can you not love the spectacle and symbolism of a modern Centurion cold-blooded shooting the head off the retro model?) and of course greatly taken by the emotional denouement. But as great as the episode is, and as appreciated as all the answers are, there is one answer that’s problematic, because (or in spite) of the fact that it’s a non-answer; it’s a small aspect of the show, but also something that informs everything that happens, Has Happened and Will Happen Again. The problem is God.

Not that I think the presence of a higher power is inherently a problem in fiction, science- or otherwise. There’s a great episode of Futurama where Bender gets lost in space, floating alone through nothingness. Well, almost alone: a collision with a small asteroid results in a race of ant-sized people living on Bender’s belly, and these people are quick to christen their metal benefactor as God, worshiping him and praying for his help and guidance. Bender loves this, of course, but ends up pretty bad at playing All-Powerful Deity, at first doing too much for his people, then not enough. His failures culminate in his worshippers nuking each other out of existence, and Bender is left sad and alone again – until he meets a faceless cosmic entity that is, essentially, the real God. In contrast to Bender’s rookie mistakes, this God advocates a soft touch, saying “if you do things right, they’ll wonder if you’ve done anything at all.”

Man, if you do believe in a higher power, this sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it? If you can do anything, but you’re benevolent and you want your people not just to survive but to be able to survive, you’ve still got to be careful and subtle. And at first it would seem that Battlestar’s God – or “creator” or “unseen force” or whatever “he” wants to be called – is just that, speaking to Baltar and Six in daydreams, sending Roslin back to that Opera House again and again, subtly manipulating events and movements to deliver Hera safely to the not-exactly-promised land. There’s lots of appropriately soft touching going on… until we get to Kara Thrace.

For the record: I’m still convinced that Kara is the daughter (whether real or adopted) of Daniel, the missing and vaguely-referenced Cylon model #13. That’s really the only thing that would explain her visions, her special destiny, and, come on, her father teaching her the Cylon theme song which points to the coordinates of Earth. It’s weird that this is never explicitly stated in the show, but it would be even weirder to mention the presence of a 13^th model and then never do anything with it (Ron Moore has basically denied this, but you know, so little is said in the show either way that there’s really nothing to disprove my theory, so there). But, okay, fine, it’s Battlestar, not everything is going to be explained. I’d assumed that, having come back from the dead, she was either the first Cylon hybrid or the first Human cloned using Cylon methods or whatever. But her last scene in the series turns everything on its ear. Lee, in the middle of a wide, empty green field with Kara, is discussing what he wants to do with his “retirement”. He excitedly turns away for a moment, taking in the brave new world – then turns back to find she’s gone. Having just said that she feels like she’s served her purpose. Remember, this is a wide empty green field; it’s not like she’s found a tree to hide behind in the last four seconds. No, Kara Thrace is gone, as in disappeared, as in off the mortal plane, as in she is dead and probably has been since we all saw her die back in Season 3. Well, shit.

Ghosts and angels and visions are not exactly unheard of in the Battlestar world. But Kara’s presence was more long-term than a fleeting daydream, and far more tactile. Since coming back from the dead, she’s shot people. She gave Gaius her dogtags. She brought back a spaceship that people have used! This was not some mass hallucination; this was an honest-to-God flesh-and-blood human being who had a job to do, did her job and a lot else along the way, and then just ceased to exist when her job was done. Okay. She has to have been an instrument of God. There’s no other possible explanation. It makes sense, right? You can buy into that, can’t you?

But here’s the problem. Once you have bought into that, how can the series maintain its dramatic tension? How can we worry for our characters when God can just bring them back to life whenever?

These resurrections are nothing new for television, movies or any kind of serialized media. But generally there’s some sort of explanation, half-assed as it usually is, where oh the bodies were switched at the morgue or I managed to escape before the building exploded or actually that was my twin sister. But here, for Kara Thrace – as it is for several issues of the show – the explanation is that there is no explanation. It was God’s will and we have to go along with it.

It’s almost like Bender took over the show for a few minutes. God’s really making his presence known here, which could beg the cynical question, why do the humans even need to bother? It’s the age-old question of free will vs. predestination, and the show seems to come down pretty hard on the side of predestination in at least this one area. Gaius says in the finale that “God isn’t on anyone’s side”, but that seems kind of disingenuous given the effort God is making to ensure our heroes get to Earth. On the one hand, that’s a pretty ballsy move, especially for a work of Science Fiction, a genre that gets its kicks in finding rational explanations for the impossible. On the other hand, we also begin to lose interest when we discover our protagonists have omnipotence on their side. It’s almost like the fix is in, and it’s a bit disappointing to discover that you didn’t win the fight solely on your own merits.

To its credit, though, Battlestar is as bittersweet in its victories as in everything else. Whatever I expected the characters to do if they did find Earth, it wasn’t to split up and live whatever life nature throws at them. It seems a little much that everyone would give up on simple essentials like toothpaste and toilet paper, but I do like the thematic idea that both sides end up rejecting the technology that brought them to death’s door. But, God, there’s just a staggering lack of any kind of unity amongst our heroes once they arrive. There’s no fraternal desire to stick with the friends made during tough times. These guys have been cramped up together for so long that they can’t imagine anything better than getting away from everyone. Lee wants to go climb every mountain he can find, but doesn’t seem at all interested in a future with Kara. Bill bids a strangely permanent goodbye to his son – what’s he planning? And poor Chief (who, in my opinion, has to be the true hero of the series – to have suffered through such a horror show of heartbreak and duplicity, and yet still have the will to even live, is probably the most superhuman feat of all) exiles himself to a decidedly unpopulated island, assumedly so there won’t be anyone else left in his life to betray him. But everyone’s at an odd peace with their decisions, controversial as they may be. It’s almost like they’re already living in an afterlife. And it’s pretty sad to learn that almost all of these characters end up as genetic dead ends: if Hera truly is mother to all of us, then the Adamas and the Tighs and all the other bloodlines we know and love won’t be much longer for this world after all. I think that may actually be the most depressing aspect of the entire show, for me, in a weird existentialist way.

But emotional response is what it is. I mean, who am I kidding, I love Battlestar to death, and I’m going to miss it a lot. I may bitch about a few things here and there, but really this was as great a finale as anyone could hope for a show that’s always been a cut above; deeply thoughtful, often controversial, always entertaining. Today, the show has left a huge void in television that I don’t think we’ll see filled anytime soon.

There be Traps!

2009-03-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

Having just finished a script a few weeks ago, I'm now kind of floating wild in the wind, looking for the next direction to take. The next big thing that requires my focus. I've been sketching out ideas for a couple new scripts - or, I guess, new ideas that I'm turning into script form, but could easily morph into a different format further down the line. Point is, I'm throwing a lot of ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.

And in some ways this is my favorite part of the process. It's just wild, untamed crazy stream-of-consciousness for the most part, where I fill pages of Word Documents with rambling speculation and false starts and conversations with myself. And as I do this more and more, I'm beginning to get a good grasp on what to write and what not to write. Yeah - as paradoxical as it sounds, even when you're brainstorming and anything goes, there are still major things you should avoid. You wanna know what they are? Well, okay:

-Negativity. In sketching out my main character's goals, I realized I'd set myself up for a challenging balancing act. And, in written conversation with myself, the next phrase I wrote was literally "Man! That is going to be so hard to pull off." And those words just hung on the screen as the end of the thought. Where could I go from there? As I looked over the words I'd just typed, all I could think about was how hard it was going to be. But you can never overcome an obstacle if all you do is focus on the obstacle itself. I couldn't type any further. I was at a mental roadblock. So... I backed up and deleted that sentence. And suddenly I could work again. As simplistic and reductive as it sounds, ignoring negativity was all I needed to start brainstorming again. I guess you could say that creativity is by nature inclusive, not exclusive; so putting some kind of negative value judgment on it won't help you much at this stage. (I still don't know how to pass that particular obstacle, but that's ok; I have several other directions I can work in. The important thing is that the creative process continues.)

-Egotism. The story I'm working on is high school-centric, a coming-of-age story about a kid who enters high school with specific expectations only to discover he's been pretty misinformed. (At least, that's what I'm thinking right now.) And I've been making a lot of headway on the major characters, their desires, obstacles, the really important story points. But at one point a weird thought popped into my head: "This script is going to be my revenge on high school." I really did not enjoy high school for several reasons - and, appropriately enough, a lot of the turmoil I went through then will probably pop up here or there in the script, at least on a subconscious level. But suddenly, revenge was first and foremost in my mind. How exactly was I going to do this? Was I going to target the system itself, or students, or cliques, or parents or... well, after a minute I realized I wasn't helping things. If I'm focused on using my writing as some (pretty hollow) form of revenge, against whatever or whoever, I'm not helping the story. I'm not helping the characters, and I'm not helping the audience. In the end all I'm doing is... well, you know the title of this blog. The point is, write a story for the sake of the story! Don't come at it trying to make a grand statement or exact revenge or make yourself look cool. In the best stories, the creator(s) should be invisible. Take your ego out of the equation and you've already taken a huge step.

The ego thing is actually tricky to balance. On the one hand, you have to trust yourself enough to put your ideas down, and you have to assume whatever story you create is going to be compelling enough to find an audience. You need self-confidence for this or you'll never get past daydreaming. On the other hand, you also need to mistrust yourself enough to be able to take criticism and - gasp! - make changes to your work. But it's not like anybody has an Ego Dial on their head that can be turned between Low, High and Off - so things can get complicated. For every writer screaming "Kill Your Darlings!", there's another successful guy admitting "I just write for myself". I guess, if anything, that shows you there's more than one path to success.

Anyway, my point is that it's very easy to hinder your own creativity, so don't do it! You'll have enough people trying to do that eventually as it is. But that's a topic for another time.

Dead Rock and Roll, Remodeled

2009-03-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

What makes a bad story? Or - if it's a different question - what makes a story bad?

I'll admit I enjoy a bad story every now and then, whether it's a book or movie or TV show or whatever. I think a lot of us enjoy a kind of creative schadenfreude, and there's a certain unique enjoyment you can only get by gathering around with your friends to experience something just indescribably, laughably bad.

But, okay, as a writer, I can also try to justify this viewing/reading/listening as a tutorial of What Not To Do. I could learn a lot about filmmaking and storytelling by watching any of this year's Best Picture nominees; but, in theory, I could learn just as much watching something like Zoltan: Hound of Dracula.

Yesterday, as we sat down to re-watch the infamous MST3K classic "Manos" the Hands of Fate, a no-budget '60s "cult horror film" generally recognized as one of the worst (and most unintentionally hilarious) movies ever made, I began to have new and unsettling thoughts. "This movie is awful," I thought to myself, "but did it have to be?" And, following the only genuinely creepy few seconds of the film - a quick gloss over a decrepit mantle, with what looks like the ashen silhouette of a dead man burnt into its relief - I began to have an even more unsettling thought: "could I remake this into a good film?"

There's no doubt that this film is pretty terrible on every level, from the wooden acting to the incompetent shot framing to the almost-nonexistent plot. But there is a plot, as bare-bones as it is; and that plot came from a rough outline, which in turn came from a germ of an idea which surely must have looked far better in writer/director/star Hal Warren's mind than what Manos eventually became. Could that idea have actually borne fruit? What's the difference between a shitty story and a story made shitty?

If I had to summarize the plot of Manos, keeping my opinions out, it would go something like: "A vacationing family spends the night in a desert shack, not knowing they're the prey of a nearby satanic cult". OK. So far, so not bad. A logline like this could pretty easily form the basis of a decent film, and, if the stars align, maybe even a great one. It's not impossible to imagine.

But let's add in some more details. Let's clarify that the cult is essentially one man and his harem of wives, all of whom only come out at night; let's also say that the family is initially cared for - and then betrayed by - a deformed and creepy caretaker named Torgo. And (spoilers!) we admit that the cult will successfully imprison the family, with the wife and daughter (who can't be older than five!) added to the harem, and the husband/protagonist taking up the caretaker position after Torgo apparently dies. Also, the main cultist sleeps outside on a slab of rock while his wives sleep tied to poles (though they seem able to free themselves at any time). The wives also love to wrestle each other for hours at a time. And don't forget the guy wears a black robe-thing with gigantic fucking red hands on it!

See? It's tricky to spot the point of no return.

But there's examples in other media too. Take the relatively-unknown novel The Lost Truth by Mike Pesko. Pesko wrote most of the "military thriller" (?) as a teenager, and was lucky enough to have it printed by a small publisher. Check out some of these highlights:

""Come on, men," Fletcher shouted to his hundred soldiers as he ordered ten of them into the air. He directed half of them to take out the two big gunners and the other three to hold the easily vulnerable transport ships in captivity and demand an unconditional surrender."

""Get your ass out of bed," the commander barked with a different timbre than used the last time they talked."

"There was more than one way to capture or kill a foreign military general. If casualties on their side were large compared to your casualties, then you have killed the foreign general. If you took out his capital building, then you have captured him. There were also other miscellaneous ways."

Although we've wanted to turn this into a movie - so faithful to the book that every time we see a map of Dushku (yes, Dushku) it changes from an island to a series of islands to an archipelago to whatever else - I also confess to imagining the possibilities of, you guessed it, remaking the book to see if it could really work. At its base, The Lost Truth is about a man struggling to unite diverse groups of people against an enemy force almost completely indistinguishable from their own.

God, put that way it sounds a lot like Battlestar Galactica, doesn't it? Even moreso when we add the detail that it takes place on a distant planet populated with humans much like us. But let's keep going. Let's add the detail of the enemy forces: the deadly, galaxy-traveling Are (yes, Are) race, who are able to possess humans because they're one-dimensional beings (this couldn't possibly have been an intentional joke), though they never have a larger goal besides victory through warfare. Also, a series of ill-defined neighbor countries who are always at war for generally left-wing reasons such as personal freedoms or democratic voting recounts. And, hey, a lot of sea life died due to an orbit change because the sun doesn't have enough gravity for Dushku anymore. Again, that slippery slope is tough to navigate.

But here's the thing. Despite how Manos and The Lost Truth turned out, there's no reason to think Hal Warren or Mike Pesko couldn't go on to produce competent pieces of work. The creativity is obviously there, even if craftsmanship is lacking. These guys obviously had stories they wanted to tell, and I couldn't fault anyone for that. But what would it have taken to make these works competent? Would they even be recognizable in comparison to what we have now? I wonder if The Lost Truth could have been saved by an editor or writing classes. I wonder if Manos would have prospered with a larger budget (and all the improvements that entails). Would we all be better off? Or are these works actually more important to us as failures, as warnings to future travelers along the road of creativity?

Truth be told, I don't have answers for any of this, aside from "Everything is the way it is" and "Speculation will buy you the greatest mansion you'll never see". I can't think of a single infamously bad work that someone has tried to recreate as an actual good story. It might be a fun experiment for those with the time and inclination, or an unexpected cash cow for a Hollywood that's obsessed with remodeling over new-modeling.

Yeah. now we're talking.

Who Judges the Watchmen? Or Really, Who Doesn't?

2009-03-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Alright! We doing this! Come on, Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time! Bring your Hollywood Blockbuster brother! I ain’t care! It’s on!

So, yeah, I saw Watchmen. I’d read the book several times – and reread it again in the days leading up to the film’s release, which, in hindsight, may not have been the best idea. But it’s clear that those who have read the book will have a pretty different viewing experience from those who are coming in with fresh eyes.

If you’ve never read the comic, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, I honestly have no idea if you’ll enjoy the film. And I’m not sure that reading my review will be of much help to you. But I’ll try a quickie. The film looks amazing. Production design is awesome, special effects generally great, good fight sequences that aren’t too overdone. Patrick Wilson is particularly great as the nebbish Nite Owl, and Jackie Earle Haley’s intense few scenes out from under Rorschach’s mask are really satisfying. Most of the rest of the acting is good, though there are some weak links, and a few line readings fall flat. The retro soundtrack is pretty killer. And the plot moves so fast you can’t help but get swept up in its velocity; whether you can follow the intricate plotting or not, you’ll never be bored. At best, you’ll come out of the theater wanting to read the comic (and if so, good! Go out and buy a copy, you won’t regret it). At worst, you’ll be entertained for two and a half hours, and will have forgotten about most of it after a week or so.

But if you have read the comic before, or want to know how it translated – we’ve got a lot to talk about! And I am going to talk about a lot, including the ending, so here’s your Spoiler Warning! Come back later if you need to.

More than a few people have called Watchmen “unfilmable”, and while I don’t agree with that in a literal sense (in a perfect world, it would make a great miniseries or even a series of films), it makes sense from a practical standpoint. The Hollywood system being what it is, mass consumer culture and short attention spans being what they are, a fan of the comic couldn’t reasonably expect anything more than an imperfectly enjoyable 3-hours-or-less adaptation. And that’s pretty much what the film is.

A lot had to be taken out, obviously, but most of what’s there is slavishly faithful to the comics, for better or for worse. While most of the memorable images from the book have been recreated verbatim, so has a lot of dialog that sounds like it came from, well, a comic book from 1985. Some of the lines have not aged well. Many of the heroes’ costumes look pretty awful, but that was true in the comic, too (poor Doctor Manhattan went through four “outfits” in the series, and the least offensive, ironically enough, was his birthday suit), and I think that actually works to the benefit of the story, adding “lack of fashion sense” to the litany of flaws these characters have.

The story itself moves at a breakneck pace. It has to: there just isn’t enough time to get through everything the filmmakers want to tell, even after pruning almost half the plot of the book. And although there are a few times where the speed prevents a few character moments from really transcending, by and large I think the writers did a great job distilling everything into as compact a package as possible (especially the new ending, which I’ll get to in a moment). Yes, everyone has a favorite scene or character or theme that was cut, but that’s the nature of the beast. And the filmmakers are at least able to throw in references to the omissions where they could: the excellent and complex production design is full of fanboy nods, from the Gunga Diner blimp to the post-disaster Millennium billboards. Though Bernie the newspaper vendor and Bernie the young reader don’t get a story, we do see two extras obviously meant to be them during the climactic scene of disaster, so it’s not difficult to imagine that their story has been going on, perhaps in the theater next door. Even Laurie’s childhood snowglobe is there, if just for half a second. Snyder and co. earn a lot of goodwill from me just by making the extra effort to at least imply the presence of details that couldn’t be thoroughly examined.

But the film’s emulation is so exacting that the few moments of actual innovation feel out of place. Though most of the heroes in the story (actually called “The Watchmen” several times in the film, though not once in the novel, interestingly enough) are portrayed as sad-sack, out of shape or out of touch, each of them gets one or two shiny new Bad-Ass Fight Scenes, which may annoy the purists but were probably added to appease everyone else. And certain characters, once normal humans, can now punch through concrete and survive multiple-story jumps – also presumably for spectacle. It does kind of go against Moore’s painstaking effort to show these characters as humanly as possible, masks on or off. But if any of this increased bad-assery benefits anyone, it’s the Silk Spectre, who wasn’t given much to do physically in the comic beyond beating up a thug and leading folks across a bridge. I don’t think Moore treated the women in Watchmen very favorably; they’re forever only reacting to the men in their lives, too clearly defined by their need for affection or companionship to be able to do very much. Poor Janey Slater especially reads like a Fainting Nellie out of some old genre sci-fi, so it was good to see her get a moment of proactive payback (whether real or manipulated) in the film.

The biggest change comes at the end of the story, and by and large I think it actually works really well. Ozymandias’s manufactured threat now comes in the form of framing Dr. Manhattan, and though I miss the squid, it’s kind of astonishing how easily this new ending fits into the story, with far less exposition needed than having to detail secret islands and missing artists and psychic bombs. Going into the film knowing that the ending would be different – but not how – I actually grew really excited during the final scenes in Antarctica. Because – unlike most superhero films where the final battle is always won by the just and moral hero – in the world of shades of gray that is Watchmen, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen. It was almost like reading the book again for the first time. And being able to produce that feeling, even for a veteran reader like myself, has got to be one of the film’s greatest triumphs.

There were only two changes that really bothered me, and the first is admittedly not a huge deal and more of a fanboy rant, so bear with me. The original Watchmen graphic novel is absolutely stuffed with visual symbolism – reflections, mirroring, image transposition, and, especially when Rorshach is involved, symmetry. Everything in the man’s life is symmetrical, from his mask to the locations he visits to the page layout of issue five. The effort Moore and Gibbons took to impress this upon the reader borders on obsession. So I was fascinated to note, upon rereading the book, the panel following Rorschach’s death in Antartica. Essentially exploded by Doctor Manhattan, all that remains is a spatter of blood on the snow. But where you might expect further, morbid symmetry, the remains are instead wild and random. There is no symmetry in Rorschach’s death, and purposefully so. But in producing the film, Snyder or Hayter or someone must have noticed the omission but missed the significance of it, because the film proudly displays a giant Rorschach blood blot in the snow; a perfectly symmetrical image that the camera lingers on so long that it kind of becomes the morbid punchline of the character’s existence. Zach astutely noted that morbid punchlines are exactly what Watchmen is all about, and that’s true, but I still feel it did the character a disservice that was actively avoided in the source material.

The other negative is far more significant, though it actually begins at almost the same time. In the film, Nite Owl witnesses Roshach’s death, and his reaction is the typical melodramatic “Nooooo!” which results in another failed fistfight with Ozymadias. “You haven’t saved humanity”, Nite Owl says, “You’ve twisted it! Perverted it!” And then he and Silk Spectre exit the building, looking down their noses in Moral Judgment at Ozymandias. Oz’s last scene in the film is a lingering shot standing alone and sad in his ruined home, ostensibly contemplating what’s been lost. As Dan and Laurie begin a happy life together, if not a new one (they appear to continue their costumed adventuring, which is a huge misread of the book’s intent), the film seems to be saying that they were in the clear moral right, that the ends did not really justify the means. Though it’s fine for some of the characters to voice such an opinion, the book itself never takes sides. Rorshach, the only one whose life was black and white, is gone, and the others continue to live in varying shades of gray. It’s one of the great and most unique moments of the entire story (especially for a mainstream comic book), and not a difficult one to understand. So it feels strange and false for the film to actually go to the same dark point the book did, only to make a moral apology for it after the fact. By the end of Watchmen the comic, there are no heroes left; our protagonists are either dead or complicit in the deaths of millions. But Watchmen the movie tries to have it both ways, making the tenuous argument that Dan and Laurie will keep Adrian’s secret but, dammit, that won’t keep them from always trying to do the right thing. It seems like the very definition of the dreaded Producer Note, so Snyder and the writers might not be to blame for this. We may never really know. But it’s there, and for me the 11^th hour sermonizing comes very close to undoing everything the story hoped to accomplish.

Was that change (or any of the others made) truly severe enough to justify Moore demanding his credit be removed from the film? I don’t think so. Yes, Moore’s films generally don’t translate well to the screen, whether in spite of best intentions (V for Vendetta) or due to simple Hollywood apathy (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or, God, LXG), so I can understand his vulnerability. But Watchmen the film is hardly hackery or mockery. Time and an impartial eye will tell if it can survive on its own merits, but it’s impossible to argue that the film hasn’t been beneficial to the source material in terms of sales. Thanks to excitement for the film, Watchmen the collected graphic novel sold over a million copies in 2008. That's an incredible achievement for any comic today, never mind one that's over 20 years old. Whatever you may think of the film, it’s brought many new readers to an industry starving for numbers; hopefully many will stick around, curious to read other books from the same creators or of a similar mold. Realistically, what more could you ask for?

The Name of this Band is The Name of this Band

2009-03-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest parts of the creative process for me, still, is naming. Assigning a proper name to a character - or even a non-living object or process - is generally the last part of the journey for me. Maybe I'm a perfectionist, but I feel that an individual's name has to do a good job of encapsulating what makes them unique. Not that I'm about to name a hard-boiled soldier anything as crass as "Ace Shooter", but I think we can find more interesting possibilities than your typical "Jim Smith" or "Lisa Johnson" or "Chris Meyer". Names are literary shorthand for first impressions, and we all know how important those are.

I struggled for a while to come up with a name for this blog. And problems intensified when I found that most of my blogspot title ideas (OK, the best of my ideas) had already been registered long ago. It echoed my struggle years ago to come up with an unused AIM screenname that was still clever and didn't end in an arbitrary string of numbers. (I eventually relented and slapped "720" on the end of my handle. Oh well.)

But, just as I did back then, I was curious as to who had had these ideas before me. Were they of a similar humor? Kindred spirits? Might I befriend these strangers across the vast anonymity of the internet? Or, would I be horrified to find that they appear smarter than me?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I visited all the already-registered pages that I couldn't create. And here they are, if you'd like to join me in exploring what might have been:

expletive deleted: beaten to the punch by a Czech guy who seems to have gotten drunk and trashed the place.
procrastination station: seems to have led a short and sad life, despite sounding like the title of a children's show.
brain cavities: really? not one single entry?
chris is a sexy beast: To be fair, I probably would not have really done anything with this, either.

Those options unavailable, I eventually settled on FEEDING THE SUMO. It's a reversal of the phrase "Starving the Sumo", which is a mantra intended to help adolescents avoid masturbating and was first used in the unintentionally hilarious Christian motivational film Every Young Man's Battle. The idea being that our perverse nature is as hungry as Yokozuna, and if we give him some food he'll bounce us out of the ring. I think.

Not that I'm going to blog about masturbation (sorry), but there is a thematic resonance underneath it all. I'm fond of using the term "mental masturbation" to describe anyone who goes to such trouble to show off their mental superiority that their efforts end up doing more harm than good. But I also think that anyone freely offering up their opinions as if they are of automatic benefit to readers - as I am clearly doing - is kind of engaged in the same egotistical stroking, if less disastrously. Not saying it's a negative (or, if you're Christian, sinful) thing, I just think it's an interesting parallel.

To put it another way: You've got to have some balls to think people are going to care what you have to say. And if your intellectual Sumo does end up informing and entertaining others, why wouldn't you want to feed the guy?

This blog, and myself, explained

2009-03-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

Do I really need another distraction in this world? Does anyone?

Probably not. Though I can boast memberships on nearly a dozen web communities and social networks - and yes, even Twitter - here I am, creating a blog only now, years late to a party that may be past its apex. But I do have a reason to be here, and I hope it's one that keeps me updating it (and maybe even somebody reading it) long after other online crazes have been forgotten.

The reason is the medium itself: writing. I'm currently an amateur writer, hoping to make it professionally one day. To date, I've written a few screenplays, and I have a regular gig co-writing the all-ages comic Rabbit and Bear Paws. I have a bunch of other projects in various states of outlining/scripting/imagining - but these are all giant, complex undertakings of creativity, and sometimes I just want to write a few paragraphs reacting to something. So that means there will be occasional reviews of movies, books, comics, music; maybe random thoughts on the creative process itself. If you're lucky (and if I'm even luckier), I may even talk about my own experiences in the field.

But I want to make sure this stays a blog focused on creativity and creation; if this devolves into biweekly posts of funny YouTube videos, it becomes just another nameless echo station in the virtual landscape and I might as well stop wasting everyone's time. And, as a budding professional, I'd like to avoid burning bridges in the industry and so try to keep snark and shit-talking out of my reactions. So if you see any of that negativity starting to creep into my posts, you have my permission to virtually kick my ass!

Anyway, that's the basics explained. I hope you keep reading. And I also hope I keep posting: the blogosphere is littered with the Best of Short-Lived Intentions, which is actually something I want to discuss in my next entry. That, and the meaning behind the title of this Blog! Dramatic!