2009: The Year Freak Broke

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

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The Fall 2009 Mix - Now with Annotations!

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.

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Missed it by that much.

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!

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And some kinds of love are mistaken for vision

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.

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

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?)

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Not So Fast.

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.

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But how does it make you feel...?

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?

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