We’re out of commission here until, oh, Wednesday? And anticipating doing more than mere linking beginning next week.
In the meantime, read up on what Carl Wilson posted on Owen Pallett writing about Max Tundra, because this gentleman is starting to knock me out.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: a.o. scott, afterschoool, cold war kids, indexed, marilynne robinson, the road, tv on the radio
- It’s Fall Preview time of year, which is exciting for precisely one reason: with any luck, there will be good movies hitting theaters in the next few months. (Or six months, in Maine.) With that, The Onion A.V. Club has turned its film preview for the fall into an Oscar-O-Meter, which does a good job explaining what buzz there is or isn’t for upcoming movies. (Like the Oscars themselves, the Oscar-buzz rating has no bearing on the quality of the film.) Things to look forward to: Rachel Getting Married (starring Anne Hathaway, believe it or not) and The Road, The Road, The Road.
- Likewise, my favorite internet film critic, Mike D’Angelo, is at the New York Film Festival and has just seen one of his favorite films of the decade. Usually, this indicates a bold and disturbing movie that you may love but will be reluctant to share with your friends. Case in point: Afterschool, which sounds shocking and awesome. He’s also put up a Films of the Decade page, which has a decent overlap with my own unwritten list.
- Regular NYT film critic A.O. Scott won my undying admiration for two books pieces he wrote on Sunday: a much better appreciation of DFW than the “Appreciation” they printed last week, and a review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book Home, her follow up to Gilead, which really, really makes me wish I wasn’t spending all of my free time working on this right now (as fulfilling and important as it is). One more week…
- More TV on the Radio reviews, from The Onion and Drowned in Sound (who, as they do almost every week, drop the M-bomb).
- Pitchfork reminds us why the Cold War Kids are popular, why they don’t deserve to be, and why you (I) shouldn’t get so worked up about it. They also review a Blaxploitation soundtrack for a film that was never made, which is damned interesting.
- Indexed is a blog of graphs on index cards, pithily and elegantly summing up the news and random people’s attitudes.
Filed under: Hasty Music Reviews, Uncategorized | Tags: babar, Music, okkervil river, sam amidon, tv on the radio
- Seriously folks, seeing illustrations of Babar in the Times and the New Yorker these past couple weeks has warmed my pretending-to-be-cynical heart many, many times. Gush. And, as an aside, all of this coverage makes me wish my memories of Babar were not simply being bored by the HBO cartoon as a child.
- Anyway, today’s main topic of discussion was to be TV on the Radio’s new album, Dear Science, (important question the internet hasn’t answered yet: do you put a comma after an album with a comma in the title?), but fortunately for all of us, Chris Dahlen wrote the Pitchfork review, and as usual he nails an extremely complicated album. It’s worth noting that the 9.2 grade seems slightly at odds with Dahlen’s review, but I understand the sentiment: in moments the album is more interesting (and easier) to think about than to just enjoy, but this seems a case where an album’s Symbolic Importance (as genuinely progressive rock music) outweighs its mere likability. And that said, I’m liking it more every time I listen to it. Popmatters also does a better job with it than they usually do.
- Also worth a look is Chris Dahlen’s blog, Save the Robot. (He is, it turns out, a Portsmouth NH resident.) His blog most often focuses on video games, with occasional sidetracks into movies and music, and he’s an immensely levelheaded and appealing writer. (Heed his notice on Max Tundra. And Shugo Tokumaru.)
- Cokemachineglow’s Eric Sams manages to address most of my beef with the new Okkervil River (the sensation, not the album necessarily) and still come out liking it. Here’s hoping.
- At Shake Your Fist, there’s a nice song by Sam Amidon from Awake My Soul, the Sacred Harp documentary mentioned a few weeks back. We mention this mainly because it was recently announced that Amidon’s coming to One Longfellow Square in Portland in December, which has quickly become my second-most anticipated concert of the year (after Andrew Bird, coming up quickly). I will be promoting the shit out of Amidon’s performance in the coming months. Look back to my Nico Muhly post for a little more on him.
- What would the White House look like if it were designed today?
- From the Department of Hilarious Lack of Imagination, The Shawshank Redemption is to be reissued on DVD, and the cover could scarcely look more like that of a Star Wars film.
Filed under: Visual, Words, Work | Tags: burn after reading, david foster wallace, fight club, mcsweeneys, micah blue smaldone, n+1, office space
- In this week’s Phoenix, I review Micah Blue Smaldone’s new album, The Red River. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to listen to a local album and not have to grade it on a curve. This gentleman is a massive talent.
- Continuing on the David Foster Wallace eulogy watch (because that’s all I care to pay attention to this week): a friend and colleague wrote a beautiful one for the Boston Phoenix; Benjamin Kunkel has another for n+1; the McSweeney’s thread continues to be a little bit heartbreaking; and the New Yorker has finally chimed in (and made a couple more stories of Wallace’s available).
- One surefire way to make me like Fight Club less: compare it to fucking Office Space. Can’t convey to you all how depressing it is to me that people enjoy that movie. It’s even more frustrating than the revisionist blather about The Big Lebowski being a Great Movie. I beseech anyone who likes Office Space to read this book and refer to it ad nauseum instead.
- Speaking of the Coen Bros, I saw Burn After Reading this past weekend, and I think I liked it. Maybe a lot, even. I’ll try to check it out one more time before I comment further.
- Via Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, these maps ranking each state by qualities of character are pretty fascinating. Apparently, Maine is both one of the most extraverted and least open states in the country. That means we’re shallow, right?
- And we’re continuing other peoples’ David Foster Wallace tributes week. I highly doubt anyone reading this is as big a closet tennis nut as I am, but I forgot how awesome DFW’s profile of Roger Federer in the NYT’s sports magazine is. (Gawker’s got a handy wrapup of freely available online articles.) The McSweeney’s tributes – including bits by Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith – have begun, and the reminiscences by his former students almost made me cry. More of those coming throughout the week. And at Zoilus, Carl Wilson gives another lovely tribute, and links to an online community of DFW freaks, where I take it there are loads more stories and articles.
- Also, I forgot to provide a link last week to my review of Why?’s album, Alopecia. He’s at SPACE Gallery on Saturday.
Harper’s magazine has just made their collection of David Foster Wallace stories freely available as PDF files. Click here for the list. I don’t recognize all of the titles, but at least a few of these would later be featured in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster under different titles. “Shipping Out…,” from Jan 1996 (later retitled as “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”), is hilarious, essential reading. I’ll be going back to it tonight.
One of the unique tragedies of a death like this is that no one could have written a more precise eulogy than David Foster Wallace. Of anyone. The man’s ability to grasp a person, moment, or occasion in all of its complexities and eccentricities was quite literally jawdropping, something beyond what you thought one human mind was capable of. He was as authoritative as he was encyclopedic. It’s impossible to read his non-fiction works and not come out more alert, thoughtful, and most of all, humble.
So, to read. Yes, read Infinite Jest (or yes, try to read it again). But more, read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a giddy rollercoaster of opinions and perspectives. It’s a book I do and will return to annually. Read his piece on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign (which was recently released as a stand-alone book). Read this simple, disarming fiction story from the New Yorker last year. Read what will likely be a lovely week of remembrances at McSweeney’s. Read this one at Salon. Ignore the needlessly critical one at the Times. Keep reading. We’ve got some serious slack to pick up.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dear science, devin davis, heidi julavits, picnic, state by state, tv on the radio, wrens
As usual, apologies for the lack of activity here this week. We’re facing unprecedented levels of non-bloggy projects at the moment. In the meantime, let’s catch up.
- It’s been an awfully boring week on the internet, politics aside (which we’re still trying to ignore for a while). Chad VanGaalen’s new album is out, but no one has reviewed it yet. You can listen to it here; you ought to buy it here. It’s solid from the first listen, but around #30 I’m convinced it’s Great.
- Over at Slate, the State by State excerpt week I mentioned earlier has been updated numerous times. This morning, Heidi Julavits, co-editor of the Believer, discusses Maine (where she’s at least a part-time resident).
- Stereogum’s put up a shallow-but-decent Premature Evaluation of the new TV on the Radio album, Dear Science,. It comes out on September 23. My favorite comment I’ve read about it so far is someone expressing relief that the band finally decided to make black music. This undersells the album a bit; I haven’t heard much of it, but it’s too bananas to wrap your head around quickly. Certainly their most impressive release; we’ll see if it’s their most satisfying.
- I was preparing to “DJ” Picnic, a music and DIY art festival in Portland on Friday, and stumbled across some old favorites I’ve been missing an awful lot. Devin Davis’s album Lonely People of the World, Unite! is probably my favorite underdog geek-rock (in that it’s really geeky and really rocking, not whatever else that genre tag implies) record of the decade. Its pop culture references, a few years later, remain surprisingly potent. Even better, I was completely bowled over once again by a few tracks from the Wrens’s The Meadowlands, an impassioned and appropriately messy breakup/comeback album if there ever was one. Myspace has one great track; work your Google to find “Ex-Girl Collection,” the album’s cathartic pop peak.
Filed under: Excerpts, Hasty Music Reviews, Visual, Words | Tags: books, Music, okkervil river, old joy, paper thin walls, sean wilsey, state by state, why?
This is the first edition of “post titles from actual subject lines of emails I receive at work.”
- From the shocking coincidence department, I got around to watching Old Joy last night (which I wrote about yesterday… accurately, it turns out), and discovered that a clip of dialogue from the film is included in Why?’s album Alopecia, which I spent the bulk of Sunday writing about (link to come Thursday). The one unfortunate aspect of this coincidence is that one line of my review is about how all of Why?’s pop-culture references are too weird/specific/on-the-nose to get people to cheer along with them. I would totally cheer for an Old Joy dialogue clip at a show.
- The new album by Megafaun, which is kind of sort of a band that Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon used to be in, sounds great.
- Slate is publishing excerpts from the forthcoming collection State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (out next week). In it, fifty writers tackle the fifty states (there’s an afterword on Washington, D.C.). Just some of the writers involved: the New Yorker’s George Packer, William T. Vollmann, Benjamin Kunkel, Rick Moody, current literary heartthrob Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End), Dave Eggers, Alexander Payne (director of Election, Sideways, etc.), Susan Orlean, Jhumpa Lahiri. There are other familiar names too. Awesome. The volume is co-edited by Sean Wilsey, who wrote the pretty good memoir Oh the Glory of It All and this excellent essay/diary, which I highly recommend printing out (he also slept in the window of SPACE Gallery for a week the summer I moved to Portland).
- I hereby predict that by the time the next Okkervil River album comes out, the band is going to get even more popular and most of their torch-bearing critics are going to turn on him. They are getting seriously overheated, and these reviews read like old Decemberists praise. Remember liking them? Sure you do. The Stand Ins isn’t bad, though.
- And, bummer of bummers, one of the better music crit sites on the web has shuttered. Visit Paper Thin Walls for their preemptive singles and album of the year, complete with streams.
- I’m taking a week off from the election. Everyone’s talking and thinking crazy and, worse, talking to me about it.
Filed under: Visual | Tags: andrew dominik, clair denis, friday night, gerry, gus van sant, kelly reichardt, monte hellman, Movies, old joy, paranoid park, two-lane blacktop
Over at of Maine’s home base last night, we were supposed to watch Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt’s awesome 2006 film co-starring Will Oldham. We were too tired though, so in lieu of lengthy comments, welcome to of Maine’s first listicle.
Sometimes when I say a movie put me to sleep, I mean it as a compliment. There’s a certain type of slow, elegant langour that simultaneously makes me feel totally engaged and completely relaxed. There are a couple of films on this list I have literally never stayed awake through. Regardless, I cherish them like few others.
1. Gerry (2002, Gus Van Sant)
In Van Sant’s anti-comeback film (after that strange foray into Good Will Hunting/Finding Forrester territory), it could be argued that every important plot point is relayed through cinematography rather than dialogue. Full of minutes-long shots of great depth (the faces stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as they walk next to each other, slowly passing each other; a car moving through a desert highway), Gerry is opague to the max (the characters both call each other “Gerry” and speak in a nearly impenetrable slang, which heightens your sense of their friendship) but taps into some primal and deeply modern idea of man’s survival instincts in the wild. Also: Paranoid Park, Van Sant’s latest movie which ought to be out on DVD October 7, is just as good.
2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik)
Another Casey Affleck joint. If this one hadn’t been released by a major studio, I probably wouldn’t include it on the list (or think as highly of it as I do), but you can’t deny how awesome it is that Dominik was able to finance the gorgeous, 2 1/2 hour death march of Jesse James simply because Brad Pitt agreed to star in it. The photography’s as good as any Terrence Malick film, Nick Cave’s score makes the whole film feel like a sad bedtime fable, Affleck is both pathetic and smoldering. I didn’t even bother discerning the supporting cast until the third time I watched it, so entranced by the tone of the thing.
3. Friday Night (2002, Claire Denis)
Woman preparing to move out of her apartment gets stuck in a traffic jam in Paris on the way to a party. Sitting, waiting, a man knocks on her window and charms her into dinner. They have sex in a hotel and presumably never see each other again, but are changed by one another. The sex feels extremely explicit but you never see full body-shots, just a heavily edited series of extreme close-ups of skin that give a sublime sense to the act. The whole film carries the same heightened, bewitching sense of magic.
4. Old Joy (2006, Kelly Reichardt)
Two old friends reunite for a trip to the Oregon wilderness. They’ve grown apart and get along awkwardly. They listen to anti-Bush Air America screeds on the radio in the car. They visit an abandoned bathhouse deep in the woods. They separate and go back to their respective lives, and you’re left deeply uncertain about what they’ll do next. For every moment where Old Joy feels like a growing-into-adulthood indie flick, there are two or three where it transcends that sentiment, so non-judgmental and quiet is Reichardt’s treatment. (Talk of Reichardt’s next film, Wendy and Lucy, is all over the New York Times fall arts preview from Sunday.)
5. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, Monte Hellman)
The two share little in common but unspoken emotions and a reverence for Americana, but it’s hard to imagine Gerry existing without Two-Lane Blacktop’s example. James Taylor (yes, that one) stars as a sullen guy and Dennis Wilson (also that one) is his more upbeat friend as the two drag race a yuppie (Warren Oates) across the country. The sound of engine noise is more expressive than the protagonists, and the undiscussed love of the open road leads to a seminal end of an era/end of cinema moment.
