let's get ignorant

dude i got so many bug bites

2008-06-30T23:05:00.007-04:00

Martin Creed is going to have this piece in the Tate that will be a runner running across a gallery every 30 seconds. I don't know anything about art and the way things are going may never see London but I am glad this is happening in the world, because who hasn't seen a huge expanse of museum corridor and wanted a little bit to slip across it faster than one ought, and because who hasn't seen Band of Outsiders, and because I just read this dull book that started with a snarky but engaging opening scene that has two aspiring teen bohemians sitting in an art museum with a pair of binoculars to observe the bourgeoisie so these lil rapscallions can read their expressions in an attempt to ascertain what the middle-aged and sensibly dressed reap from Art. Everyone sometimes turns around at the movies for a sec to look at the expressions of people looking up at the screen; at the Olafur Eliasson exhibit part at the MoMA, all everyone did was take pictures of themselves and their friends as the whites of Stephanie's eyes turned pink. The point is, the way people move through these spaces (bodies dashing through Chelsea! eyes slowly-slowly finding a way across a big Poussin painting!) is at least ridiculous in a small way, and I think this idea is ignorant, good-type.

Oh real quick fore I go to early pre-long-work-day sleep, here are the movies I've seen lately:

Celine et Julie vont en Bateau: LIBRARY BREAK-IN SCENE ALLUDING TO LOUIS FEUILLADE. DELIGHTFUL WHIMSY AT EXCESSIVE LENGTH. A++

The Little Fugitive: DELIGHTFUL VERITE DEPICTING 5-YEAR-OLD GETTING LOST IN LATE '50s/EARLY '60s CONEY ISLAND. PONIES. A++

Taking Off: LARGELY UNFUNNY SATIRE OF EASY TARGETS--PETIT-BOUGE LONG ISLANDERS AND WISPY DUMB HIPPIES--REDEEMED BY THE FACT THAT DIRECTOR MILOS FORMAN HAD JUST DECAMPED FROM EASTERN EUROPE AND CLEARLY LOOKED AROUND HIM AND THOUGHT, SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK.

Onimasa: GENUINELY TERRIBLE JAPANESE EPIC RE EARLY 20TH CENTURY "GAMBLER" AND HIS BORING ADOPTED DAUGHTER, REMINISCENT OF A TELENOVELA IN STRUCTURE AND STYLE.

High and Low: GENIUS PACING ALLOWS THIS KUROSAWA JOINT TO SUCCEED BOTH AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY AND POLICE PROCEDURAL.

Mister Lonely, or, Ask Me About Unwound

2008-05-17T14:26:00.003-04:00

Ok, I saw Mister Lonely last night and am still reeling a little bit from the experience. I
wait one second: I am listening to New Plastic Ideas for the second time this week, that being the first time in a year and a half or so; this HOLDS UP like nobody's business, and none of the bands of now that go for the pounding dark vibe have anything on this band, who maybe were the only or last people to get the loud/soft dynamic shifts powerful without corniness. By Leaves Turn Inside You, which I'm not sure if I like any more, they, too, had gotten a little too "experimental." This record might actually be punk? It has a great guitar sound. So usual.
ANYWAY I gotta go on a long bike ride, but I also want to know, what did you think of this movie if you saw it? I went into it not really expecting to like it and left not knowing what I thought. Some parts
this song I am listening to is kind of post-Nirvana, hmm
The weird thing, I think, is that you think it'll be whimsical (the bad kind of whimsical, wait, there's no good kind, but you know what I mean?) and it isn't. I mean you think it'll be hipster-dreamy but it's just dreamy; Herzog's presence aside, parts of it seem very Herzog-y, with a small, bizarre, and beautiful thing happening in a big expanse of space. In other parts that you'd expect to be lush and over-the-top, Korine shoots in really tight focus on people's faces, which grounds you in the characters' emotions, and ultimately each main character's personality overrides the weird mise en scene, rather than sinking back into decorative weirdness. Does that make sense?
It has false notes, for sure, and despite the movie's surface earnestness (it's about faith), you wonder where the irony lies, if anywhere.
Oh shit, I am gonna be late! More later. Bike time!

HAIRCUT TIme

2008-05-07T22:22:00.008-04:00

Don't they know, at the haircut place, that I haven't had my hair cut since November or possibly August? Can't they see that I look like a feral metal dude? How could they have mistaken my "Wednesday" for a "Friday?" I protest this dreadful mistake by holing up in my room with books/computer/guitar to spite the nice weather.
onetwothree this is what I've been thinking about

The vague resemblance Serena VanderW. bears to Laura Palmer--the haunted blonde, misunderstood, caught in webs of intrigue which, it seems, she cannot control, except when you realize that perhaps she has, indeed, a deep and terrible grasp of her surroundings.

Why it is that so much art devotes itself to itself: we watch movies about making movies about artists making their art, we read books about writing writers, but we don't make movies or art or write; we come home from work, cook pasta and consume and think we derive something about talent or torment or the relevancy of the beautiful to a prosaic way of being.

Which is obvs not to say that one should read books like this one about strategic personae one can adapt to push forward positive change and get ahead within one's organization, just that it's sometimes hard to bring things to bear on each other. The Poussin show at the Met was really great.

Also, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were about my age when they got married, which, the more I think about it, makes no sense at all, both these two facts and the fact that I'm thinking about it. Also, I saw the Daniel Johnston documentary, which proves that the best documentaries tend to depict moments or people who document themselves (cf Capturing the Friedmans).

As a Lord of the Rings-influenced big-budget martial arts movie featuring a training montage wherein a pudgy film nerd buffs up and sprouts a ponytail,The Forbidden Kingdom may prove the least cool movie in the history of cinema and probably, the more references one catches to other kung-fu movies or to LOTR, the wider the chasm separating one from "acceptable" grows. I could still maybe pole vault?

listen to the New Bloods. That's it, i think.

walking down the streets of paradise

2008-03-27T16:37:00.002-04:00

Come out to the release party for perhaps this city's only dance-related zine (coordinated by Ana), tomorrow night at Sound Fix!

Also, read Hannah's photo blog about her Argentinian adventures.

Finally, you should probably listen to Pour Down Like Silver.

Memories of Murder

2008-03-17T19:54:00.003-04:00

One expects the unexpected in a police procedural so automatically that the twists become formulaic: the first suspect won't pan out, the corruption at the heart of the law and the cop-criminal slippage usually starts to unfold about 2/3 of the way in. Memories Of Murder sticks to the formula partially, which makes it an incredibly weird movie. As in Law and Order, you see only hints of the policemen's private lives; the film focuses on the case, a serial rapist and murderer terrorizing a village in 1980s Korea. This movie--it is so strange.
First, the film plays much of the investigation for laughs. The cops bumble around, employing idiotic strategies (at one point, the lack of pubic hair at a crime scene convinces one that the criminal must be a hairless monk, prompting him to camp out in bathhouses, investigating his fellow bathers), seem generally ignorant, act cruelly and beat suspects out of sheer stupidity rather than vindictiveness. The comedy runs through the whole movie, but the wackier the cops seem, the more the film emphasizes their helplessness. In an early scene, they can't prevent a tractor driver from running over a footprint; later on, they sit in their office knowing that a murder will take place but unable to do anything to prevent it.
The movie's stock characters--the sharp city detective, the old chief of police, the murderer--act atypically. The man from Seoul has sharper investigative skills than the small-town police (who also don't shape up to impress him, as they might in a different movie), but proves equally unequipped for this case. Rather than affecting those around him, the irrationality of his fellow cops and the crimes' cruelty take an abrupt, heavy toll.
The DVD case describes Memories of Murder as a "moody thriller," which I first found unapt but think might be accurate--better, it's rueful, all about missed opportunities and disappointments, but this tone is unexpected in a movie about what this movie's about. It also puts a weird cast on the actual scenes of brutality, of which there are a few, that are horrifying and, more frightening still, inevitable.
I find this movie hard to describe. It came recommended really ardently from a few disparate sources, and it definitely hits you a lot harder after you finish watching it than while it's actually unfolding in front of you.

SNAX PICKX

2008-03-12T00:23:00.003-04:00

Both proprietary brands!

1. Trader Joe's Jumbo Raisin Medley. I barely liked raisins, only had odd-hour cravings for them and appreciated their presence in oatmeal, oatmeal-raisin cookies, and bran muffins, till I got this. About five of these raisins basically comprises a snack, and if you ever heard the phrase "plump and juicy" applied to a raisin before and looked down at teensy dried nuggets in your palm as the corners of your mouth turned down involuntarily, you should wait in that line, man. THESE RAISINS ARE AMAIZINS! I won't use them in my oatmeal--it's be like using Macallan for a whiskey and coke or something.

2. Archer Farms Jamaican Spice and Black Pepper and Sea Salt-flavor Baked Potato Crisps. You buy these at Target and at Target only; luckily I work near the hellacious Atlantic Avenue Mall, which is redeemed from fire and brimstone by these chips' righteousness alone (although the $14.99 Xhiliration bra special at Target also wins them points. I can't go in there and not buy chips and a bra! What the fuck?) These broad, flat chips have a brittle texture and lack the slightly sweet taste that bring down Baked Lays in my estimation. They're light while not lite, but the seasoning really makes them. When Archer Farms says pepper they mean real coarse-ground black pepper, that lingers in the corner of your mouth. Jamaica BBQ has a savory jerk taste underlying the pepper, while the black pepper chips simply have MORE PEPPER. Geniuses! My office can take down a big bag of these lickety-split.

ignorant: the book review corner

2008-03-09T23:06:00.005-04:00

People tell me I write how I talk but I hope that's untrue: the language I speak comes haltingly, broken unevenly into measures by "like"s, "I mean/guess," and a lot more shits and fucks and goddamns than my audience should accept. I resolved to quit "like" more New Year's than I can remember, but it takes such a pervasive role in my vocabulary that when I speak formally, to superiors at work, say, I might utter "yes, like, this situation . . . " realize that I've just used "like" improperly, and turn the actual situation into a hypothetical: "Yeah, like a situation wherein x might happen is analogous to the situation we're in" rather than "Yeah, our situation is x." And more minds than mine have drawn broader conclusions about this generation from our linguistic limp--things are not, for us, they are like this or like that. But I digress.
Since I read anything I see that has to do with meth addiction (I also feel compelled to read cookbooks and top 10 of anything lists, that's not what this is about here), I read the excerpt from Nic Sheff's meth addiction memoir Tweak, which was linked off an article in the Times. Here's a quote:

"I guess I've pretty much spent the last four years chasing that first high. I wanted desperately to feel that wholeness again. It was like, I don't know, like everything else faded out. All my dreams, my hopes, ambitions, relationships -- they all fell away as I took more and more crystal up my nose. I dropped out of college twice, my parents kicked me out, and, basically, my life unraveled."

This is amazing! What a mess, man, what an onslaught of cliches and nervous modifiers and "like"s and unnecessary adverbs. This phrase represents the core of this book, the truth of the devastation of this kid's life, and it's inept. One should not be allowed to get away with writing like this, much less earn a publishing contract from Simon and Schuster. But then, talk to me when you see me about inarticulateness and likely I'll look at you from behind a chunk of hair, scratch my nose, push up my glasses and say "Basically, like . . .fucking, like, we don't know how to talk anymore." So in a way this terrible writer has perfectly captured heavy sentiments for the era of the idle rich meth addict--he has no art, he could've done better but instead he did drugs. Is this prose commendable for its honesty and aptness or loathsome for its ignorance?
I saw about an hour of Into the Wild, which worked in a similar way: to express the naive alienation of its protagonist, the film's director (Sean Penn, I think) employs the dullest MTV techniques--slo-mo, split screens, topical Eddie Vedder songs--in a movie with themes (the romantic innocent trapped by society trekking out into the hills) for which this stylistic crap could not be less appropriate. . . OR IS IT?

Anyway, I have seen some movies lately, including Annie Hall, The Panic In Needle Park, J'entends plus la guitare, 10 Rillington Place, and Nobody Knows. Unlike Into the Wild, these were mostly good, particularly J'entends.

Based on Philippe Garrel's affair with Nico, the film has one topic--how love works--and cuts out any dross that might not relate to this particular thing. You don't know what any characater save one does for a living, the interiors are sparse, the camera lingers on faces, faces and pays attention to conversations, not actions. It is about the Frenchest thing I have ever seen.

Heroes, pt 2; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

2008-02-20T11:24:00.004-05:00

In a world saturated with the bad kinds of bad attitudes, Mark Bittman's bad attitude serves as an exemplar, a how-to guide for maintaining a bad attitude in the best way. He scorns this and turns his nose up at that, but concludes with gentle affirmations: I'm so against these nerds who say vinaigrette's got tricks, so against them; making vinaigrette's actually so goddamn easy I'm going to do it, and guess what, you can too.

There's a part in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days when the protagonist scurries through a grim sector of a city in the middle of the night, the camera hovering over her left shoulder like a zombie-cam in a horror movie. Patches of the city appear in the shots' margins and you see the most indescribable, unexpected colors--a blurred grey-brown, a hazy purple-orange--and you sense the character's panic and displacement so sharply.

The film has one near-insurmountable problem. One of the main characters elicits incredible empathy, while the other--the person whose not-unsympathetic predicament sets everything in motion--is basically a psycho hose beast, a cowardly, thoughtless, simpering ingrate. I'm unsure whether the other character's depth compensates for this other lady's obnoxiousness. I wonder if having the antagonistic woman (the one who needs the abortion) be the person with whom one's sympathies would naturally lie represents an attempt to challenge the audience, or if the director spent himself while layering the other character with complexities?

One conversation in this movie between the protagonist, Otilia, and her boyfriend, just does not relent and probably will remind you of something you've thought and experienced yourself if you've ever cared about anyone, that is about one thing very specifically but more generally describes pressing against the limits of your love and trust for someone and discovering the indistinct but extant point at which you must care about yourself more than you do about him or her.

So, way to go, Cannes jury, I guess, this was a really good movie. It also did that trick with sound effects editing (cf. No Country For Old Men, um Last Days, a lot of other recent stuff), where everything sounds incredibly clear and present; a ball kicked against a car like a gun going off, a cigarette inhaled so deeply your throat hurts.

stupor bowl!

2008-02-04T21:58:00.000-05:00

On consumption, briefly: I find high-life-type shopping fraught; whereas at H&M, say, you just have to confirm with yourself that you like and look decent in a thing and assess the odds that someone you know already owns it, at whatever Williamsburg joint with enticingly small SALE sign, you must answer all these questions and then determine to what extent in buying X thing for Y money, you'd have to consider yourself your own class enemy, and then work out weird equations where ZP.B.R.s + Qbags of lentils / NGreyhounds + Cdelicious hockey puck-sized chocolate chip cookies from the bakery near job = Dress G - the square root of cell phone bill or whatever.

Alas, and anyway, my love for lentils will never die. But anyway again, did you watch the GODDAMN SUPER BOWL?

I only saw half, or rather, I saw the last 2 minutes/25 minutes of the first half, the dullish Tom Petty halftime biz, and the second half. I spent the first half, to be fair, at the New Museum and eating a next-level good bougie Mexican sandwich that contained the exact same ingredients as Madeleine's 7-layer dip, which I consequently had to exempt myself from eating. The New Museum's exterior leaves no surprises for the innards: it's yeah, three big concrete spaces atop each other. Most of the pieces in the current exhibit left little impression, although I found myself stealth-affected by Martha Rosler's collages that merge pictures of models and interior design magazines with pictures from the war; they're so obvious that when you find yourself struck by them it's kind of a double blow. But I digress.
At one point during the game, my friend Alex asked me if I'd fallen asleep since I'd been pretty quiet for a while and of course not, I was literally biting my nails. When I watch the Mets, I often grow quiet and nervous and all, but that's got a context, right, an allegiance. This game, though, proved its worth. I care nothing about the sport, feel similarly dispassionate about the two teams--though I sure wish no well for Robert Kraft--but the hometown boys' balancing of ineptitude and luck with skill and tenacity proved gripping. Gripping! Football! It is amazing how sports viewership works the same way as one's own little life: that you have to try not to hope too hard for things lest an excess of wishing fuck with your fortunes.
In other news, I saw a fantastic psuedo-ethnographic silent movie from the 1920s called Chang, d. by the same guys who made King Kong which featured the slaughter of about 5 leopards, 2 tigers, and 2 goats and the abuse of countless other mammals, human and otherwise, and in spite/cos of that, was totally fascinating, both the things it showed and how it showed em.

your gardens and bridges green with shit came running i'm back

2008-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

HI.

This is a painting a friend of a friend of mine made called "DEATH TO BLOG," but this blog lives; listen, I got a real job, where I make phone calls and fill out purchase orders and try to learn FileMaker Pro and act very concerned when paperwork goes astray, and it is at a non-profit so my heart's supposed to be in it, which means first, less blog-time and second, when I am not at work I want not to see a computer but rather to listen to Morbid Angel or Fleetwood Mac, steam myself some vegetables and mix up some tahini sauce, drink this one kind of $10.99 shiraz, and read novels so late into the night that I cut it real close arriving at this real job every morning, and I'm gonna take my tax refund post-my tuition write-offs and get "wack boug" knuck tats. SIKE! I'm not hating, I promise.

The best snack I've eaten since I stopped posting in this blog is this kind of Ritz Cracker I can't find a picture of on the internet because I can't recall its name, but their thinness amplifies their faux-butteriness in a sort of sharp, irresistible way. I ate them in my coworker's car somewhere in New Jersey.

The best movie I have seen, by far, is not really a movie but rather the 6-hour or whatever TV version of Fanny and Alexander.

Let me say first that I haven't liked any of the three or four other Bergman films I've seen; I find their intensity both forced and coercive. I had no idea that he could (or would) do something like this.

After you watch something for that long a period of time, you necessarily feel a little shaky heading back out into the world. When you sit in front of a TV for six hours (and I can recall for you one particular string of Memorial Day Weekend Law and Order franchise marathons), you stand up and feel blunt all over, your muscles slack and your brain unable to point itself directly towards anything you'd want it to focus on; you open the wrong door in the kitchen looking for pretzels, you wander into dark rooms thinking "ah, this is just my parents' house, but the TV has just told me a criminal's likely lurking here, but I'm too checked the fuck out to remember to turn the light on and find out one way or the other." That's why going to the movies in New York is the best--as soon as you leave the theater, you're shocked, cold-water style, into being a person again, since it's bright even though it's night-time and you need to wend your way back to the subway and skirt the usual cabs and jocks, and what stays with you from the movie in those moments are probably the things from the movie, whether moments or moods or whatever, that were the truest. When I left Fanny and Alexander, I felt confident that I was walking around in a world where I might come across a ghost at any moment and it'd be cool, just kind of the way things are.

"Sumptuous," I think, one might call this in writing its DVD-box blurb. I wrote that thinking of the red velveteen interiors of the opening Christmas segments, of the loving shots of the smorgasbord and of the beautiful grandmother (this blog, I swear it, is going to have a long post on amazing old ladies someday soon), but the adjective might apply as well to the emotions expended in the film. One could as easily describe the professor uncle's infantile rage/affection towards his wife as "lavish" as one could term the set design. As soon as the movie goes over-the-top, though, it slips back into something recognizable or genuine.

Let me digress for a sec and talk about There Will Be Blood, a movie so perfect in its pitch and tone, so well-shot and controlled for almost precisely its first half, that loses itself so badly in its second (I drew a really accurate hand-graph of the movie's failures at a party a while ago that I would reproduce in Paint except I'm on a stupid Mac). Anyway, Fanny and Alexander never unwinds like that. The terrifying but lil'cheesy girl-ghost-twins appear for no longer than they ought to and do not return; the old Jew's legend flies repeatedly off into a fantasy realm but lingers on his face and closed eyes, letting you feel as bewitched by his own tale as he and Alexander.

The closest thing I have experienced to watching this is the times when I'd sit and watch as many episodes of Twin Peaks as I could get from Kim's, but F + A has depth in addition to its trickery, where TP (which I'm not hating on, hey!) settles itself in vague irony. Nonetheless, you rouse yourself from the couch and don't even need to dream about B.O.B. since you imagine him so vividly around the corner. That's how alive Fanny and Alexander is, I guess I mean to say.

Anywayx2, it's about a big tight family in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and what happens after tragedy strikes it suddenly and tears little Fanny and Alexander and their mother away. You should watch it, I think, and since it was made for TV, whatever I said above, you can totally see it at home, since they just show it in HD in the theater anyway.

r.i.p.

2008-01-23T12:35:00.000-05:00

Towards the end of Lords of Dogtown, arrogant skate-shop owner Heath has been abandoned by the Z-Boy skaters for better and more legitimate sponsors, for drugs or trouble. Fame and women drift away, and he finds himself reduced to sanding surfboards in the back room of what was once his own shop. His hair mangy, a cigarette drooping from his lip, he notes "Maggie May" coming on the radio and sings along, as much as one can sing while you're sanding and smoking. The moment has a weird and rueful power and represent, for me, the apex of Mr. Ledger's acting prowess.

(I'm back, Layla)

Art cinema: ignorant!

2007-11-18T14:44:00.000-05:00

In general, I'm not into Maya Deren; I think if I'd met her I would have hated her, and there's something too-too about most of her films. Her last one, The Very Eye of Night which you can watch here, blows my mind, though. It is SO IGNORANT. In the Deren documentary, J. Mekas talks about how, at the time of its release, people pointed out how easily you can perceive the stars to be spangles on a scrim being pulled along.
How beautiful is it, though? It's like the dream you'd imagine a kid having after she'd gotten dragged to the ballet. If it were any more adept, it would lose its janky-atavistic power.

In other news, it's weird that I've had this blog for over a year, and now I've started walking around in my red coat and listening to my Neil Young mixtape again and remembering how the winter was passed. It is again the season for a new job and pulling out records from the 1990s (Moss Icon, for sers, and Unwound and Rodan) and buying whiskey for hot toddies and socks without holes. At the beginning of this month, I started writing down what I do every day, just short bullet points. I recommend it.

long ignorant post bout seeing some movies

2007-11-12T20:03:00.000-05:00

One twilight this past summer, distraught after a petty fight, I pedaled unthinkingly up an unfamiliar route that led me beneath the alien residential high-rises on 1st Ave. in the 30s and 40s. At stoplights, I'd look up into lit windows set inside heavy concrete casings and see the TV news up on the 10th floor, or a person putting something into a microwave. I had been reading some books about architecture, about glass and its mystical or maybe democratizing properties, and in this moment it made sense: the contiguity of my isolated experience of the city, by myself on my bicycle, with that of these lone figures exposed in their miniature domestic scenes.

I was reminded of this moment by an opinion piece in the Times a few weeks ago, and then again when I went to see Chelsea Girls at the Museum of the Moving Image. Warhol once analogized the movie's spaces to "cubicles in hell," but it just as well mirrors the way you would watch people stuck in a glass highrise across the way: the two simultaneous situations established by the side-to-side projections, the limitations of the film's audio tracks, which either overlap and confuse or leave one scene silent. After we left, I said to Ned that I spent much of the movie with a visceral desire to throw open a window. It's an airless film, with tight shots of characters who stagnate in rooms. They refrain idle threats and slip druggedly from sense to abject incoherence. No one seems depressed, even; more terrifyingly, the repetitive, drawn-out scenes they act have a practiced normality.
The film's beautiful moments do not redeem the characters: these segments or instance come as aberrations and thus, ultimately seem all the more pathetic. I mean like when Brigid Berlin winks bawdily at the camera, or like when Ondine shoots up and raves about god, self-anointing himself the pope of Greenwich Village, while on the opposite projection Nico brushes her bangs out of her eyes and unnatural colors drift across her face and a keening VU instrumental plays. These bits would be intense in any context, but in a movie that maintains such a dull level of intensity for 3.5 hours, they really smart.

You would kind of be an idiot to watch this on DVD, unconfined to a dark space, not subject to the projectionist's decisions about how to show the two reels and synch the audio. Despite the movie's length, you experience it in spatial rather than temporal terms. At its most boring you think not "how fucking long have I been sitting here?" but "how the shit can I get out of this room and away from these people?"

That's really deeply cinematic, I think. Here is a picture of Andy Warhol in the "invisible cinema," a theater designed by Peter Kubelka in the late 1960s at the height of the dogmatic New American Cinema scene.

He demanded the whole theater be painted black, and installed blinders between the seats so you could touch, but not see, the person sitting next to you. It has a house-of-worship vibe, right? So cool. BTW, if anyone has a copy of Jonas Mekas' Movie Journal she's looking to deaccession, get in touch. His film writing is my new favorite thing, all ecstatic and full of pronouncements vague and specific on the nature of cinema and the beauty of some corner in the west 20s and 8th Ave. and how cool his friends are, explicating movies' aboutness by saying "it's about diagonals. it's about girls. it's about love. it's about good camera angles." HERO.

Anyway, today I saw No Country For Old Men, which is the real virtuoso shit that ought to be seen a.s.a.p., because the dreadful expanse of Texas sky and the sound of a pneumatic cattle-butchering gun just demands a real theater. A.O. Scott self-consciously nerds out in his review in the paper, describing it as a moviemaker's movie with near-perfect editing, stunning cinematography, and generally a barrage of smart decisions by the Coen Bros. And yeah, early on, there's a scene that foregrounds a corpse's bullet-strafed boot and you can see the sky through a bullet hole in the boot sole and you just kind of think, holy shit, who thought of this and then executed it? Even at its most portentous--it's about, Mekas-style, God and masculinity and America and evil--the film stays uncheesy. It is also probably in my top 3 "most violent movies ever seen," after aforementioned Eastern Promises but well below The Proposition, which is really the next level.

i finally saw mika miko

2007-10-24T14:57:00.000-04:00

No, but seriously, I am not one to judge what is or isn't punk; I didn't own Rocket to fucking Russia till Ben gave it to me for my birthday LAST YEAR and I had a korperkultur job interview in an east midtown highrise yesterday that left me so dizzied and confused that I bolted about 50 blocks in high-ish heels and scarfed a weird hippie Chinese-flavored burrito I was barely hungry for before I knew what had happened. But after I saw this band all I could say to anyone was "that was the punkest thing I have ever seen in my life," because if there is anything more punk than wasted L.A. teenagers falling on top of each other barely sober enough to play, telling their even drunker audience to fuck off and die, and still somehow emitting raging near-danceable jams that have obviously heard like, the Raincoats but also like, the Middle Class, it would probably have my brains spewing out of my ears or something. I have rarely felt more inspired.

we die and we're born again

2007-10-12T15:51:00.001-04:00

Remember when we were little and in college and every week would vie for free tickets to this or that unmissable thing at the Knitting Factory or Northsix, or trek down to ABC No Rio in what was invariably dreary weather to stand twixt mouldering crusties and then wait for an hour to get an Unturkey Club at Kate's? And we'd see grad students who'd go to maybe 1 show a year and think how hard it must be to grow old?

Right. There are like five bands I like in America now, primarily, as the Gnars points out, in the subgenre of Hipster Hardcore, and they're all playing in the next few weeks. So while enjoying a temporary burst of youthful raging, I can soon refocus my attention on things like the $468 coat I want or going to the farmer's market, or um, school or something silly, and not worry about seeing bands for another while.

10/18 and 20 Clockcleaner, whose hilarious-offensive shtick would be so tired if they weren't the best T&Gcore band since uh, the days of T&Gcore.

10/17 and 21 Mika Miko, who I missed every one of the like 10 times they played here this summer. After I heard their newest ep-thing, 666, I texted someone, "now I like music again." On the 21st they're playing with Finally Punk, who I'm stoked to see after reading Layla's many ardent recommendations.

10/17 (reputedly, can't find any info on this) the mighty SEX/VID, severely awesome hc from the northwest for whom I am skipping class. Sophomoreyearin'!

In a different vein entirely, members of Espers are playing their original soundtrack for the stunning insano Czech movie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders at MoMa on 10/27.

Finally, on 11/10 Fucked Up are playing.

Oh also, guess what, I am affiliated with yet another blog. Since IFD is (alas!) kind of fallow of late, I feel ok about this one. Here are my co-bloggers on our trip to Lancaster County:

Sike! Sarah is not a pony! But anyway, it's a group recipe blog (uh-huh). Let's eat!

blithe ignorance: a noble tradition.

2007-10-04T01:01:00.001-04:00

From someone named Jean-Paul Richter ca. the turn of the 19th century, quoted in Kittler, F. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 p. 145

"The feminine reader, her reading habits are ten times worse, but a hundred times less curable. Let us by all means leave her to do what she will--the silk scrap or thread may fall out of her book, or the open book on her lap may be turned upside down and sht by someone else, so that she won't know where she was. Or, for the sake of the story, she may begin with the Revelation of St. John and then read until she reaches Genesis and the creation--at least she will finish her book, and let that be sufficient for everyone. Indeed she will finish it sooner than a male reader, because she is not delayed by any sentences, to say nothing of words, that she doesn't understand; rather, more concerned with the whole, she will continue on. She owes this splendid habit at least in part to the conversation of men, where daily hundreds of technical words from law and medicine and other areas fly by her, without anyone taking the time to explain them."

no, really, next year is now

2007-09-30T20:42:00.000-04:00

well, at least I can still root against the yankees.

i write really good sentences but cannot construct arguments for shit.

2007-09-19T12:24:00.000-04:00

Je veux voyager en France. Did you have this book when you were a kid? Serious-ment, dudes, I have wanted to go to Paris ever since I pored over its pictures of the bird market and the Rive Gauche, but I've been Google-image-searching like a fiend, ever since I read this tres etupide article and then one of my professors happened to say "when I was at the Cinematheque Francaise last summer," and I realized, Miss Rumphius-style, "I, too, can travel to faraway repositories." No matter what Jacques Austerlitz says, I find the idea of the sunken forest at the Bibliotheque Nationale tremendously appealling.

Lately, I feel a little self-conscious about having this blog, but at the very least, I like having a record of all the movies I see, which reminds me where and with whom and that I was doing something. So I saw Helvetica. Highlights included the enormous banner, in the offices of a Dutch graphic design firm, done in the style of the Emperor logo but reading "MODERNISM" and the fact that despite the tiresome aspects of its repetitive montages of Helvetica appearing all over the goddamn place set to boring idm, this movie will prove a perfectly accurate depiction of the urban Western world of 2006 for future generations. It's a bit long, but full of insights into the thought that goes into making things look the way they do. Additionally, for both interviewees and audience it becomes a really focused experiment in forcing yourself to ponder something you never think about (one designer says "it's like talking about off-white paint"). Also noted: graphic designers can be sassy, and universally have really nice glasses.

Also, I saw Eastern Promises, which I don't have much to say about. It's well-done and gripping throughout, though the more I think about it the more I dislike its resolution. Viggo plays a slight variation on his usual character, which suits him well. Cronenberg uses a similar discomfiting cinematography to that he employed in the inferior, more heavy-handed History of Violence: painstakingly slow pans and shots that linger just a bit too long when you expect them to cut away. I've been wondering, though, if this movie bears some secret metaphoric weight as almost all his other shit does, or if he really just made a dark, nicely constructed genre thriller.

Il Posto

2007-09-14T18:51:00.000-04:00

Just read yet another article about "mumblecore" (seriously, people, doesn't anyone remember the keen experience of seeing Low described as "sadcore" and thinking "oh ok, nothing can get worse than this crap term for an ersatz genre?), about how these are the ideal movies for Generation Indecision. Without spewing speculative venom in the direction of those movies, I'll talk about Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto, which I finally watched. Here's the story: Domenico leaves school (high school, mind) where he studied some things he realizes will bear little pertinence upon his money-making life, applies to and gets a bottom-tier job at a big corporation, and--and nothing. At some point in the application process, he meets a girl, whom he fails to court. The film ends with a desk-jockey's death, which allows Domenico to take over his soulless calculating job.
The film alleviates total grimness in several ways. First, it has a heavy dose of black humor: a Band of Outsiders style diversion into the lives of Domenico's officemates and their lives and perversions is particularly well-timed. Perhaps more importantly, though, you suspect the whole time that Domenico is so much smarter than the system that he'll work his way out of it. Kent Jones talks about this in the Criterion booklet essay, actually, but whatevs: the character seldom speaks, but you see him watching the people around him all the time, pacing himself and his reactions. You get a sense that he's as on top of his own situation as you are of his--I mean to say, whichever type of irony it is where you know what the characters don't (dramatic?) is the opposite of what's going on here. While he's taking the entrance exam for the corporation job, he receives a pretty simple math problem to solve. Olmi cuts to a p.o.v. shot that has you, along with Domenico, staring upwards into the high domed ceiling of the exam room, as if to show you both that Domenico's rolling his eyes and that you and no one else in this movie know exactly in what sense, but that he aspires higher.
& that's how you make a movie about our troubled youth.

I also saw some Yugoslavian short movies at BAM, which were pretty hippie-flighty. It was all fun and games, but let me just note this one kind of anthology film, I Miss Sonja Henie made at I think the 1972 Belgrade Film Festival, that incorporated a 3-minute long Paul Morrissey movie which was, amazingly, no more and no less a Paul Morrissey movie than any 90-minute or 20-minute or 3-hour-long Paul Morrissey movie. Bravo!

jobs suck

2007-09-05T11:12:00.000-04:00

Let me just say that the film noir series at F. Forum failed to bring it--or, perhaps, that July-August 2007 was not the time for me to indulge with any enthusiasm in cornball dialogue and chiaroscuro. I remember Phantom Lady and Killer's Kiss as notably whatever, and can't even recall what else, if anything, I saw. Besides that, I saw Superbad.

But this is the question that I've been thinking about, to the exclusion of thought about any movies, really, the more time I spend around people who spend all their times MAKING THINGS and WORKING ON THINGS TO MAKE, like art or ideas or dances. What I have, can we call this life: a job--the goal of which, no matter what it is, seems to be to do such good work that every trace of my labor and being is effaced from the end result--plus the spare-time cultivation of tastes [cf. this very blog!], plus cameraderie and alcohol?

Let me know.

pick

2007-08-25T14:47:00.000-04:00

When I think about next week I draw in a sharp breath involuntarily because I have so many things to do and mull over and fret about and throw myself towards, and in fact I should be doing one of them here in my office but instead I've pulled my legs up onto my chair highly unergonomically and am swilling black coffee and wishing there were some way to listen to R. Kelly here at my job. Mais n'est pas possible, and so I will just recommend the new highlight of the internet
This here blog.
Before I met Layla I read a guest column she wrote for Maximumrocknroll that took a strong stance on retaking feminism from the craft revolution ie emos who knit skull-and-crossbones scarves for their boyfriends in bands and it was like she'd read my mind, which she has continued to do over the course of the MRR columns she's posted on this blog. I mean shit, I too love X and Anne Briggs and Koro and hate on farmer's market-politics and khaki wearers on a daily basis. She writes in this amazing voice, breathless and obsessive, that makes her writing sound like a favorite remembered maybe half-drunk conversation. Sorry if this is creepy, L., but whatever, you should read these.

friday 9:42am

2007-08-10T09:37:00.000-04:00

Here are three things said to or about me at work this week:
1. "Ella tiene cojones."
2. "That was a whirlwind job."
3. "Will you clean my apartment?"
Here are the movies I can remember seeing in the last few weeks but not writing about in a whirl of heavy cart-pushing, mojito-drinking and focused reading of Muriel Spark novels:

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning d. Karel Reisz, which has a fantastic carnival scene until you remember that honestly, anyone who can't pull off a carnival scene should probably not direct a motion picture; Albert Finney seethes with the kind of jovial rage those kitchen-sink dudes opt to portray; the book was better.

This Is England d. Shane Meadows. As my punk crush Layla would say, totes bogues, except for the use of the Toots and the Maytals song "54-36" and I think this fall's the time to retrieve my Docs from my parents' house.

Bob le Flambeur d. Jean-Pierre Melville. Bob is my favorite character in cinema. Look at him there in his tux (he was the first to imitate les Americains), attending to his gambling with the delighted raptness of a fingerpainting child.

Masculin Feminin: 15 faits precis d. Jean-Luc Godard. My friend who saw this with me believes that JLG sometimes doesn't always know precisely what he's doing, that he knows moments and scenes mean or stand for something but hasn't fit them precisely together, hasn't worked them through in the way I imagine he has--I picture a chart on which you could link scenes and themes and lines, all under perfect control. I think I'm right, but I found the notion of loose ends in a Godard movie to have a certain really lovely optimism.
Classes Tous Risques d. Claude Sautet. Pretty second-tier if enjoyable French noir.
****************************************************************************
It rains it rains; I came to work too late, at 8am. I have felt little urge to blog since I wrote last but I have moved to a pink building with a garden, have cut my hair. I want a burned cd of that Ghostface album that the white guys I know jock hard, a used lp copy of X-Los Angeles, and a shiny new Studio One Roots.

I want to go home.

Kes/Summer afflictions

2007-07-17T22:38:00.000-04:00

Whatever color process or film stock or chemicals in the air and water produced the color scheme of certain late '60s British movies like that of Kes, very similar to that in the color portions of If. . . . should find its way into an art museum: thick, rich browns, blacks, and greens, so warm brighter colors seem an intrusion. Would I watch anything that looked like this? Maybe.
Kes's story's so simple it seems like a folktale and indeed, it has the requisite elements: a boy, a wicked relation, the animal companion he captures and tames (the kestrel of the title, which a review of the movie informs me was the favored bird-companion of the peasant class in the Middle Ages). It's a bummer, sure; you never imagine that things will turn out a-ok for little Billy Caspar. At the same time, as crushed as the movie's end might leave you (spoiler whatever, you can tell what'll happen by the movie's poster and you've heard this story before), Loach's rapt attention to little Caspar's inner life leaves you with an inkling of hope. Two captivating scenes stand out particularly. One occurs near the beginning, a scene of Billy that kind of envelops you in his worldview: he sits down to read an amusing fight in comic book and the camera zooms in on its frames as he reads all the text, sound effects and all, aloud in his head in his flat tones of voice and Yorkshire accent. The latter comes at the film's end, as Billy describes how he trained the bird to his class at school; the camera seizes on him and draws in closer and closer, giving the viewer a sense of his undeniable importance and endowing his breathless monologue, broken by questions from his teachers and classmates, with urgency, excitement. The more I think about it, the more the-end-of-400 Blows this movie seems; you and little Antoine/Billy end up alone together, but shit, that's better than hanging tight with your philandering mom or drunk, crushed brother, innit?
Ignorant analyses aside, hearing the English language as spoken in this movie is worth the price of admission--it's in this weird Yorkshire dialect that leaves out "the"s and incorporates "thee"s and "thou"s. & Finally, Loach's typical fuck-capitalism politics appear in earnest but not overly obtrusive fashion, unlike some of the other movies in the Lincoln Center Woodfall Series (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, e.g.), which, while generally wonderful movies, all but squash the viewer with a morally indignant club on which is writ How Capitalism Destroys Our Poor Youth.
***********************************************************************************
A tally of summer injuries thus far:
Beer Toe (National holiday. Hand>glass>foot>floor)
Moving Elbow (but I do not even have that many records! )
Pretzel Tummy (Thanks, Pennsylvania)
Rollercoaster Chest/Rollercoaster Neck (Thanks, the Cyclone)
Bike Wrist (Someone who laughed just like Dr. Hibbert stuck his head out an SUV window and commended me for this as I dusted myself off)
Pride (Several incidents besides the above sadly come to mind)
Also a box of reel-to-reel tapes fell on my head at my internship.

whatevs tidbits

2007-07-10T01:52:00.000-04:00

Rescue Dawn's a fine movie that might ascend to excellence if it lost its maudlin, cliched soundtrack that conditions you to feel and expect conventional things from moments that might otherwise be interestingly off the usual kilter of 'Nam or prison-escape movies. Christian Bale and Steve Zahn are great, and the physicality of their relationship as the one drags the other through the jungle has an odd, motherly quality, absent the sappy homoeroticism of a similar film like uh, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Some severe WTFs ensue at the end, though: we're in a war, Werner! All that backslappy cameraderie? But you know, exciting, and the characters were well-drawn: just eccentric enough to be Herzogian but credible human beings.

Ok dudes, I saw Ratatouille. I love cooking shows and um movie-Paris and I don't have air-conditioning and the Times and Ned said it was good and Ben wanted to go. It reminded me that I also adore Vincente Minnelli and various movies with enraptured, swoopy shots of bodies at work. But jeezlouise, it's boring and besides a few bits, neither funny nor "cute," and now I have contributed some percentage of $11 to Disney.

I have wanted to post about this for a while so I'll stick it here, I guess? A few weeks ago a friend of mine claimed the Linkin Park/Jay Z collaboration album as both great and "criminally misunderstood." While I sputtered vehemently and incoherently, another bro said well, it's ok, he probably listened to the Crash Test Dummies every week. In abject shock, I deferred my "guilty pleasure." Since I do not live an unmitigatedly high-class, capital-C Culture lifestyle (I've gotten pretty indiscriminate about coffee lately), I don't entirely believe in guilty pleasures, since generally I like what I consider good and worthy, dislike what's not, and take or leave the whatever. One's audience also factors in heavily to a declaration of a "guilty pleasure," right? There are certain people to whom confessing my affection for the first few Ted Leo LPs or for certain things that may or may not involve Stephen Stills (oh man, some of his Buffalo Springfield material is top quality) would have me picking at the ends of my hair and maybe coloring gently; I know others who'd be offended if I said that sometimes I feel a little silly for clapping along to the clap part every time I hear "Timorous Me."

But here's my "guilty musical pleasure:" Discount, whom I first "got into" at the age of about 22, when a 14-year-old girl on the internet demanded to make me a Discount mixtape.

"They changed my life," she said, and this is music that'd do just that, were you a girl and 13 and things unfold in sucky and weird ways that sound exactly like this: bombastic vocals, compressed guitars, the occasional fist-pump chorus or acoustic ballad, lyrics in breathless cliches or nonsequitors. Listening to Discount demands your indulgence in--if not actual reminiscences--that old way of feeling about things. That, I think, is something to feel the little prick of guilt about.
(& now you know, guys.)

I'm Against It Part 2:
Those giant cafeterias with a salad bar and a hot-food bar and "panini," inevitably, and smoothies that appear all over the city but particularly in midtown and near hospitals. I understand their function and I suppose having vegetables as opposed to merely McD's around is desirable, but something about them seems to represent the bleak plight of the salaryman so fundamentally, and moreover, they're usually fucking pricey.

Belmondo!! + I'm Against It Pt. I

2007-07-03T01:14:00.001-04:00

Everyone talks about Belmondo's "cool," but I think more precisely, his face expresses this unmistakeable confidence: you don't want that sneer in your direction, you desire that broad smile. In a mini-Belmondo Bonanza, LGI saw Pierrot le Fou a few weeks ago and Le Doulos a few days ago. I've yet to see Jean-Pierre Melville fuck up in the slightest; although I've only seen his gangster movies and Army of Shadows and not, like that Cocteau movie or anything, he seems to have mastered the tense-yet-rueful in a way few filmmakers have consistently commanded a mood (a vibe, if you will) without letting things get repetitive. Bob le Flambeur remains my fave, maybe since the main characters--if you'll permit me, I mean both Roger Duchesene's Bob and um, Paris--have such depth and are portrayed with a not uncritical warmth. In Doulos, some of the climactic flashbacks in this one could've been left to the imagination, but it's essential, and the more I think about it, the more I appreciate Belmondo's performance in a role that's a kind of red herring. Oh, remember when I wrote about how it's hard to portray friendship in movies once, and my mom and Ben were all, "Westerns! Fool!" As much or more than they're about gangsters, Melville movies (aside from Le Samourai, natch)are about friends.

I don't have much to say about Pierrot except that the more I remember little fragments of it, the more I like it. It had so much more heart than I ever expected to see in a Godard movie. I mistrusted this emotion the whole time I watched the movie, expecting some kind of trickery or irony to undercut the main characters' love and disillusion that's expressed so frankly at the narrative level. As great as Belmondo's "cool" is, seeing his character clowning around or floundering or coming apart is at once charming and unnerving.

Shit, gotta go to work. Before I go, I would like to instate a new blog-feature. It's called "I'm Against It" and it's a list of what I'm against.

I'M AGAINST IT PART I:
1. The craft revolution
2. The urban suburb
3. Dance parties
4. The pricing of Luna Bars above $1.79
5. Expansion teams

where i was from?

2007-07-01T13:25:00.001-04:00

BRACE YOURSELF FOR THE MOST PER-ZINE THING I WILL EVER AUTHOR. PLEASE FORGIVE ME! BACK TO MOVIES SOON.
The only thoughts on "home" I can recall commmitting to writing appear in this essay I wrote for 12th grade Spanish that I still have on my computer. I assume the grammar is a giant tangled dreadlock of atrocity:

No siempre he vivido en South Orange. Viví en Canada, y después en Cincinnati. Cuando era niña, creía que todos mis problemas serían arreglados si me mudara a otro lugar. Imaginé casas bellas y grandes en lugares distintos y exóticos como Francia o Inglaterra o una granja o una isla pequeña en el mar, llenas de cosas bonitas y de amigos.

That's all true. Although I should probably have a rote answer by now, I find myself at a loss for words almost every time someone asks me where I'm from, a tendency which frightens more often than it intrigues. Sometimes I say "I moved around," but that's a lie: I've moved twice, once when I was 2.5, which is I guess around when you stop being a baby, and once when I was 13, which is whatever, being 13. I half-expected my family to leave Cincinnati the whole time we lived there, because we moved when I was at said "formative stage" and cos my parents hated it, and as soon as you start high school they start conditioning you for your departure, so that house certainly seemed impermanent. Nor do I feel, really, that some essence of Ohio or New Jersey has affected me in any way beyond the facts that yes, I've ridden the Beast at King's Island and yes, I've eaten at the Golden Touch Diner on Route 10; perhaps that best answer to the question's just "the suburbs," but that's kind of annoying and not my steez. The point is: I have never considered any structure I've lived in my "home" in the profound sense I think that word's supposed to imply. I have resided in buildings with families, friends, and things.

Last night I stayed out late in Brooklyn and slept over at a friend's in a conscious effort to avoid the mass of belongings I spent the last week consolidating and moving around that's filling the room I'm subletting in Washington Heights. I wanted to see what it'd be like, also, to wake up in the morning, tie on my sneakers and toss on my purse and head home to a home that had never been my home before.

I got out of the subway at Delancey-Essex almost without thinking; I knew that I'd find a cup of coffee with soymilk at the expensive natural food store on Ludlow and since it's Sunday there'd be a farmer's market at Tompkins where I could buy greens and then proceed across 10th St. and up to Trader Joe's for cheap cereal for tomorrow morning, and as I walked past familiar trees and shops and puppies I had the strange and potentially terrible realization that the routine of running errands downtown might be as familiar and comforting and reassuring and sometimes awful as people's "homes" are, for them, that I maybe ought never to buy nice furniture but can and will always find organic strawberries and a bench where I can eat them. That comes dangerously close to me saying "ah, the city is my home," which is, ok, almost what I mean, but not quite. I mean maybe, I might not have grown up here, my parents did not even grow up here, but the first time I came to this city at the age of 11 or so, I remember staring down 9th Ave. during some wack street fair, seeing the largest assemblage of people and empanada-vendors I'd ever seen outside of a baseball stadium and thinking right, this place makes sense.

The point is, I moved out of Inwood and now I'm perched on top of a stack of shelves from my bookshelf in a dark room and I feel a little weirder than before. I did watch TV for the first time in ages only to experience a devastatingly shitty episode of SVU about whether a 30-year-old who dates a 17-year-old with a genetic condition that makes her look like a child is a pedophile, with the worst "oh hey Stabler, I'm your new partner!" scene I could possibly have imagined. I guess, if anyone wants a lesson in "how not to organize a move," or can recommend me more jams that sound like that Northern Irish punk song "War Stories" on the Fucked Up mixtape we listened to for the 500/501st time while cleaning our old apartment, or has cable upon which I can watch "The Bronx Is Burning," you can always find me here on the internet.

dance

2007-06-14T10:02:00.000-04:00

Although I have seen movies aplenty lately (myriad Herzog docs and picks from the series at Film Forum; Mafioso), I have a dance piece I saw stuck in my head like a Kelly Clarkson song. "DANCE, Ms. Ignorant?" a reader might query, perhaps noting that I have never danced a step in my life. But one of my dearest friends, Ms. Ana K. (as featured previously on this website) is a brilliant and up-and-coming dancer/choreographer, and I accompanied her to see some of her friends and acquaintances perform at St. Mark's Church. It cost $5 and 2 cans of Goya beans, guys.
Most of the dance Ana and I have seen together has an oddly arch, removed tone--can dance have a tone?--that alienates a spectator coming from outside the choreographer's milieu. In the half-dozen or so shows I've attended over the past couple years, I have seen dancers recreating others' dance work to pay tribute or mock, polemicizing against former teachers, and, as another dancer did at this particular show, combining really clever kinds of movement with in-jokes and goofy props. This kind of dance has come to remind me of the "j/k" you dash off in a g-chat conversation after tapping out what seemed to be a funny but which, you quickly realize, might prove offensive or embarrassing.
Much of the non-self-referential and quirky dance I have seen has, indeed, been embarrassing: an older woman wrangling a lightbulb to the accompaniment of some "experimental" post-Bright Eyes duo had me biting my lip and picking my cuticles.
So, having endured that, and some stone-faced asynchronous side-to-side hopping, and a political piece involving a Stevie Wonder song and the setting up and dismemberment of a wall of cans, I had low expectations of the final piece, "Colt," at this show.
Two spotlights shone on the floor; a woman in a retro-looking party dress in one and a man in short-shorts and a retro-looking party top in the other, and an instrumental brass-funk piece played, and they danced in their respective spotlights. Just danced, is all: sometimes they moved in synch, sometimes just a little off each other, sometimes completely separately. Although they started off slowly and got more wild as the piece went on, it wasn't a strict dynamic progression. Their movement seemed as vernacular as choreographed dance might ever be; one wouldn't move as they did as a party, but enough workaday-dance-style made its way into the piece so that it became, if not naturalistic. . .joyful. Certain repeated arm-and-hip motions (do you call these "themes" in a dance?) came and went. I see what they say about "dancing about architecture" now; I wish I could convey the pleasure of watching really skilled dancers perform a piece like this, professionally yet exuberantly, sans forced self-consciousness. When the music ended, the two left the floor and a little girl came out and slowly and deliberately reiterated a few of the dancers' moves.
It was satisfying like a great painting or a short story with components that fit together organically. Unlike most dance pieces I've seen, a non-dancer spectator left thinking not "I bet that was fun for the people who were dancing," but "I am so glad those people let me watch them dance." And I have felt like this for a week.

capsules/capital: an excursion into the heart of ignorance

2007-06-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

A recent post on the Chicago Reader film blog (a worthy endeavor I should try to read more often) reminds me of an interest-slash-hobby I indulge all the time but seldom discuss: blurbs. Given a copy of, say, New York, I tend to devote as much time to poring over three-sentence descriptions of plays and gallery openings I have no desire to attend, steakhouses where I will never eat, or movies I don't like as I do to reading the actual articles, which are probably stupid or boring. Seeds of this definitively ignorant avocation lay fallow in LGI for ages: as a kid, I read--I say read, not skimmed nor rifled through nor admired product illustrations with longing or envy--every catalog that came to my house. I favored Harry and David and Levenger ("tools for the serious reader," natch). It was the prose that appealed (appeals), I guess, as I recall no yearnings for "Moose Munch" or teak lap-desks. Why? I have no idea. But I truly admire the diction of a good capsule review/catalog blurb (they're about the same--after all, as they appear in magazines, critics' capsules sell you their opinions): it should tread a line between the precise and the absurd that, limited as it is, leaves you utterly convinced.
Ex: Harry and David pears often "melt." Fruit does not melt, fools, but this verb concatenates pear->chocolate->woman, granting the item an infinite desirability and the word a (ridiculous) precision and appropriateness that sells me on both the awesomeness of $30 pears and this writer's craft.
Or, here is a mediocre movie blurb I wrote while in the employ of a now-defunct and unlamented DVD retail website: "What happens when you flush a baby alligator down the toilet? In this 1980 horror flick, it ingests hormones and starts eating the neighbors." Indeed, this approximates the plot of Alligator and tries to be cute, but lacks the terseness it'd need to be witty or, alternatively, an extra two or three words that would truly sell the '80s movie buff who, FOR SOME REASON, has not seen Alligator that he'd fucking better SEE ALLIGATOR.
Without overburdening you with examples, here's a third example of a more nuanced blurb, Time Out's review of some whatever Chinese restaurant that damns effectively with faint praise. That "pleasant," ouch.
So I suppose that it's something about a prose that eliminates ambiguity--this pear is good, that restaurant is whatever; you need to purchase the one and will do fine at the other. It is also a prose you cannot contest: you trust it to judge your pear or Chinese restaurant for you, you rely on it to condition your expectations. It tells you nothing it does not want to tell you and everything it believes you ought to know, pinpointing both the item and its market (a description of an '80s cult movie does not and will not resemble a description of an expensive fountain pen, which ought not to be that far removed from a capsule review of a show at the Whitney ). And hey, is this not the "affirmative demeanor" of the culture industry? It has seduced me and I have been seduced.
And I wonder where I can separate whatever it is late-capital has wrought on my psyche from any kind of deeper tendency I have to heart the tangible hard--I have always vaguely considered W.C. Williams' "no ideas but in things" a cliche to live by, can better summon to mind an upturned table or an image of a prison with a guard-tower at its center or a chess-playing automaton than describe a great bit of philosophical insight.
This means 2 things: you can now think about whether or not I mean "ignorant" ironically, and also that I plan to write future blogs more like capsule reviews or catalog copy. Unwaveringly precise, saleable: this is our new goal.

Champion sandwich/Celebrity Sighting #3/What I Listen To

2007-05-30T12:28:00.000-04:00

The prospect of an unlimited toppings bar at a falafel joint filled me equally with anticipation and apprehension, sensations heightened--again, in equal measures--by Christy's delighted description of Maoz Vegetarian's Madrid outpost, where (she says) the town crusties expend the coins they've spanged on a falafel sandwich. Using their crusty eating-tools, they deliberately scoop out the falafel innards, refill their preserved pita bread with toppings, consume, and repeat, for the rest of the day.

I have now eaten at the NYC Maoz twice; both times the toppings seemed so appealing that I just got a pita filled with hummus rather than a legit falafel, which seemed both excessive tummy-wise and further, would clearly leave insufficient room for cramming in tiny bits of everything. Here's how it works: you get your pita with hummus and a bit of salad in a weird cardboard pita-sandwich-holder, and then you can add as many toppings from the ten or so at the little bar, so you get a few slices of vinegary cucumber, a couple beet pickles, some carrot salad, a piece of fried cauliflower, several varieties of harissa, etc. This sandwich is the closest thing to being a snack that a sandwich might ever be: it's like being at the best kind of party, where there are chips and dip AND carrots and hummus AND peanuts AND cookies and you have a little nibble of each. Or better: it removes the terrible necessity of choice one feels when ordering food elsewhere, knowing that you must commit to a singular food item when really, all you want is a forkful of six. Everything tastes fresh and not horrifically unhealthy; the pita is thick and fluffy and the hummus flavorful and not too tahini-y. While my Union Square falafel allegiance remains with Rainbow Falafel--and I remain uncertain about the ok-ness of a falafel "chain"--I declare the Maoz hummus pita a Champion Sandwich.
**************

As I type this, I remember that I have Celebrity-Sighted Troy Dyer before; last time he wore sweatpants and was in Union Square, while yesterday, strolling down 13th St. he sported a red tshirt with what I believe was a Native American's head, so whatever that.
*************
Ben--half-jokingly, I think--inquired "what DO you listen to now?!" on our way home from the greatest baseball game I've ever attended (a run was BALKED in, guys, BALKED!)and then double-checked if I still like the Gun Club record he really wants me to stop liking. The answer's yes to the latter and to the former, music that makes me tip backwards on my computer chair and watch the warm breeze in my curtains and think about the delights of doing nothing when it's hot out, and the slight melancholy that the nicest weather brings:

This kid has a really great post about this album, to which I have little to add, besides that this might be the only record that uses pan-pipes without annoying, and that it takes the affectations of Paul Simon's singing voice to imbue the most fluffy things with a sort of sadness and the heaviest notions with a vibe of "ah well, so it goes."

I bought this record because of King Sunny Ade's gratuitous appearance in the most underrated Robert Altman movie, the undeniably great O.C. and Stiggs. I know very little about Afro-pop, but I love this album, less dance music than a soundtrack for staring into space while tapping your foot or nodding your head as a steady, not-too-hard goes on while dub parts, pedal steel, I think maybe even a flamenco-y guitar, and call-and-response type vocals wend their way in and out

Vocab

2007-05-28T11:45:00.001-04:00

Happy Memorial Day! In remembrance of our nation's war-dead, LGI may be doing some or all of the following: picnicking, helping snaxblog buddy IKIW emigrate to Brooklyn, seeing some Werner Herzog picks at Film Forum, cleaning my room, and having that Sleater-Kinney song "Jumpers" stuck firmly in my head [DAMMIT]. Part of the second-from-last effort involves looking up words I've written on receipts and envelopes on the feeble free reference resources of the internet, before the little pieces of paper get too crumply to educate. And honestly, I couldn't think of a better place to record them than my blog. What does that mean?!

pulsion- A swelling or pushing outward.
atopia-a society which does not have territorial borders.(?)
ludic-playful in an aimless way.
tmesis-the interpolation of one or more words between the parts of a compound word, as "be thou ware" for beware.
erethism-an unusual or excessive degree of irritability or stimulation in an organ or tissue.
horodeictic-?
syncope-1. Grammar. the contraction of a word by omitting one or more sounds from the middle, as in the reduction of never to ne'er. 2.Pathology. brief loss of consciousness associated with transient cerebral anemia, as in heart block, sudden lowering of the blood pressure, etc.; fainting.
atabrine-a drug (trade name Atabrine) used to treat certain worm infestations and once used to treat malaria [syn: quinacrine]
Canute-king of England, Denmark and Norway, celebrated for "trying to hold back the tide," commanding the waves of the sea to retreat as a reprimand of his courtiers
Coueism-The application of French psychologist Emile Coue's familiar conscious autosuggestion, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" (Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux).
laterite-1. a reddish ferruginous soil formed in tropical regions by the decomposition of the underlying rocks.
oleograph-n. A chromolithograph printed with oil paint on canvas in imitation of an oil painting.
nugatory-1. of no real value; trifling; worthless. 2. of no force or effect; ineffective; futile; vain. 3. not valid.
friable-easily crumbled or reduced to powder; crumbly: friable rock.

Heroes, #1

2007-05-19T23:54:00.000-04:00

It is one thing to make great sweeping statements about the human condition, and another to insist that in order to lay a foundation for such a claim, you must traipse for miles through the rainforest with a team of locals and oxen and a little grey monkey named Lucinda clinging tenaciously to your left boot--and once you've found the most bare, basic, untouched specimen of humanity you can find, realizing that it's sort of just people like anywhere else, except you really, really don't speak their language. It took me a few years to finish Tristes Tropiques, in no small part because every time I put it down I wanted to start again from the beginning, the sun setting at sea, the coastline of Brazil appearing slowly in the distance.* Between this book and the series of Herzog documentaries at Film Forum, I feel a little like a jug-eared boy-nerd from the '50s, poring over accounts of Great Adventurous Khaki-Clad Men who strive to find the heart and origins of man (and no shortage of feathered headresses) in the darkest jungle, daydreaming about someday striking out there for myself. Especially given Levi-Strauss's poetic melancholy about the loss and decline of the unspoiled places and the ultimate futility of his quest, it is a romance that's easy to find yourself sucked into.

A key aspect of both this book and Herzog's documentaries' greatness lies in their ability to mix philosophical or anthropological or metaphysical insight with adeptly pinpointed disarming instants (aforementioned Lucinda, querulous fellow-travelers in L-S, Herzog cajoling an old Bayreuth fire inspector into singing along to a (live) Lohengrin aria). I find that it's these parts, as much as the sight of the rainforest canopy from a balloon or Mohenjo-Daro might seem appealling, that fill me with a gentle, entirely dreamy sort of yearning for faraway lands.

*I think I sounded STUPID trying to explain this to someone the other day, but also, the layout of the Penguin Classics edition of this book is bizarrely prohibitive: it's a long work, and the pages are enormous with really squashed-together type that, combined with L-S's elegant yet oft rainforest-dense prose, makes reading a single page take as long as about 3 normal pages. IT TOOK SO LONG!

Celebrity Sighting #2

2007-05-16T16:30:00.000-04:00

My thoughts on Joan Didion's writing inevitably return to the remembered row of white paperbacks that sat on the top shelf of my mom's bookcase throughout my childhood, which I thought had intriguing titles. I asked her to lend them to me once, and again, until finally she deemed me grown up enough to understand them. I wasn't and maybe, to an extent, I'm still not, but that's not the point, which is that when I saw a tiny-tiny gaunt woman in rust-tinted glasses and a drab suit perched on a bench outside a pre-graduation luncheon I was doing sound for, I smiled at her and almost waved, as though she were an old family friend or a former teacher. Then I realized oh, this familiar face belongs to my hero, Joan Didion, who's sitting on a bench outside the James Room, where she will shake hands with some trustees and privileged graduates and eat some grilled salmon. I did not walk up and shake her hand and tell her oh hey I'm a fan; I have read too much of her autobiography. I thought first, that I imagine I know her too well to gasp out some banalities, and second, that I could almost predict the impeccable sentence she might--if she wanted--construct about me.

The Swimmer/The Summer

2007-05-11T11:06:00.000-04:00

Perhaps watching a movie that uses the summer as a metaphor for the transiency of pleasure and the inevitability of disillusionment is not the best way to kick off summer fun 2k7. But ever since I saw aforementioned Play It As It Lays, also directed by Frank Perry and also a misfit-who's-losing it-too-publicly-vs.-tightly-knit/homogenous/wealthy social circle-type story, I've been itching to see it. Also, while I haven't read any John Cheever in a while, I was a big fan in high school (side note: the cover of that volume of his collected stories deserves some kind of medal for iconicity), and seeing how a filmmaker spins a movie out of a short story (let's see, The Killers, Short Cuts, Rashomon, kinda-sorta the Hammer Poe movies, also-kinda Jesus' Son, what else?) holds some interest.

As far as I recall the story, the movie follows it closely: a man (a well-preserved if suitably wrinkly Burt Lancaster) appears at his neighbor's pool in a swimsuit and realizes that he can "swim" home by traversing every backyard pool in his ritzy Connecticut suburb. A sort of Rip van Winkley time-shift occurs, though; as he swims, unbeknownst to him, years pass and the season moves from summer to fall and his neighbors tell him (to his increasing confusion) about the unravelling of his life. The movie displays the different moments of the story as these bizarre, stagey tableaux as Lancaster walks into various people's backyards to interrupt their lives and afternoons. Possibly jokey tres-late-'60s montages of people jumping over steeplechases and baked orangey colors, along with Lancaster's acting--stylized or marginally competent? In one amazing scene, a former mistress in a fantastic bathing suit tells him she was faking it the whole time, and he enunciates, shaking his fists at the sky: "YOU.LOVED.MEEEEE!!"--make this movie a tough nut to crack: it's either hyper-obvious or aestheticized to attain peculiarly deep level.

let's recommend me a book!

2007-05-09T11:27:00.000-04:00

A fact about LGI not evident to all but university chums: I read all things except philosophy and "theory" at a terrific pace. Most novels, regardless of length, take me under a week to read. I also live in a very remote locale, so when I don't spend my subway rides staring into space, listening to the Kids, and daydreaming about cheap shoes or Klute-era Donald Sutherland or grocery shopping or whatever it is I think about, I go through books real fast. I pretty much only do read novels, though.
Thus, although I know about a number of things (9 different ways to cook lentils, how to file a FOIA request), I know surprisingly little about The World. I would like to use my fantastic reading ability to stopper this gully of knowledge. Please recommend me history books!
Here's what I have a pretty great awareness of: American history, especially the Civil War, the history of "westward expansion," and the 1920s and 30s; Japan, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries; India (ditto); Israel; and the European theater of the Second World War.
I would like to learn about other parts and non-honky peoples of the earth. G. has recommended the new Hamid Dabashi book to me w. tears in her eyes, so I may start there. Mind, I am not looking for brutally scholarly endeavors (like that Robin Blackburn book about the slave trade, which I was supposed to tackle for a reading group, merciful heavens shit was dense). I also have little interest in military history and I really think I know enough about Europe to serve my present purposes.
DON'T BE SHY!!!

some mediocre movies

2007-05-08T00:28:00.000-04:00

To be fair, Night Walker, which I saw because my pal misread the BAM skedj, kept me consistently amused for its 86 minute running time, in no small part thanks to the woman behind me whose chatter the phrase "running commentary" barely does justice ("Is she walking into the room? Oh my gosh, he might be there, scary! OH is he not dead?" etc). It also has a really high-concept-hilarious scene, which I have now attempted and failed to describe twice, so tantilize yourself by imagining some combination of a mature Barbra Stanwyck, a flaming skewer of meat and veg, a solicitous would-be psychologizer, and a maitre d'. To be truly fair, this movie, which fluctuates from moments of genuine suspense (genius sound-editing, A+ exploitation of wax figures and blind people) to instants of undeniable ineptitude (too many to list), is straight-up IGNORANT of everything from cinematic convention to uh, how humans think, so I guess I ought to use this particular space to appreciate it and its auteur, William Castle (pioneer of gimmick horror) wholeheartedly.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold d. Martin Ritt, showed at Film Forum tonight, and this noise is, let me tell you, DELIBERATELY PACED. I have little else to add--it's fine, ultimately plodding rather than thought-provoking due to its even-handedness, although I do want to work in the library where Claire Bloom's mod-Commie character works in the darlingest little lace-trimmed dresses, where every book's about apparitions or lycanthropy.

Let's be posi, though: great things include springtime, maintaining the venerable LGI tradition of the Black Sabbath room at house parties, hummus, roomie/bro Trevor's new blog, Dead Moon, and X-Under the Big Black Sun, which has inexplicably taken over my brain and turntable for the last month to the point where I'm thinking of going to see the inevitably embarrassing X documentary+accompanying John Doe solo set (YIKES) @ aforementioned BAM next month--are YOU down???

getting ignorant at the museum

2007-05-02T23:41:00.000-04:00

In school, maybe once a semester, I would find all of my classes somehow synching up with each other, and have this heartstoppingly clear FLASH, which had no particular significance besides a sort of pop-Zen realization that everything, somehow, fit together. These fleeting moments, when things fundamentally made sense if for no deeper reason beyond their lining up to make a clear and complete picture, made school worth it.
Something like that happened to me today,

in a few instants when I was standing in front of this Jeff Wall photo (note: probably about 5' long) at the MoMA, and I thought of a part in the Barthes book I'm reading now (The Pleasure of the Text) when he describes his pleasure in reading an overly detailed description of a clothesline-- "manic exactitude," he calls it. And you can't see it here on the internet, but this photo has a similar excess of detail; each blade of grass and pinpoint flower in the tripartite cascade in the center of the picture picture seems all too vivid, an overload of texture that reminded me of something I did when I was a kid and we drove on a road called Spooky Hollow on the way to elementary school, when I'd stare out the window at the gravel and dirt and weeds at the margin of the road until they coalesced into a transfixing earth-tones blur that I would watch morphing as we drove forwards.

The clarity of this sense-memory returned me to another book I'm reading now, Sebald's Austerlitz, which is kind of an attempt to engage with history's sweep via intense, visceral memories; and this idea of the epic scale of history mingling with highly personal moments and recollections brings me back to the picture at hand, named "The Storyteller," after (natch) the Benjamin essay about the loss of "epic memory" in the age of capitalist modernity and the resulting decline of the "storyteller" figure, as seen in this romanticized photo of a group of homeless First Nations people, the kind of people whose practices--as I wrote in the paper I turned in last week--various and sundry government bodies have made desperate efforts to museify, to turn into "cultural treasures" or "human heritage" or whateves, to artificially recapture a kind of re-telling that may or may not be lost to us.

This paper earned me a barely qualified "very good," a sort of grade I haven't received since high school, when I used to skip out early on my internship to go to
the MoMA, where I hadn't been since it reopened, which gave me (earlier today) the peculiar sensation of finding myself in front of, of all things, the Demoiselles d'Avignon and feeling a warm coming-home sensation.

The photo, though, also put me in mind of my friend Veronica, who tells the best stories and who used to live in Vancouver, where Jeff Wall took this, and who has singularly detailed memories, like you'll be talking to her and she'll bring up a fleeting incident from when she was a kid that fits the situation at hand perfectly in a way no one else I know can manage. I texted her from in front of the picture to see if she'd seen the exhibit.

and that's what I thought about when I saw this picture.

Rohm-in' Around

2007-05-01T00:14:00.000-04:00

No one could deny the influence of the setting of one's viewing of a movie on one's ultimate opinion of the thing itself: if I hadn't watched Talladega Nights with a team of howling bros, maybe I'd be convinced of its inferiority; similarly, I liked Two-Lane Blacktop well enough after watching it with a pal who H.A.T.E.D. it, but seeing it in a theater full of rapt fans pushed it into the ranks of my all-time faves. Ben thinks that I'd concur that Cache suxx had I watched it with him rolling his eyes next to me and not in the theater with a couple hundred other people also taking part in the most profound collective gasp-of-horror at that part, but I dunno about that.
In sum, a million thanks go to Lev and Whitney for putting together one of the nicest afternoons in recent memory: 3 Eric Rohmer movies, copious snax and white wine, a jaunt in the park and an espresso, good company, a porch, etc. A regular rite of spring!
Prior to this afternoon, I didn't like Eric Rohmer particularly--I think I saw part of My Night at Maud's and found it dull--and was kind of theoretically against gabbing bouge Frenchies, but this shinding turned me around completely. We saw La Collectionneuse, Love in the Afternoon, and Suzanne's Career. Perhaps I have just partaken in an atypical number of "girl problems" conversations this past year? But I found these movies engaging, even delightful.
First off, even if we don't go off on jaunts to the Riviera or buy cashmere buttondowns (?!) on our lunchbreaks or roll with the world's most attractive people, the shown in the films are beautifully familiar. The voiceover narration Rohmer uses in all of these (all of his?) movies works really well: as I think many have pointed out, it allows you to see the disparity between thought/plans and their true-life manifestations, but further, it permits you to envelop yourself in the narrator's mindset and, even if you rarely actually like him, to understand him to a point of sympathy. The two color films looked stunning (though to be fair, if you're filming on the Riviera you kind of can't help that, I think. See: the work of xoxoJacques Demy, esp. the b&w Lola and La Baie des anges). Also, this may sound ignorant, but for movies that revolve almost exclusively around the question of "should I do this chick," the lady cipher/characters have unexpected richness and depth, particularly Chloe in L'amour, who's persistently a wreck but in so many different and surprising ways that you understand the narrator's confusion perfectly.
When I was trying to explain to Ned why I liked these so, I started off with, "well, they're kind of like real life," which I instantly realized was insufficient reason to qualify a movie as "good." Recently, though, I've felt especially drawn to this kind of film--Killer of Sheep as mentioned below, that movie Funny Ha Ha (the protagonist of which officially reminds 4 people of me)--as opposed to, I dunno, more epic-scale world-problems-focused movies with more drama and guns and shit. There's something fundamentally bougie about this, I think; no one whose life isn't kind of ok anyway likes movies that are just about how ordinary life functions, and there's something narcissistic about watching things that "bring out the drama of everyday life," that valorize the scale of yr own navel-gazing. But I dunno, I'm down.
These movies have a lot of really delightful bits, too. The past few days, the fantasy sequence in L'amour, L'apres-midi and the seance in Suzanne are stuck in my head like a song.

dear movies, i miss you

2007-04-20T08:46:00.000-04:00

LGI's prone to fits of unreasonable enthusiasm; if you ctrl-f enough rest assured you'd find at least every month I see some movie with the greatest x in cinema and that every record/garment/website/produce-aisle item I buy blows my mind.
That said, The Long Goodbye, playing this week at Film Forum, has been one of my favorite movies since I was in high school and not in the Ghost Dog I see-why-I-liked-it but maybe-it-doesn't-quite-hold-up model; I have seen this again, and it still slays just as hard. Those washed-out colors, those Altman asides and details ("el puerto del gato"), and most of all, Elliott Gould as an unshaven Nixon-era Marlowe, as sad as he is sassy.
Recommending an article in the Voice is a little embarrassing, but J. Hoberman's piece on Gould (whose amazing vibe I have discussed elsewhere in this blog) his performance in this film, and, uh, Jews in Hollywood in the '60s and '70s is excellent, but maybe I only think so because it's a goddamned cover story about Elliott Gould.

In other news, is anything showing at Tribeca worth my time and of heaps of cash? I don't even know what all's playing.

Is Grunge Next?

2007-04-18T23:26:00.000-04:00

This blog post is based on a conversation Ben and I had a few days ago, wherein I proposed that EARLY GRUNGE will be the next postpunk/stoner-rock/freak-folk/noize-influenced black metal/whatever.
Evidence:
-I think maybe grunge happened in fashion? Is that why my style-star erstwhile co-snax-blogger Piper had a lumberjack-style jacket a year or 2 ago?
-In any case it REALLY happened the other day when this hipster in one of my classes rolled into the computer lab in a loose flannel/white tshirt/black leggings/like 30-eye Docs ensemble.
-The next day, Snake Apartment did a Dusted top 10 list of grunge/80s and 90s Pacific NW heavy rock. Looking at it again, I see they reference "grunge revival of '08." Is this facetious? Probably as much as this blog post.
-The next week, Dan Gr.'s song of the week was the Nirvana cover of "Return of the Rat" from a '90s Wipers tribute comp (I confirm: it is good, though I'm not a big fan of the guitar sound. The Hole cover of "Over the Edge," however, is the stuff sad places are made of).
Past evidence includes:
-My former co-dj Hunter jocking the first Soundgarden lp like 2 years ago
-This fall, that guy at Academy Records Annex (you know which guy I mean) rocking the living shit out of Little Baby Buntin' by Killdozer. His enthusiasm for it proved so persuasive that although I didn't buy that record, I bought a CD of their first album the very next day. It's really good. It's called Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite. They cover "Run Through the Jungle."
Possible evidence:
Wipers LP reissues?
-Resurgence in Flipper's popularity and rise of that sort of ugly, nasty sound (cf. Clockcleaner)
-Reunion/rediscovery of Dinosaur Jr.

Ben counters:
-It sucks. Obviously, one can argue this point sort of, but I will say that as much as I like the Melvins, I have always WANTED to like Green River and never succeeded.
-This happened in all of our lifetimes, unlike previous trends. We (well, not me, but some people) already own "seminal grunge" from when it came out.
-Similarly unlike previous trends, the grunge lifestyle cannot really be romanticized. Postpunk has the nice political posturing and graphic design, freak-folk the back-to-the-land and yes-it's-still-offensive Injuns fixation; grunge has SELLING OUT.
-In that vein, grunge, we all know, was strip-mined by major labels post-Nirvana; EVERYONE got signed. Really early stuff and early Sub Pop shit aside, it has as of yet--as far as I know--little record collector cachet. A lot of this music seems to be total dusty 2 for $10 7" bin fodder, which either makes it ripe for the picking and stockpiling, or straight-up worthless, or bad.

SO:
What do we all think?
If yes, will a RIOT GRRL revival happen alongside this? (SLANT 6 4EVAR)
Why in the name of everything holy am I displacing my anxiety and terror and anger about this week in world news (seriously, everything from overseas to at home to my high school's gym getting destroyed by flood [HA]) into this blog post instead of using it to write my gargantuan term paper?

song of the day

2007-04-18T12:33:00.000-04:00

Once again, the battlefield is your body
and those who want control have laid down their terms in black & white and red all over they keep the backstreet butchers in business as advertised from a bullhorn and the all knowing man has set up his make-believe graveyard with tiny white crosses for millions of make-believe souls someday I'd like to see a cross set up for a real live human being who bled to death to maintain the sanctity of mary mary & child
scream the bigots who couldn't care less about human life obey their self-righteous lies while your sisters & daughters die all decisions are final your body is forbidden.

ok ok ok

2007-04-12T00:27:00.000-04:00

I'll admit a tendency to dismiss things enjoyed by people I dislike, particularly music-wise. This habit has proven itself as often ill-advised as not. And today, I come before you all (at least the 2 of you to whom I may have broached this topic in the real world) contrite, once again:

So, I downloaded this off some sendspace business and I've listened to it a bunch the last few days. And I realize, not only do I enjoy it a whole lot, but it's undeniably some kind of key that unlocks so much of the music I like already. Most "indie rock" and even some "hardcore" (you know what I mean by that quote un-quote) I like I tend to describe to whatever random as "dark and discordant and shit"--but a decidedly teenage darkness, the kind you imagine as hammering on your skull rather than sort of seeping inwards, best epitomized by that Unwound (xoxox) song wherein Justin starts out sort of moaning and ends up shouting "i tried to search for you..." and extending to Drive Like Jehu or something. "Propulsive," I'd say if I wrote for allmusic.com, or maybe "autumnal?" I accept it now, that Big Black might have invented this and that I have been denying that for too long.
I guess that in my experience, Big Black tended to attract a "too grown up for punk" element--like, kids who listened to whatever raging as kids and matured got into this and then it led them to Sonic Youth and then whoever, minimalist classical music and Deleuze or something; this led me to think "in addition to the obvious 'fuck Steve Albini,' fuck this band beloved by sellouts or poseurs" (also their weird sort of sexism didn't help) and never give them a chance. But whatever times 4. I'm gonna go to Generation tomorrow, where hopefully I can buy this album AND Milo Goes To College (!) and feel that I have fulfilled some unfinished business with my 16-year-old self.

David Copperfield (for real)/Killer of Sheep

2007-04-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

Oh! Sorry, I had to do some work and cut my last post short. The George Cukor David Copperfield, at least the first half, receives the resounding thump of the LGI approval stamp. Pluses: W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, the CUTEST winsome big-eyed little thing as petit-David, and basically being the kind of movie little nerds watch through their enormous-framed glasses (bought "to grow into") on PBS on snow days with a big cup of hot Nestle's Quik: looong, generally delightful with some remarkably sad and dark parts (being a girl sucks for most everyone who has to contend with that problem here, although D.'s batty-yet-sensible aunt is our new role model). To be fair, I haven't read the book, but according to those in the know (Ben), most of the dialogue comes straight from its pages. Things get hurried towards the end when it seems like Cukor (a new fave, who wants to watch The Women?!) realized oh crap, after all the charming travails of lil' D., I have about 300 pages to get through about his winsome puppy-obsessed first wife and the slimy dealings of Uriah Heep (not the band), so there's a lot of expository dialogue and such. While definitely no the David Lean Great Expectations, it's worth it.

So, the hype in town these days is the revival of Charles Burnett's long-lost Killer of Sheep at IFC. See it. You have a couple more days (I'm sure it'll be back and then on Criterion but, it's here now!).
I feel a little weird about it, though: I've been reading some would-be motivational "radical librarians" literature lately to try and re-stoke myself on this field (not working, all these bitches seem to do is complain about their jobs and the Man), I've been thinking about the whole by/of/for The People thing--like, yeah, Chris Dodge can talk all he wants about fighting for your library's right to stock Street Spirit or anarcho per- zines but really, patrons want you to have a million copies of The Five People You Meet In Heaven and Zane, right? So, while Killer of Sheep is mos.def. by and of the people, it has ultimately become destined for the educated bouge who can sit back and admire the warmth and closeness of the devastatingly poor Watts community depicted in the film and tsk-tsk the protagonist's alienation from his family, self, whatever because of the murderousness (literally, he works in an abattoir), of his daily routine. The people in the movie would probably find it pretty boring. What I mean to say is: I found it effective, politically, but who cares what I think?
That said, whatever. It's a beautiful movie, replete with what Vern accurately described as countless "disarming moments," like a tiny girl singing along to a soul record at the top of her lungs, an upwards-looking shot of kids leaping across a rooftop, a shot in which a boy bikes forwards from behind the camera into a bunch of girls who beat him up and break his bike, etc. A scene of two men trying to carry an engine down a rickety staircase holds geniune suspense. It seems, to the layperson, a textbook in how to film everyday life compellingly, with equal doses of hilarity and tragedy.

Total side-note: if you saw/enjoyed David Gordon Green's George Washington, realize that pretty much everything good in that movie was jacked from this.

Let me add further that my room presently smells like a mixture of nail polish, coffee, and "peaches and cream" lotion. AMAZING.

Great life events/David Copperfield

2007-04-07T15:51:00.000-04:00

This morning (ie. around 1pm), while trotting down to return the 9/11 Commission Report to the public library and obtain some non-bread items from the farmer's market (alas, only onions and apples remained), I reached the intersection of Broadway and Dyckman and, omg times 1000, there was MR. MET standing in the sun-roof of a Mets-logo painted SUV, followed by the drum majorettes of Mother Cabrini High, followed by about 10 Inwood Little League Teams in full uniform, with banners, chanting. Based on team spirit, this will be a good season for Grandpa's Pizza and Dyckman St. UPS, and not so much for Dyckman St. McDonald's. Bummer that I didn't have a camera. Seriously, though, is your neighborhood officially allied with Mets baseball?! NEXT YEAR IS NOW.

let's get, um, perked up via exercise

2007-04-03T16:19:00.000-04:00

(or, if Michael Bluth can do it, so can I)
I guess I am turning this into a legit livejournal-style endeavor now? Today I rode 11 miles from my house to Canal St. to have lunch/hang out with Vern, then pretty much the entire way across town to eat the world's greatest cupcake, then up to Trader Joe's to get some life essentials like 99cent Luna Bars and baby spinach, then over to school where I had planned to spend all day in the computer lab, where I am now. I totally hate it when other people are right, especially bike people, but this ruled and I don't hate this city any more. I don't LIKE it here again yet, but riding your bike in the street (SAFETY FIRST, MOM) is sort of the best thing ever. Also, if you see me slithering on my belly across 14th St. later on, feel free to scoop me up, toss me over your shoulder, and bear me to the subway. My quads feel. . .amazing.

let's go outside/the world's greatest salad.

2007-03-30T13:38:00.000-04:00

Whatever it is that makes my hands and wrists hurt when I type too much has been doing that lately. I've seen these movies, all excellent:
Zodiac
Born Yesterday
Billy Liar
The Big Clock

One of my all time favorite movies:
The Earrings of Madame de...

and a sort of crap movie, which was massively inspirational nonetheless:
Unknown Passages: The Dead Moon Story

Since I cannot decamp to the Yukon, build my own town, or subsist on $2000 a year while churning out primal rock and roll like Fred and Toody, I've just been trying to ride my bike and listen to the Wipers and stay off the internet as much as humanly possible. Hence the lack of Substantive Blogging. Perhaps once I finish all my skewl-type things for the semester I will devote a larger share of my waning hand-strength to ranting about Robert Altman on the internet, but for now, smell you later, amigos. I might post some what-I've-seen lists just to keep a record.
**********************************************************************************
Before I embark on a blog hiatus, though, let me leave you with The World's Greatest Salad. I pretty much get out of bed every day so I can eat this for lunch.

1. Chop up some tomato and cucumber; tear up some spinach, or if you prefer, romaine lettuce. Dump in a bowl with some chickpeas (rinsed).
2. Optional: chop up a little bit of onion and/or parsley and/or shred a carrot. Dump in bowl.
3. Lightly toast a sliver of pita, tear this up, dump.
Toss, let the pita get a little soggy.
Then squirt on a decent amount of lemon juice, drizzle a little olive oil if you're like that, and sprinkle on some sumac powder (available fr. local middle eastern food purveyor) and black pepper. Toss, annihilate.
Olives (esp. the wrinkly oily ones) or capers might also be a nice addition but I keep forgetting to put them in.

FYI, this is a butchery of something called "fattouch" people like to eat in Lebanon.

drinking black coffee

2007-03-25T19:02:00.000-04:00

Forthcoming: reviews of three movies about reading: Zodiac, Born Yesterday, and Billy Liar. Right now, though, I will list my five favorite cups of bougie coffee in New York City. Bear in mind that despite a few years of being a "barista" at a Border's Books I don't really know anything about what makes coffee delicious. This isn't about espresso crema or latte art or whatevs--just straight up medium coffee avec soy milk--nor is it about ambiance, which is entirely another matter.
1. City Bakery (I dunno why I like this stuff so much, but I used to get back to work late from my lunch break every day so I could wait in the painfully long lunchtime line at C.B. for a delectable cup of their coffee. Also: they have very well designed paper cups, and a next-level, astronomically priced salad bar.)
2. Gorilla
3. Joe
4. Mud (note: the best cup of Mud coffee I've had came neither from the truck nor the 'spot, but from this yuppie fried chicken place [fuck this city] near my school, where they insisted on brewing a fresh pot of coffee for me and cajoling me to wait until the pot was brewed, although I was already late for class. I was rewarded with one of the best cups of coffee I have ever consumed--and black, at that).
5. 'snice

Most disappointing cup of coffee: Porto Rico, which despite selling delish beans serves up a weak, watery, off-tasting brew.

I and I Survive

2007-03-20T13:55:00.000-04:00

(warning to my gentle readers: this may get a little livejournaly. but don't worry, once I get back into the swing of things I'll start going to the movies again.)
Before my plane landed at LaGuardia yesterday, it flew low over Manhattan. I pointed out Madison Square Garden and Central Park and my job and my building to the boxer sitting next to me whose main concerns were ascertaining the location of "downtown" and gauging the drinkability of NYC water. The city looked sort of pallid, all snowy and grey, but it was kind of a nice way to come home; I don't feel elated to be back amid responsibilities and atrocious messiness from my longest trip away from the East Coast in a decade, but seeing everything laid out below me reminded me ok, here's what I know, here's home. I realize 7 days (supposed to be 5, but thanks snowstorm+American Airlines!) isn't very long, but it sufficed to slightly denaturalize things: I was surprised at the musty books/peach hand-lotion smell of my room, forgot the E doesn't stop at 59th St., etc. This indicates, I think, how off-kilter I find my everyday routine.

Besides the annoyingness of San Francisco public transportation and a definite excess of crusters and hippies, I like that city ok. The weather ruled while we were there, so I got to walk around to many different neighborhoods and to the ocean; I ate an unimaginable quantity of delicious food, saw a killer photo exhibit at SFMOMA, met some good kids and hung out with some old friends, heard some massive West Coast slang as well as by far the greatest response possible to the question "what is your favorite food?" (given by "Gnars'" roommate Chris, who deserves a rare power-pop record for putting up with Ben and me for 7 consecutive days: "something like a burrito, or a breakfast scramble, in which everything is evenly distributed so you taste all the flavors in every bite"), flipped through about 10,000 records, and was reminded of an important life fact:
The world's #1 activity, which may be even better than watching movies, is listening to records with friends, preferably while imbibing cheap sake (an innovation!) or coffee. HEAVEN.
As a side benefit of staying in a record library, I got to hear a heap of great jams of varying attainability (please Fred and Toody, pretty please reissue The Rats In a Desperate Red lp and someone find me a boot of the Middle Class ep, so fucking great, and any number of other Spanish and Italian and Finnish eps Ben and GN dragged out for me--but then guess what, the new Black Lips ep--what's up New York Timescore--and the raging new Totalitar lp which was waiting for me when I got home, and, shit, the Descendents first record which if I ever listened to it before, did that in 1998 and had no memory of, also kill). Since every winter I end up listening to the same things over and over and over to stave off the darkness (see below), getting re-excited about non-bummer records proves that I'm ready to pull myself out of the shit and into the springtime. I'm cleaning my room.
ps.-one love to #1 bro Parker, who even after days of little squabbles and mopes and inability to get back to the proper coast rallied (around Jah throne) to discuss Abyssinian spearsmen and pull out a stack of Misfits boots and sketchy jams for our enjoyment. And to G., A+ hostess and pal, who'll be picnicking in the park out here sooner than you know.
pps. this is what I've played no fewer than 6 times today.

if i lived in san francisco

2007-03-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

i would be fat and broke from eating delicious food and buying records all the time. i would probably have nice calves from walking up all these mountains, though.

2 things u should do

2007-03-08T21:15:00.000-05:00

1. See Vengeance Is Mine

I think it's done playing at BAM now? But the good snobs @ Criterion Collection will release a premium DVD within the next month or so. Prior to its jolting end Vengeance Is Mine takes a matter-of-fact, journalistic (I mean old, elegant journalism, right) approach to its charismatic subject, Enokizu, a con-man, lady-killer, and ultimately, serial killer. Hilarious at times, moving at other, and occasionally almost unbearably intense, the movie never plummets into gratuitousness: its violence and sex offer no thrills, and it seldom--if ever--psychologizes its characters. There's little to summarize: he cheats, kills, fucks, and gets caught (in the movie's opening scene; the film plays with frame stories and chronology purposefully). Let me just say, though, that the old-lady character in this movie is my new hero.

2. Eat at Souen

Ok, I eat a lot, but I rarely exclaim "whoa!" after tasting a food, which I did upon digging into a plate of the special crispy tofu w/veg in ginger-miso sauce at Souen. Unlike other restaurants I frequent this place is macrobiotic, meaning 1-they have fish but no, uh, potatoes or eggplant and 2-if you didn't eat too much of it, I think it might be legitimately Good For You; even my tofu was grilled not fried. The enormous bowl of noodle soup my dinner companion (thanks mom!) got also tasted delish.

Forevs, or, ignorance in consumption

2007-03-06T00:29:00.000-05:00

At work tonight, one of the girls was jazzed post-shopping and I said, where'd you go, and she said, oh to Victoria's Secret and Forever 21. And before you could say "prison labor," I blurted out "OHGOD I LOVE FOREVER 21." Now you know.

What the girl I work with said: "They have so many clothes. . . I mean, I've been to the giant Macy's, and I don't think that has so many clothes." I can't verify the truth or falsehood of this statement but my goodness, Forever 21 has an intimidating amount of clothes, organized--I think--mainly by color, although sort of by style and sort of by purpose (different nooks for ugly satiny flower-patterned things that Facebook tells me are knockoffs of what my high school classmates wear for goin' out; a million variations of cheap b&w working clothes; the perpetual Marc Jacobs (I think) plagiarizations for little weekend jaunts, etc.). Bizarrely, it carries almost an incalculable number of different styles, so if you want a brown shirt and you find the primary place of residence for brown shirts, you'll pull out one in a v-neck, one with a button, one with a boatneck, but never 2 the same, and certainly not the one you like best in your size. As their website says, "did you know [they] get new stuff every day???"

Unlike, say, a Uniqlo, with its pretense of class thanks to towering pristine stacks of sweaters, unlike a department store with carpeting, tiers and hierarchies, unlike a genuine bargain-bin-type store, Forever 21 does not intimidate. Everyone is there for the same reason: they want cute things and they want them cheap, so cheap that the fact that these things will probably chafe and shrink horribly in the wash is immaterial. Forever 21 does not care about your walk of life--as implied earlier, probably any woman could walk in to one of their stores in a bind, and come out with at the very least a plain tshirt that has cost her $4.80. I like the Union Square store, where I often used to spend an odd 40 minutes between my old job and class.

Lately, I've been reading blogs by people in other cities to ascertain if anywhere else is vaguely liveable (doubtful), and this one L.A. artsy-type lady uses Forever 21 as an even more derogatory adjective than how I use Urban Outfitters like "even though she was head-to-toe Forever 21, this girl was cute." Forever 21 differs from the Urb in a couple ways though: one, no pretense of "cool," really--the Urb is overpriced to give a vague illusion of elitism, and it has an attitude. It wants you to need what it'll give you. Also, there is more cohesion in what it tries to sell you each season; thus it's clear when someone's Urb-ed out, whereas someone in cheap tightass bootleg black dress pants and someone in jeans a tshirt and hoodie, and someone in some plasticky (f)au(x)-courant type apparel are equally Forevs Girls. I'm saying: this is democracy, made in China with a good chance of melting in the dryer. As their slogan declares: "fashion for all."

Forever 21 just wants you to be 21 forever, with age-appropriate fickleness and vicissitudes and undeniably poor decisions made possible and often unavoidable. At no other store have I ever understood that my resolute decision to buy a top I don't need results entirely from the persuasiveness of the establishment's soundtrack (I sort of feel like Lily Allen owes me three $15.80 tops, but then, I sort of thank Lily Allen for being there on that day at that time, for enabling these three $15.80 tops to take up residence, tags on, in my bureau drawer. FYI, "do you know [their] return policy?" You would if you'd ever shopped there, cos they ask you and tell you every time you pay. Store credit only. You are bound to them forever.)

I don't know anything about fashion; I know that never in my life will I buy underwear from that terrifying giant chest of drawers they have near the checkout. Sometimes, I worry that if by some odd chance I have a daughter, I will not be able to pass on well-made cashmere sweaters and pricey shoes as my gran and mom have endowed to me, just a heap of raggedy discount chain retailer shit. Sorry in advance, little Angel-Eyes, but if you could have half of a decent pair of pants OR a striped tunic in every color of your video display, which would you choose? Presumably--like everyone I know, undoutedly--the moral and aesthetic high ground that would lead you far, far away from the inviting all-glass facade of Forevs. Not me.

what's good?

2007-03-01T10:58:00.000-05:00

It turns out that when she wrote "great job!" and "develop further" in red pencil on my paper to which she awarded an ignominious grade, my cataloging professor actually meant that I need significant help learning how to write and structure an essay. So before I embark on a rewrite of this painfully flawed 4-page exploration of how to catalog your books on some books/social networking website, not my idea, let's think about things that are great.
-ginger tea
-always
-the first pair of boots i have had in years that actually keep my feet dry and warm.
-wow, NOT this phil ochs album i found in the basement
-seeing Ana AND Hannah tomorrow
-Fucked Up playing Saturday
-my brother's pictures of Olmu and Valparaiso
-Arrested Development Season 1
-going to San Francisco in a week and a half
-the homey little sort-of-expensive Greek deli/bar/restaurant that Cory likes near Columbus Circle
-a tape Lyle made me for my birthday a couple years ago that I like a lot and inadvertently left off my top mixtapes list; I like it particularly because of its near-disturbing breadth and scope--like, he taped what he liked at the time and what he thought I'd like, so there are Blind Faith songs and Woody Guthrie songs and ska and mid-'70s Chilean protest music and it works. Few are this daring.
-not usually a music blogs fan but this rules
-Art Garfunkel's website, a bizarrely fascinating and needlessly detailed thing. You learn: Art Garfunkel has walked across America. Art Garfunkel has read many books. His taste in music sucks but my God, he or whoever runs this site is a compulsive record-keeper.
-Shohei Imamura and Graham Greene series at BAMcinematek
-Alternatives to copyright
-finally, this video as seen on Ben's myspace, about which all I have to say is that I once had a dream (prior to watching this, and also before I found out even l-skewl papers need beginnings, middles, and ends) about Glenn hiring me to be his personal librarian, and also that I presently have "The Occult Roots of Naziism" on hold for me at the nypl. Make of that what you will.

gonna go to heaven in a split pea shell: sad times tape

2007-02-25T11:19:00.000-05:00

Lest the intimations of my last few blog postings slipped by you, I've been in a weird and un-posi mood for most of February; you always know February will do that to you, but then it happens anyway, and what are you supposed to do about it? Make WUSS MIXTAPE 2K7 over the course of several no good very bad days, employing a few of the total parents-core records I found in my basement. I would post the mix itself except it has a few transitions I'm not thrilled by and, more importantly, it's on a tape (90 min)

tara jane o'neil-"the poisoned mine"
jackson c. frank-"yellow walls"
fleetwood mac-"woman of a thousand years"
fred neil-"i've got a secret (didn't we shake sugaree)"
judee sill-"the phoenix"
laura nyro-"save the country"
jackson browne-"our lady of the well"
the byrds-"tulsa county blues"
the incredible string band-"womankind"
carla sciaky-"and i a fairytale lady"
spires that in the sunset rise-"a little for a lot"
p.g. six-"go your way"

caetano veloso-"o leaozhino" (sp)
jackson c. frank-"blues run the game"
paul simon-"everything put together falls apart"
ida-"so long"
gene clark-"for a spanish guitar"
asa irons and swaan miller-"untitled"(?)
bert jansch-"rambling's gonna be the death of me"
lal waterson-"fine horseman"
retsin-"your own bar"
freakwater-"gravity"
emmylou harris-"sorrow in the wind"
neil young + crazy horse-"through my sails"

UH-HUH.

Like I said, I don't stand by this whole thing--the particular Laura Nyro song's a sore thumb (I had listened to New York Tendababy like 5 times the day I taped that part and just kind of wanted to put her in though she doesn't really go). There's about 7:30 left on side 2 and I haven't decided what to put there yet. "In My Hour of Darkness" by Gram Parsons and "Attic of My Life" by the G. Dead are both distinct possibilities.

Anyway, if any readers who aren't completely appalled by the direction my musical taste has taken would like a slightly improved version of this on tape, if you're feeling the way I am, I'll gladly make one up for you.
If you're the downloading type, though, I really strongly advocate you make room for this particular Fleetwood Mac/Fred Neil/Judee Sill sequence in your life and, most of all, this Byrds song. It's from their generally mediocre LP "Ballad of Easy Rider" and, although it was written by some random other person, represents late-era Byrds at their most capable; it's short, has a pretty immaculate Clarence White solo and some nice fiddle accompaniment, really simple harmonies, and basically just breaks your heart--like, the lyrics couldn't be more straightforward, which makes them all the more sad.

eurotrash movie theme songs

2007-02-20T01:18:00.000-05:00

So, I saw Bertolucci's Before the Revolution at F.Forum today; it was great, rang true, and I think I'd have a lot more to say about it had I not sat in the very front row and consequently devote a lot of my movie-watching time picking whether to watch subtitles or movie. It did, however, have two fantastic pop songs, sung by Gino Paoli and arranged by Ennio Morricone. I recalled suddenly that after seeing another mid-60s Italian movie with a beast of a theme song that I'd decided to get into '60s europop, although it took me a second to remember the exact song that made such a deep impression: Adriano Celentano's "Furore," theme for Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (the song starts about 20 seconds in)

Although not European, the music for Seijun Suzuki's gangster movies slay, and also represent the same sketchy, dark lounge kind of vibe. I've had the theme for Tokyo Drifter stuck in my head for months.

More than a little more insane, but still amazing, is the theme for Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown, also featured on Ben's blog recently:

While I'm talking about favorite '60s movie theme songs, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this universally beloved Chantal Goya hit. The trailer we see here for the reissue of Masculin feminin, moreover, sells this movie better than just about any other trailer I've seen.

Unfortunately, the actual Before the Revolution songs don't seem readily accessible on the internet, so here's a different Gino Paoli song; although not as good as the ones in the movie, it's his biggest hit prior to his attempted suicide via, uh, gunshot to the heart, and was arranged by Morricone--note the weird martial snare drum.

Another pick of mine comes from a film I foolishly omitted in my short list of fave the ever-awesome, sadly limited subgenre of "non-musical movies with songs on the soundtracks that narrate the movie's events." The vox on this song are truly atrocious! Starts about :30 in.

Play It As It Lays

2007-02-18T10:17:00.000-05:00

Few movies do justice to really intense friendships between adults; maybe after I drink my coffee I'll think of one, but movies seem to leave being friends mainly to teenagers and kids and then the twists and turns of love and family and, you know, "life" once you're actually an adult. Woody Allen, come to think of it, depicts friendship really well. But seldom do deep, affectionate 100%-just-being-friends relationships appear on movie screen.
That's a striking aspect of the 1972 film version of Joan Didion's novel Play It As It Lays, which they showed at Walter Reade yesterday. Tuesday Weld as Mar-eye-ah, the main character, and Anthony Perkins (the very same) as her only real friend, the fast-talking bi film producer B.Z., have truly remarkable, affecting friend-chemistry. Both incredibly damaged people, both realizes the other's the only person who has a shot at understanding what happens in their own heads--and that, in fact, the other person DOESN'T really get it, but in whom else could they trust? There are some super scenes of them hanging out--one where they walk arm-in-arm along the beach at sunset and it's a complete twist on the usual on-the-beach-at-sunset scene, since B.Z.'s gay and suicidal and Maria's cracking up, but they joke and laugh honestly and believably. Both actors play their part really well, too; Tuesday Weld has a breathy spaciness entirely apt for the novel's charachter and Perkins surprises, looking fantastic (every dude I know should dress like this dude; would that there were pictures on the internet) while imbuing B.Z. with alternating layers of slickness and honesty. At one point, after a jovial get-together, Weld asks him if he ever gets tired of trying to please everyone. Unexpectedly, Perkins's expression completely changes and he says yes, in a moment that could've played out like a total cliche but having occurred between these two particular people, hits really hard.
A lot of the negative reviews of the film criticize its oh-so-'70s style; admittedly, some of the quick, flashy cutting meant to mirror Maria's disturbance doesn't really work (some of us nowadays also might find Maria's post-abortion trauma, as presented here and in the book, "problematic"). Some of it, however, brings out aspects of the novel that wouldn't otherwise be presented in the film. Didion, as always, is concerned with place--like, geography, environment, etc.--and how it affects and undresses one's psyche (sorry for the excursion into ignorance!); the movie can only show this via stuff like quick cutting through different sequences of highway signs, or pulling way up into the sky to show the knotted L.A. freeway or the Nevada desert. It also has the nice washed-out 1970s-CA color scheme of browns and light blues that I can't get enough of.
So, yes, I'm all in favor of a critical revival of this business, though I could see how Maria's escalating loopiness could grate on a viewer instead of moving her (note that just about all of my favorite books are about alcoholic women who lose it, and that seeing a fair cinematic treatment of one such lady was an especial treat for me). Considering this movie also hasn't been shown in probably 25 years, the print Lincoln Center got was really nice and clean.

ps. Now I really want to watch The Swimmer, another depiction of a rich person going batty also directed by Frank Perry, which stars everyone's favorite chin, Burt Lancaster, and adapts a short story by one of my high school faves, John Cheever.

Making ponchos a threat again

2007-02-17T10:57:00.000-05:00

Film Forum's about 2/3 way through the Morricone retrospective; I still cannot spell Morricone confidently without looking it up, and I missed a few movies I intended to see (apparently The Burglars was the series's sleeper hit!). I plan to go to 1-3 of these jams next week, but since I neglected to follow through with my thoughts on th e Woody Allen retro, here's what I saw so far.

Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion got thumbs-ups from reputable sources, but mercy! An overblown, prurient critique of the hypocrisy of the police state sees Gian Maria Volonte playing essentially the same schizo part he does in For a Few Dollars More, widening his eyes and enunciating more breathily as he gets more and more in a tizzy. Volonte's unnamed police chief character murders his lover, a woman obsessed with tabloid-fodder sex crimes (this would've worked well as a giallo plot, come to think of it), in part because she rejected him and in part to prove to himself that, in his new capacity, he's entirely above suspicion. Devoid of the subtlety that could give it an impact beyond "whoa, authority's fucked," it has some really nice set-pieces, especially those set in the cavernous warehouse that holds all the police's surveillance files, and a nice Bunuel-y part when Volonte's coworkers eat snax at his house and slap him a bunch.

The Big Gundown (d. Sergio Sollima) has a severely awesome score, stars Lee Van Cleef AND Tomas Milian, involves a chase through a cane field, and, in a rare feat for a spaghetti western, has a mild degree of character development and--shut up!--A PLOT that sees Van Cleef tracking bandito mexicano Milian through the Southwest and into Mexico at the behest of a rich man and out of his personal obsession to seeing the law carried out. He finds his assumptions challenged, and Milian a tougher, more complex quarry than expected. Granted, the film takes some detours so as to include a remote mountain ranch run by a kinky woman and a team of sadists, but the genre pretty much demands such things. OH MY GOD, I almost forgot about the PROTO-NAZI AUSTRIAN GUNMAN WHO PLAYS "FUR ELISE."

Death Rides a Horse d. Giulio Petroni has dreamboat John Phillip Law and Lee Van Cleef seeking revenge against the same band of outlaws, dreamboat JPL because they butchered his family and Van Cleef because they set him up and sent him to jail for fifteen years. If Clint had revenge rather than monetary motive in For a Few Dollars More, it would be this movie (Van Cleef's in tough-love father-figure mode). Aside from sick gunplay, I particularly like the movie's red-tinted old-fashioned flashback moments, experienced whenever dreamboat JPL sees a signature tattoo/earring/whatever of one of the dudes he's after; the humor is pretty cute, too.

Along with Corbucci's The Great Silence this double feature (I'd seen Death... before) comprised my two favorite non-Leone Westerns. Speaking of which

I'd forgotten how Clint "finds" the poncho near the end of this movie after he give a dying soldier his duster for a blanket and dons it just in time. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is probably one of my top-3 all time movies. I recognize Once Upon a Time in the West as superior, certainly plot-wise, as a critique of Westerns and a damn fine Western itself, and perhaps even stylistically, but I love this movie fiercely. The only commentary on a situation not directly relating to his own well-being Clint gives in this movie comes as he surveys the battle at the bridge, when he, you know, squints a little and says to Eli Wallach, "I never saw so many men wasted so bad." And you think, WASTE, what do you know about WASTE Mr. Blondie, having spent the previous, like, 6 hours of this "loose trilogy" gunning down nobodies and getting the shit kicked out of you and dragged through deserts so you can dump some bags of gold coins onto your horse and trot off, presumably to bury in the sand somewhere since you seem to wear only the clothes and bear the weapons you remove from corpses? More, probably, than you do.
This movie has no plot; just as greed empties its characters of anything besides greed, this film's excesses obviate its narrative thrust. It'll replicate the rush of finding a gold watch on a dead soldier for you, but its central character will barely speak ("shoot, don't talk").
If I ever have a kid, I will seriously consider giving it the middle name "Angel-Eyes."

spinach fiesta week 2k7

2007-02-12T18:35:00.000-05:00

I'm not a great cook or even a good one; I eat at odd hours in my home at the ends of the earth, and thus, 98-percent of the time I make food just for myself so I have little impetus to attempt ambitious kitchen feats. But I love cooking really straightforward things; I require the confirmation only chopping some vegetables and tossing them in a pot or pan can give me to assure myself that yes, a day has passed.
Cooking for oneself also depends on your meals sort of tag-teaming ingredients, or else your fridge fills with half-cans of tomatos and shriveled mushrooms from dinners past, waiting in vain while you eat the stews and sauces composed of their peers.
When I bought 2 pkgs of bagged spinach for the price of one at Fine Fare a week ago, I promised myself this would not happen to these leaves. Spinach is my favorite vegetable! This is what I did when confronted by an incredible amount of spinach, homework, cold weather, and my new partially-employed lifestyle.

1) Spinach in miso soup-broth with tofu, broccoli, seaweed, mushrooms, and soba noodles
-I'm sure what I call "miso soup" would horrify anyone who actually knows what miso soup is, but this concoction (flavored with some ginger, garlic, and cock sauce) is quick, nourishing, and you know what, I think it's pretty tasty. 2 meals.

2) Spinach with roasted chickpeas, pinenuts, raisins, capers, and tomato over couscous
-A slight variation on the chickpea/tomatogunk/olive/whatever coucous I usually make, this sparkled thanks to Didi Emmons's excellent hint to stick the chickpeas in the oven for half an hour, giving them a slightly crispy exterior and a rich, nutty flavor. The real recipe calls for hazelnuts, but who has those lying around? This seemed not only delicious but totally not unhealthy! The highlight of the week. 3 meals.

3)Spinach in tofu scramble
-Redeploying the tofu, mushrooms, and some broccoli from the soup and adding some red pepper, I adapted the Post-Punk Kitchen's t-scramble recipe, so far the best such recipe I've found. It came out super and a good thing about tofu scramble as opposed to real scramble--you can have it as leftovers and it's a-ok. At some point this week I got some nice farmer's market bread which went nicely with this biz. 2 meals.

4) Spinach in salad with random bits of stuff from the fridge
-A wise cartoon character once said, "You don't make friends with salad," an assertion upheld by this totally mediocre "I'm tired and hungry" effort. I improvised an ok tahini dressing but made about half as much as I needed. Also, I got this can of adzuki beans in a state of incredible confusion at a health food store that didn't have what I wanted (tempeh) and was particularly unenthused about them. Definitely the culinary low point of the week.

5) Spinach with tempeh and red peppers in peanut sauce over rice
-Frying the tempeh till it was browned on both sides--not to mention using a recipe for the sauce to get the coconut milk/peanut butter proportion just right (2x as much c-milk to pb, they say, fancy that!)--really made this a great dinner and lunch. 2 meals.

6)Spinach with adzuki beans, broccoli, and seaweed
So, I had some adzuki beans left over the shitty salad, broccoli left from the soup, and the last remaining spinach. Consulting recipes for adzuki beans advised me to use either seaweed, a sweet sauce, or both so I whipped up a (sweet)miso/mustard/ginger sauce. The resulting meal tasted amazingly and uncannily like bar-b-que sauce. Okay! I dunno if I'd make this again, but definitely "something new," interesting, totally edible, and filling. 2 meals.

Notes:
-All I have left over (besides tomorrow's lunch of #6) is some rice and some canned tomato goop! Model efficiency!
-Excepting the chickpeas, every one of these dishes employed what is now confirmed at the world's #1 condiment:

Thanks, Huy Fong Foods.

pedal steel guitar and peanut butter are humankind's greatest achievements

2007-02-11T21:38:00.000-05:00

Here I am in my room, listening to the scratchy copy of Some Girls my roommate found among big stack of slightly rodent-nibbled lps in our basement. When little talya! sat around the neutral-brick house in Symmes Twp. Ohio, staring at the wall or attempting to watch more than the permitted hour of TV or winding up her brother for no reason, Mom would say "seems like you're at loose ends" and suggest homework, a book, or playing outside. These days, seems like I'm at some pretty loose ends. Today I didn't rent a movie because I was ashamed to be seen in Kim's again. Questions--would I do more homework if I had a printer? Should I get the satiny Valentine's Day edition Air Force Ones?

Shock Corridor

NYMPHOS! Every Samuel Fuller movie I see's more off-the-wall than the one before. After Walkabout, this is the most please-write-a-college-essay-about-me movie I've seen in a while. Some B-actor plays a reporter who goes undercover to win the Pulitzer Prize (as if you win the Pulitzer Prize the way you win a Scout badge or something) in an asylum where every crazy person's psychosis embodies some 1950/60s anxiety, manifesting occasionally onscreen, shockingly, as grainy color newsreel footage (now what does this say about our MINDS and the CINEMA, kids?). We learn: sex will make you crazy; don't go undercover in an insane asylum; Constance Towers, the actress who was the "protagonist" in The Naked Kiss, does possibly the least hot striptease in movies.

Murmur of the Heart

Or, would you hit it with your mom if she were this hot? Or, eat your hearts out, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. The entire look--color processing, shot framing--and breezy>serious mood of The Squid and the Whale may have been jacked wholesale from this movie, one of the most American French movies I've ever seen, and the precocious yet immature, willfully inappropriate behavior of say, Max from Rushmore may have first been embodied here, in cute, sexually inexhaustible fifteen-year-old Laurent. A little overlong, but delightfully strange.

Blood and Black Lace

I read an essay recently by a woman defending her love of the "Emmanuelle" movies saying yeah, they're degrading and stupid, but if men can love degrading, stupid movies with men beating and killing each other or killing girls in aesthetically pleasing ways, why can't I indulge in the soft-focus girl-on-girl fantasy world of Emmanuelle? I thought about this when I was watching Blood and Black Lace. I have a higher tolerance for "cult" movies than some aesthetes I know, but motherfuck, this movie was bad. What weirded me about about it most, I think, was the total absence of narrative perspective--nothing drove the movie's events. You see a pretty girl, you follow her, she gets killed. Cut back to the investigation of a previous murder, or the fashion house where the movie's events are centered, you see another girl, you follow her, she gets killed. Most movies like this at least have the investigation to give the story a form, or you kind of side with a potential/future victim, at least for a while, but not here. At some point, you find out who's doing the killing and why, you don't care, they kill some more people, whatever. Even the violence lacks the art or artfullness of other, similar movies, lacking even the classy leather-gloved hand that figures in most gialli. I don't usually wear this hat when taking in popular art forms (witness the album I'm enjoying), particularly not proto-slasher movies, but really, this wasn't scary, thrilling, beautiful, or "interesting;" it was just girls getting murdered. How novel.

Jezebel

A pretty whatever melodrama with Ms. Bette Davis as an 1850s New Orleans belle too hotheaded for Henry Fonda, who--after being shamed by her public wearing of a red dress--hightails it up North where he marries some wack bitch whom he brings back down South. Chagrin! Absurd political dialogue, duels, lots of darkies kowtowing to their kindly masters and mistresses, and a ridiculous recreation of a yellow fever epidemic ensue.

Regular Lovers

2007-02-09T01:34:00.000-05:00

I saw this a couple weeks ago at Cinema Village on one of the coldest days so far; I've thought about it ever since, I think. Lately I write here about things--Graceland, Hana-bi, now this movie--that I can't quite unwind, things I feel strongly ambiguous about, and let me just say this sensation would probably mirror the way I experience my own life lately, if I ever thought about things besides movies.

Regular Lovers ostensibly takes Paris '68 as its subject, but really, it's just a movie about growing up like any other, albeit a three hour long movie with the look and feel of a movie that could've been made in 1974 rather than 2004. Our "heroes" grow frustrated with the working classes' unwillingness to obey the theoretical constructs they have learned in school; they do drugs; they slowly and regularly become increasingly open about their bourgeois futures; they do drugs; they sleep with each other, do drugs, and talk. It is as pathetic when one man freaks out on acid as when another ditches his friends for not being revolutionary enough, as unsurprising when a woman decides to get married as when her friend decides to leave her poet-lover for America.

In sum, it is as though you--assuming you belong to roughly the same milieu as I, reader, over-educated, bourgeois (yep, twice in 2 paragraphs), vaguely "arty" like your boss would ask you to make centerpieces for the winter brunch because you look arty and you've got other friends who hang stuff in galleries, far-left and confused--watched a movie of kids you know hanging out for 3 hours. You'd space out. In some shots they would seem unrecognizable, in others jaw-droppingly attractive and in still others completely uninteresting-looking. It'd be funny at times, more frequently painful, and you'd be able to ascertain the larger scheme of things impelling them towards their silly childish actions while knowing that if you were them, you'd do the same selfish things. That's what this movie is like, except maybe edited a lot better.

The friend with whom I saw this movie found it epically self-indulgent and hated that whenever Garrel shows someone, he frames the shots, particularly close-ups, so that things you think should be in the frame are cut off, and you rarely see an entire face or head; this kid further noted that everyone wears the same clothes for the entire movie and that the main girl and main boy wear near-identical outfits. These are all true statements, all valid complaints to have. The Onion, I think, objected to the way that the impact of the events at the film's beginning on its characters--Garrel stages a reenactment of the riots, complete with the seeming importance and ultimate futility of doing things like tipping a car over and, later, complaining that the police climbed over a barricade that the rioters had spent a lot of time building, those pigs--is "locked in Garrel's head," too implicit to be understood. I'd say--I think the absence of perceptible effect speaks volumes (as they say) but I'm not sure.

let's get reclusive!

2007-02-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

I have not left my house since coming home on Sunday at about 5pm, so about 2 days ago. It's cold outside, goddammit, and after spending all of the fall and winter so far with minimal heat in my room, I applied myself to the radiator valve and now I, talya!, am cooking with gas, and only wearing 1 sweater. In addition to cooking constantly (yesterday: spinach w. roasted chickpeas/pinenuts/raisins+couscous, also cookies; tonight, possibly some tofu+spinach pilaf or maybe curried spinach-potato soup, spinach being 2pkgs for price of 1 at Fine Fare this week)reading some books, and doing minimal hw, I watched some videofilms.

Ordinary People d. Robert Redford

I found a video of this in the living room and have sort of been curious about it, since these '70s family dramas were in weird hipster vogue a year or 2 ago and I wondered if the people who brought, say, the first Steeleye Span LP to my attention have similarly good taste in movies. Kind of? The mom character, as played by Mary Tyler Moore, was comic book-caliber bitchy--like, you see that she's all repressed and truly grieving for her dead son and completely incapable and unwilling to understand her living, damaged son, but she is SO MEAN and SO COLD; you think the film will somehow complicate her character and it never does, while Donald Sutherland as the dad only becomes increasingly sympathetic. Both MTM and Sutherland do a bang-up acting job with what they're given, although Timothy Hutton's wavering from almost-normal kid to stultified crazy-person don't particularly convince. The film has a really nice look, though, all muted and autumnal colors, warm yet oddly impersonal. Random personal anecdote: I once took a creative writing class taught by the sister of Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Timothy Hutton's girl, a lady who went on to write a novel about a woman who has issues about having a famous sister. Uh-huh.

Fat kitty, what are you eating on the floor of my room?

Hana-bi ("Fireworks") d. Takeshi Kitano

Good lord, what a strange movie, driven almost entirely by editing, which I guess all movies are, but few really grab your attention and shake you by the shoulders and scream "WATCH THE EDITING!" like Hana-bi. So, I also started watching the Feuillade Les Vampires serial, and at one point in the first episode you really see the camera move for the first time, as it slooowly tracks a black-clad bandit across the roof of a building and down a drainpipe, and it is completely nails-in-mouth thrilling. The moments when the camera moves in this film have a similar, jarring effect--a couple times, Kitano pulls back way up into the sky and descends onto the action and although you know what will or has happened, you're gripped. The plot, though, the plot is WEIRD, the characters are WEIRD, and the strange mingling of tones (depression/rage/charming Chaplinesque slapstick with Kitano's wife who's seemingly regressed to childhood) may or may not work.

Imitation of Life d. Douglas Sirk

100% BANANAS. Sirk lets no one off the hook--even the seemingly perfect man-friend has flaws and even loyal black Annie has weird motives and shortcomings--and employs every absurd costume and over-the-top symbol at his disposal. Highlights include Sara-Jane's bad-girl behavior and Mahalia Jackson's showstopping song at the movie's end, followed by the shots of every single black person in "New York" showing up to the funeral of some random lady who happened to be in the employ of a famous person. All in all, though, after watching the three big-name Sirk melodramas, I'd rank this third, with All That Heaven Allows 1 and Written On the Wind 2.

we believe in a land of love or, top 5 mixtapes

2007-02-04T21:42:00.000-05:00

A while back I organized a tape swap; although I made my tape ('60s and '70s country-rock, folk-rock, and folk, 60 minutes) right away, I dillydallied in sending it out for all sorts of reasons. My loss, because once I got my act together I got an instant all-time-top-5-tapes tape from Ben H. which I've spent the last few days enjoying. It's one side krautrock and one side reggae (highlights: Cluster & Eno on first side, Junior Murvin on second), which basically makes for the greatest soundtrack to a contemplative, spaced-out subway ride. Also, Ben included the Black Uhuru song "I Love King Selassie," which I last heard played by the DJ who did her show just after my 6-8am Tuesdays show my freshman year of college and have had quasi-stuck in my head ever since. Isn't that the best? Like, for years I had a vivid memory of a song from a terrible movie trailer but all I could remember was "I Want You," and then in some random person's apartment discovered it was in fact, "I Want You" by Elvis Costello (one of my favorite ever lines: "since when were you so generous and inarticulate?")

Phew, that was longwinded. Here are the other 4 mixtapes that I can't listen to enough.

1-Golnar's summer 2k5 tape--Dangerhouse and KBD-heavy, with some other fun-time modern-day punk gems. PLUS she goes there and puts on "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg." Wow, is this tape key.
2-"Shivaun" from the internet's Discount mixtape--This almost doesn't count, because it's all Discount (that's right), but it's drawn from all sorts of albums/comps/7"s. A few years ago I posted something about this band's "Love, Billy" ep on a message board and she responded by pretty much demanding to make me this tape. Good call on her part; this would have changed my life if I'd received it when I was 13, and now all I can do is listen to it when I feel 13-year-old-like emotions coming on. Take a breath, and grab a hold of yourself.
3-"Brandon Z."'s WBAR tape swap summer 2k3 tape--I don't know this person, but I got his tape of garage, mod, early rock 'n' roll, and the like in a swap. This tape introduced me to Dead Moon, so I owe it a big one, and is in general, really well-selected and well put-together. If you don't have one, I recommend adding a garage mixtape to your collection; it works both for commutes and for "I'm on the way to a party!" situations.
4. Merran's post-punk and New Wave tape--I asked her to make this to introduce me to this type of music, which I don't listen to all that much, and this tape is pretty much a textbook "how to make an introductory mixtape" tape, including Gang of Four songs and random one-off 7" bands alike.

All these tapes, moreover, have at least one or two jams so catchy they threaten your sanity--Voice of Progess "Mini Busdriver" on Ben's; I forget whose "I Keep Your Cunt in My Freezer" on Golnar's, which is actually a life-ruining thing to get stuck in your head; the Muddy Waters "Hand Jive" song on Brandon's; too many to pick on the Discount; and this fucking Go-Betweens song about Lee Remick on Merran's.

Runners up, btw, are Ned and Judd's fantastic "rap mixes."

This post was just a reflection on these tapes but feel free to respond either with "great tapes of your life" or with an offer to trade with me. Now that I know how much it costs to mail a cassette ($.87 first-class), I can shoot 'em off like anything.

Fallen Angel/The Hole

2007-01-31T10:57:00.000-05:00

Overwhelming feelings of confusion and cold caused me to spend most of my time recently taking showers, listening to the Beach Boys, and going to Forever 21. I have seen a few notable movies, though.

Fallen Angel d. Gandulf Hennig

You watch this movie, you hear a lot of dull people (and Keith Richards) talking about Gram Parsons, how he changed and--for instance--how when he started hanging out with the Rolling Stones he started dressing really weirdly to oft-hilarious effect and doing the same drugs they did, how he liked to drink and fuck around and not to practice, how he cheated on his wife with a friend from back home, and you realize: this person died when he was TWENTY SIX. Why, you wonder, am I watching a documentary about a KID, albeit a talented kid? Well, whatever. Some neat and goofy footage makes its way in, and the interviews with a thoughtful but still resentful Chris Hillman (and NOT the ones with various squabbling Parsonses) make it ok. Seriously, though, if you need to know anything about GP, ask me instead of watching this.

Ranging from hilariously weird to near-unwatchably intense, Tsai's The Hole merits comparison to both Antonioni and to Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris. I guess he made it on sort of a commission from a French TV station as part of a series called "2000 as seen by..." and Tsai, apparently, saw little hope in the new millenium. It's pretty easy to summarize: we learn from an introductory fake newscast voiceover that in Taiwan, an epidemic that makes people adapt cockroach-like behavior rages in the week before New Year's 2000. A few people refuse to leave their quarantined apartment buildings, nonetheless. The movie (which probably has about 20 lines of dialogue) then devotes the rest of its time to the dull lives of an alcoholic man and the woman who lives below him, and the hole a plumber drills in his floor/her ceiling and then abandons. So, relentlessly bleak depiction of alienation and doom, impossibility of true human relationships, bla bla. But then, uh, there are musical numbers, all songs by Grace Chang, performed by the woman downstairs whose apartment becomes more and more flooded--did I mention that rain pours for the entire duration of the movie?--and grows increasingly overwrought. Suddenly, though, she'll break into some ridiculous '50s HK jam, with backup dancers and everything. At the end of the movie there is a message from Tsai, saying something like "Grace Chang is what gives me hope for the future." Generally, a pretty amazing achievement.

Angels in the architecture

2007-01-26T02:20:00.000-05:00

Just as it took a head-scratching minute or two sometime in the middle of the Film Forum Woody Allen retro for me to realize, well, I have definitely seen more movie by Woody Allen than I have by anyone else, does this mean he's my favorite director, could be, it took me until I was smushed againt the subway door yesterday and inexplicably got "You Can Call Me Al" stuck in my head to realize:

Graceland may be my all time favorite album.

Without a doubt, it is the first album I can remember hearing all the way through (I think it is also the last non-classical LP my dad bought, save maybe 2 California Raisins records I think my brother demanded). For my entire life, I have gone through phases of completely loving it and then not listening to it for years and years. We used to listen to my brother's tape of this and my parents, uh, Ladysmith cd, in the car every time we took a family roadtrip, so I can't hear the record (which, I guess, is kind of in vogue now?) without thinking of the southern Indiana landscape and eating cheese snacks from a lunchbox and humming along. At some point in middle or high school, I rediscovered it and tried to teach myself to adapt the tinkly upper-register guitar parts for my nylon-string guitar, with little success.

What I do not know is: is this album good? There is only one way to find out.

1. The Boy in the Bubble
The album begins convincingly (the decisive drum thump a few seconds in really helps). Although, as far as I can tell, this song is about NOTHING, it works really well; the accordion proves a surprisingly fitting addition to the pop music ensemble and sounds here kind of like a shakier version of an organ. The absence of solos/breaks also helps this song keep on chooglin'.

2. Graceland
Although probably it is for the best that Paul Simon did not try to tackle other continents lyrically as well as musically, why is there a song about driving across America on an album meant to bring African music to Americans' attention? The mooing bass sound sort of bugs me on this song, but the sad, conversational chorus works. As far as the words go: again, the choruses are all really effective, but the bridge is a little wince-worthy and the verse about the "human trampoline" is one of the most embarrassing sex lyrics EVER. Last thought--in general, I really like the placement of an album's title track as the second song.

3. I Know What I Know
I sort of shuffled around in a way approximating "dance" earlier when I listened to this song while frying some tofu, so I must find this song pretty catchy. One of this record's key selling points is the stellar guitar work; the best songs all have these two really clean-sounding guitars ("African"?) that play off each other, and this is one of them. They prove so appealling that you almost forget that, on this song, there are backup vox going "whoop whoop." I bet Paul Simon, at some point in about 1978, really did pick up a woman by saying "don't I know you from the cinematographer's party?"

4. Gumboots
"Hey senorita, that's astute, why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute?"

5. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
Ok, here we get into the shit, a full-on Ladysmith Black Mambazo intro. Does it work? Unclear. The melody's real pretty and I like the words ("he's a poor boy, empty as a pocket, empty as a pocket with nothing to lose") and you can def. imagine Paul Simon singing it sans a chorus. So I guess not? As far as the rest of the song goes, "I could say woooo and everyone would know exactly what I was talking about" is kind of a cop-out for a chorus, and despite more nice guitar stuff, this song isn't my favorite.

6. You Can Call Me Al
The main riff (theme? what do you call it?), I decided, clicks and gets instantly stuck in your head because of the way the bass plays a sort of upwards melody underneath the main horns/synth/whatever business. Paul Simon delivers this song really well. Chevy Chase is in the video.

7. Under African Skies
What this song has to do with Africa escapes me but again, a lovely melody and Linda Rondstadt's backup vox (!) are nice. Actually, the lyrics are mind-bogglingly dumb.

8. Homeless
I appreciate that Paul Simon wanted to introduce South African music to the masses, which at the time was "political," too, but really, if I wanted to listen to South African music, why would I do it on a Paul Simon album?

9. Crazy Love Vol. II
For me, this song epitomizes this album's problems: it has both my favorite and least favorite moments of the record. The bad: a needlessly bombastic chorus that goes "I don't want no part of this crazy love," a tenor sax. The good: this is probably the nicest guitar work on the album, with a melancholy downward harmonized line underneath the verse. The lyrics sort of trade off greatness with sheer dreadfulness: saying a fat person "slopes into the room" is pretty ingenious, the line about "evening news" blows. What to do?

10. That Was Your Mother
If I wanted to listen to zydeco, why would I do it on a South African-flavored Paul Simon album? That said, I always get a line in this song stuck in my head where he sings "you are the bur-den of my genera-tion" really catchily.

11. All Around the World, or, the Myth of Fingerprints
Omit all the times he says "watermelon" in this song and you're set: the harmony vox that come in on the last verse are the highlight of this song for me, finally having a song that vaguely hints at colonialism is a nice touch, and I just realized this album ends with the line "that's why we must learn to live alone."

In sum: unclear. I'm going to go watch the videos on the enhanced cd.

Winter Soldier, the State of the Union Address

2007-01-25T09:54:00.000-05:00

Sorry if this gets serious, ignorant-style.

Ned and I watched Winter Soldier a few days ago.

This is the second-most effective war documentary I've seen, the best being Eyal Sivan's The Specialist, an unnarrated stitching-together of footage shot at Eichmann's trial. A collective of documentarians made this movie over the course of a few days in 1971 when a number of Vietnam Veterans for Truth "testified" in the lobby of a Detroit Howard Johnson's about what they did and saw in Vietnam. Apparently it was shot really on the cheap, with equipment and film stock left over from porno shoots, and save a few still photos of individual soldiers, remains inside the walls of the HoJo and all you see is men talking. Nonetheless, the movie plunges you right into the shit, with a man describing the gruesome disembowelling of a female civilian about 7 minutes in. It proceeds with a catalog of almost any imaginable atrocity.

Most striking, perhaps, is the testimony of Scott Camill, a beautiful guy with big brown eyes (bottom left in that photo) who attained a pretty high rank and earned all kinds of stars while committing and watching some unbelievably awful things. He's charismatic and, with the part-smile he has a lot of the time, appears to have just woken up from a nap. Given his warmth and the conversational tone of his delivery of even the grimmest things, you can't imagine that you would have acted any differently than he--that if you'd seen your best pal shot, yeah, you might've knifed the next Vietnamese person you saw--or, at least, that this person could not have possibly acted differently.

The "testimony" has a very Christian feeling, as though by getting this stuff off their chests and begging the government to end the war, these men can somehow repent their sins. The forgiveness they seem to beg, indeed, has the abstract quality of religious repentence: they speak to a room of American reporters, continents away from families whose children they stoned to death as a joke. The men's appearance, much commented-on within the film, also gives them a degree of removal from their actions. You see a few photos of them as clean-shaven, uniformed soldiers, but they now come before the camera with shaggy hair, beards, and bandanas, weird counter-culture mirror-images of their old selves. You sort of want to grant them catharsis, since they seem like such ok guys now, but wait a second.

Another problematic/interesting aspect of the movie lies in its synchronicity. A few men describe, sort of, how they realized what they'd done was wrong (one read history, one ran down a hippie on the street in Cambridge who said something like "How can I ever know you if you treat me like that"). It gives a series of small, terrifying shards of the war, and little of a sense of the history that could've created people like this. That was Vincent Canby's (thx. ProQuest) issue with the film--that it skirts the key question of how "we" could've borne generations of people capable of this behavior. One exception, probably the most amazing moment in the film, occurs during the testimony of a Native soldier, who completely breaks down while pondering the government and its lies and tricks, baffled that he, of all people, ended up killing for it, and recalls the old promise made to Indians that treaties would last "as long as rivers run, as long as the grass grows green." Someday, he says, the grass won't grow anymore, and you think about napalm and the unrepentent burning of Vietnamese villages described earlier and thanks Mr. Canby, your issue's answered.

That particular Jacksonian language has always gotten me--the baldness of the lie, but, the twisting of the knife, its telling in poetic fake-Indian-speak. Like calling the most abusive part of PFC Camill's training "motivation." Or calling our current entanglement a war on "terror," as though you can battle a sensation, and somehow make it stop.

After the movie, Ned and I talked for a while about Iraq and Vietnam and remembered the disbelief we both felt at the beginning of the war that the government could actually not know what they were doing--like, they knew Vietnam didn't work as well as we know (reading about the upper echelons of the military during the late '70s and '80s is pretty eye-opening; dudes went batty from the trauma of losing so badly, of discovering that "we" could lose), so presumably they couldn't fuck it up that terribly again. But, although it's dangerously misleading to say Iraq is just like Vietnam, these testimonies frequently seem redundant to we who've seen Abu Ghraib photos and whatever else, and that is the most deeply terrifying effect of watching Winter Soldier in 2007. People in the movie keep saying, if I saw this, that meant it happened elsewhere, too. In the wake of what we know happened in Iraq, it is really sickening to think that somehow, despite these things we're aware of and realizing that we probably know what we don't actually know, this war goes on.

In the State of the Union Address, the president commended a man awarded the Silver Star for using his body to shield his men during an attack, and while filled with shrapnel, turning things around and defeating a bunch of baddies. Scott Camill, juvenile delinquent turned war criminal and hero, had a Silver Star, too. It's bullshit, he says, these medals are all bullshit, I got ones when I didn't deserve them and didn't when I did. I just didn't want to die.

Coal Miner's Daughter

2007-01-23T16:28:00.000-05:00

A word of explanation for the ferocious rate of recent LGI postings--school vacation + the extended vacation of a co-worker at have left me with a lot of dead time at my jobs (read: 8 hour me+computer time). Things should chill out soon.

Coal Miner's Daughter belongs to the elite and nonsensical class of "movies I own." Re-watching it for the first time in a while, though, I realize what no one else in various reviews I have read seems to have cottoned on to: this movie is not a Loretta Lynn biopic at all. It is a complex depiction of her husband, Doolittle, or at most, about their bizarre relationship. We have little concept of what Loretta thinks or feels or decides or aspires to; we understand, fully, how Doo feels about her--like a sort of pervy dad (she was 13 when they married, and the scene of their wedding night will make you cringe), exploitative while also being motivated by genuine pride and love for her and what she can do. A good example of this occurs when she's giving her first radio interview and suddenly talking more, and more excitedly, than she has in the entire movie to this point. Instead of staying with her in this really triumphant moment, the film cuts to Doo (this is Tommy Lee Jones with an awful blond dye job), sitting in the car, listening to the radio broadcast, and smiling, sort of enchantedly embarrassed for his hillbilly wife. The movie does this ALL THE TIME--no sooner do you start to get a sense of Loretta (Sissy Spacek, of course) then Doo pops into the shot, or we get a quick cut to Doo at home with the kids or working on his car or whatever. He's interesting, "conflicted," we might say, whereas Loretta's change from eager-to-please child to aspiring star to weary pill-popper seems abrupt and unconvincing. Did the people who made this movie (director Michael Apted, you may recall, is the man behind the Up series, and the real Mrs. Lynn had some involvement in the project as well) realize this?

the greatest compliment I have ever received

2007-01-22T16:07:00.000-05:00

At the end of a brief conversation with an old Romanian man in which the meaning of my name ("lamb") came up: "I would not sacrifice you. You are too beautiful to be sacrificed."

let's get cheerful, team

2007-01-21T17:41:00.000-05:00

Ok, I almost never watch youtubes on other people's blogs, but the onset of cold weather is having really deleterious effects on my friends, and the least I can do is provide a slew of our favorite singing and dancing movie-Frenchies, inspired by the #2 scene, from the movie I saw yesterday, Les amants regulieres. Please cheer up, honeys.

Ghost Dog, or, No regrets for our youth

2007-01-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

One of my college applications had a blank for "favorite movies;" I picked a few, and the only two I remember now are The 400 Blows and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. One of my dearest friends, in whose company I revisited Ghost Dog at Walter Reade last night, finds this a charming example of the foibles of youth. "You forget stuff like that," he said, that only a kid's top two movies could be something so unquestionably great alongside something indisputably slight.

Ben is 100% right in picking out this movie's falsest move: a tawdry Jerseyed-up blonde leaves the motor of her Jaguar running while she dashes inside a liquor store; Ghost Dog steals the car; the camera watches the car go down the street and turn a corner; and cuts back, unnecessarily, to the woman, who stamps her heels in rage, shouts "My FUCKING Jaguar!" and darts back into the store crying "you gotta phone in here?" It's gratuitous and unfunny, and reduces some of the film's pretty bizarre and interesting depictions of race to a boring "trashy white people suck" moment.

That aside, though, I stand by this movie and its peculiar Jarmuschian confusion of moods and tones. Is it reverant of its main character, Forest Whitaker's misplaced mafia hitman-as-samurai? Does it allow for some ridiculing of Whitaker's behavior? How sincere is Jarmusch, despite all the intoning of Eastern-mystical quotes: are the scenes with the little girl, or the stylized moments when, for instance, a fullscreen shot of Whitaker's head is super-imposed over the twilight skyline, a move obv. lifted from kung-fu/yakuza movies which this film parodies and admires? It mixes this unreadability with the most obvious, whack-you-on-the-head symbols and references leaving you with this weird combination of inscrutability and a total absence of subtletly that particularly appeals to me (see: Walkabout, Fulltime Killer).

But maybe I don't stand by it; maybe I just remember when the most important thing to me about a movie was knowing that I was the only kid at school who'd seen it, that you wouldn't know it to look at me hiding at the corner desk in too-big pants and a too-small shirt but I was a GIRL who watched movies about SAMURAI HIT-MEN that didn't even have a hint of orchestral soundtrack, just weird crackly nostalgic-sounding hip hop and was as interested in how people read things and then read the things they read back into their lives as it was in showing Forest Whitaker laying waste to a houseful of broken-down mafiosi with his coatfull of enormous silent guns

The 400 Blows is also about a loner whose own misbehavior serves to rail against an uncomprehending and nonsensical order, but let's not push things. I like the part when the dying gangster says, "at least we get to go out like real gangsters," and Isaach de Bankole.

crotchety

2007-01-18T11:18:00.000-05:00

Today, in honor of my sulky mood, I present a few bad-tempered or old-person-y things that I have run across in my many hours of internet-time lately thanks to the brokenness of the only computer at the library on which I can actually work:

This article from the London Times about how middlebrow literature sucks.

The IFC points out that some "cult movies" pretty much suck.

Theodore Dreiser's library of what he considered essential American realist works.

This has been making its way around the internet a lot but just in case: Art Garfunkel, star of the twisted psychosexual drama Bad Timing has kept a list of every book he's read since 1968.

One of my favorite digital archives, which happens to belong to my sort-of-soon-to-be-former employer, is YIVO's People of a Thousand Towns website, which is collection of a few thousand photos of prewar Eastern Europe and its gnarled-looking Jews.

Another good one is Corsair, the Morgan Library's catalog and digital archive of illuminated manuscripts.

Totally important poll

2007-01-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

So, it may seem like all I want to do is watch movies, but really, all I like to do is eat falafel. Feel free to think of Party Girl references and then keep them to yourself.

Here are some places I have eaten falafel in New York, in no particular order:
Tamarind Seed (surprisingly ok for premade/microwaved)
Amir's (whywhywhy)
Jerusalem (nicest dudes)
Oasis (don't remember)
Rainbow (awesome)
some really gross Greek restaurant
Mamoun's (totally excellent)
Ali Baba (also yes)
Chickpea (embarrassing but good green color)
Ta'im (didn't live up to hype but a+ fries and pita)
Bereket (worst stomachache)
the dude on the street near the MoMA (hit the spot whenever it was I got it)
that place on Bedford that closed (put olives in)
Sam's (also: ew)
Cinderella (can't remember)

That's all I remember for now although I bet there are a lot more I forget. These days, I am really into Rainbow, which is near my soon-to-be-former job and rules. But really what I'm asking is, where else is essential? I hear Kalustyan's is great, but their mujaddara is so amazing that I can't NOT get it if I'm eating food there. I would also like to try the dude with the light-festooned truck in front of ex-Tower Records who's supposedly the "best falafel vendor in New York."

The question here is: where should I eat my next falafel sandwich? Take into account:
-falafel--well-spiced, not too crispy or squishy, microwaved or deep-fried just for you?
-pita--fresh? tasty? Damascus brand from a bag?
-salad--edible or greyish?
-hummus/tehina--creamy or chunkyish? would you eat them on their own? Too heavy or just right?
-cost
-location--convenience to movie theaters, jobs I hold or schools I attend, or record stores I frequent definitely a plus

Ignorant review corner, pt. 1

2007-01-14T11:21:00.000-05:00

In which we talk about things that aren't movies.

1-News Sources
I think I will try to stop reading the New York Times and switch to the Guardian-Observer full-time. I will not even miss important lifestyle issues; these wacky Brits had 2 articles on dating in NYC just today! In addition, they just seem greatly on top of things. Recent favorites include the pithy q&a at the end of what seems to my uninformed eyes a good analysis of the Iraq sitch and this manic review of Apocalypto.

2-Books
I just finished two books in quick succession, which have provided me with much food for thought.

The first, a bona fide classic, is George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, wonderfully written, wrenchingly sad, and oddly both pertinent and irrelevant to the world today (what would've ensued on the streets of Barcelona if the CNT and Communists had been going at each other with AK47s instead of busted 19th century rifles?). Idealized or no, what particularly struck me about Orwell's loving description of anarchist Barcelona (ojala) was the politicized disuse of formal terms of address (usted/senor). I think a lot about the sort of flattening of class/rank distinction that takes place at work, at restaurants, in life, whatever by the sort of general absence of these terms of address. I mean, do any of you call your boss Mr. anything? Or use polite name-prefixes to anyone besides randoms ['sir, you dropped your hat'] or, for those of us in the service industries, the people we're serving ['Ma'am, no bags in the library']? Rather than equalizing everyone, I find that first-nameifying just veils class distinctions. I would almost rather have to call my supervisors Mr/Ms/Dr than ignore the actual differences (of age, class, whatever) between us and maintain this false buddy-buddy pretense, which foments fundamental misunderstandings. Sorry, that's a little too heavy. But that book=essential.

So, as a devoted fan of classy or at least pseudo-classy (Balzac) lit, I was a bit embarrassed by the next book I read, also pulled out of one of my boxes I found in my basement: Ann Beattie's 1979 Chilly Scenes of Winter (aka Head Over Heels for the movie tie-in ed. I have). Look how middlebrow!

But, although I wouldn't recommend it to everyone and carried around another book for the 2 days it took me to read it in case I ran into anyone I knew and had to whip out a book, I liked this book a good deal. In an interview with Ms. Beattie for the New York Times, Joyce Maynard said this:

"I can imagine a facile kind of writer doing a superficially serviceable imitation of an Ann Beattie story, including an ashtray and a certain sort of very spaced-out remark and a lovable dog and some wonderfully good meal or some fascinatingly terrible meal--and not succeeding at all."

Usually, when I read in a book review that something is "sharply observed," I think it means "includes correct cultural referents and defines a cliche with slightly better-than-average language." But no, this book is "sharply observed," and its plainspoken, rambly style really approximates the way people seamlessly incorporate thoughts about their loved ones with song lyrics with wondering how much cash they have in their wallets and if it's enough to buy dinner at the supermarket. Like that book The Ice Storm, [which I liked more than I thought I would when I read it (probably in about 2000, but hey)], this book talks about the "end of the '60s" explicitly, as a sort of dull switch from one set of objects (possessions, records, ideas) to another, less devastating but more boring one, and how utterly unsuccessful people were at making the necessary transition. It had problems--I realized that it's the first book I've read in a while by a female writer writing from a man's point of view, and most of the female characters are pretty one-dimensional--but many witty and sharp or just well-done bits. There is also something essentially wintry about this book, which put me in the proper frame of mind for the season, weather notwithstanding.

3-Food

I am tired of Chinese/veganasian food with sweet sauce, which seemingly appears on my plate no matter what I order. All I want is a menu notation like the little chili pepper for "spicy" that is a little crumbling tooth for "sugary" to prevent these debacles. whine whine whine.

4-.Art
So I've recently seen the Kiki Smith exhibit at the Whitney and the Walton Ford and Ron Mueck exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum. Now, I know nothing about art, but I liked all of them pretty well.

Usually--and I realize this is a sort of runofthemill bouge opinion but whatever--I find "feminist art" sort of hit-you-on-the-head and lacking in nuance, but I thought K.S. worked in pretty regular themes more interestingly than others, in part because her art is sort of persistently creepy rather than relying on shock value. She and R.M. actually make a pretty good pairing because both have painstaking concern for the realities of human anatomy, and if you've ever thought about the uncanny valley, you should probably check them out.

RM is all about shock value; not jump-at-sudden-noise shock, but like, staring fixedly at a familiar face and realizing you don't understand how the features fit together to fit the face you know.

Walton Ford's art hits the same note repeatedly. He paints these enormous watercolors in the style of J.J. Audobon, packed with clues and allusions and stories and text re:globalization, colonialism, capitalism, etc. Seeing this many of his paintings was incredibly exhausting because each one of them has so many tiny details and bits of text and allusions and stories; in part, it's gimmicky, but the pictures are all so striking that it kind of works. This was a few too many to digest, though, and I was too sleepy and in need of salty Chinese food to concentrate on the "Magic in Ancient Egypt" exhibit.

When we say ignorant we mean

2007-01-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

Fulltime Killer d. Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai.

There is ignorant and there is ignorant, and there are movies that involve needless terrorizing of library patrons and characters motivated to their questionable actions by the Olympic Games. In this kind of movie, a typewriter that taps out the title in the opening scene reappears 20 minutes prior to the movie's end and no sooner do you think "ah, frame narrative," do you recall that at least three other people have at some point provided voice-overs, indicating confusion, incredible brains, or massive, delighted indifference on directors' part. Oh, Fulltime Killer, you redefine "gratuitous" with your sequences of electronic signals dashing across wires and circuits to indicate "someone sent an e-mail" and your ceaseless stream of references to other movies, made explicit by characters who have seen as many movies as we have, so that when the 2nd best assassin in Asia tries to teach his video-store clerk girlfriend to shoot a rifle she says "YES, I've seen Leon."
So, it is about 2 rival assassins, who, over the course of the movie, assassinate people all over Asia for inexplicable reasons--ok, save "excuse for sick action sequence"--on behalf of we don't actually know who. This sounds like a video game, you think: there's the woman you need to kill in a Singapore train station, a car-ful of henchmen you must shoot in a town square in Macao. THEN THE MOVIE goes there and TURNS ITSELF INTO A VIDEO GAME.

Based on a bunch of reviews I have read, this movie, which I couldn't have enjoyed more, is in fact kind of run-of-the-mill for HK action cinema, in which case I have a lot of research to do. If anyone has recommendations for further excursions into the genre (I've seen a lot of the big hits--John Woo, Tsui Hark, a bunch of J. Chan and M. Cheung vehicles) or wants to watch a bajillion uber-slick, over the top, stupid, stunningly choreographed shoot'emups with me, I'm down down down.

Half-Cocked (coming soon)

2007-01-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

Today's crucial life question: What is it that compels people to tell other people about the fluids involved in their ailments? Surrounded by old folks at the library here, I feel besieged by mucus oneupsmanship.

But on to other matter. Although I've seen a heap of movies since last time (M*A*S*H*, no less caustic or funny than on any previous viewings; Polonsky's Force of Evil, with slightly off stylized dialogue and a stunning distance shot of John Garfield dashing down stairs under the GW Bridge, etc.), I'm going to write about a movie that is showing in about a month, on Feb 13, at Anthology Film Archives, Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's Half-Cocked. The program says this about it:
"A fictionalized document of a certain time and place that manages to fuse an idealized, impressionistic snapshot of the era with the smelly, hungry, and desperate reality of the whole enterprise"

The "era" and in question are the mid-1990s in the midwest; the "enterprise" is an attempt by a bunch of youth with about $20 in their collective pocket to cure the malaise of the mid-1990s midwest by stealing a van full of band equipment and driving it around, forming a band called Truckstop and jumping on shows and trying not to just go home or grow up or get anywhere. The kids are played by members of the band Rodan, with Tara Jane O'Neil taking the "starring" role; other mid-'90s indie rock types, like Cynthia Nelson (Ruby Falls), Catherine Irwin (Freakwater), the Grifters, and--most spectacularly--Ian Svenonius, make appearances.

About the closest comparison I can make for you folks is to Old Joy, which is basically about the type of people featured in this movie ten years down the road, when they've decided either to settle down (but remain kinda 'edgy') or just sort of meander off, turning into self-defined 'freaks' or what the world would term "losers." The movies make a nice pairing stylistically, too; Half-Cocked, shot in b&w 16mm film, has some really nice shots that express the "hey, look, we're NOWHERE" vibe essential to the movie, but I remember it being edited kind of choppily, having sort of amateury bursts of pretension with genuine if heartfelt sloppiness(visually as well as in the dialogue). On the other hand, Old Joy's cinematography is consistently stunning (those through-the-windshield shots, wow), while still giving the impression of being totally d.i.y.

But this haphazardness makes Half-Cocked what it is: a near-perfect depiction of a specific place and attendant state of mind. One aspect of the movie I particularly enjoy that points to its aptness is Truckstop/Rodan's incredible excitement at the possibility of meeting or playing with the Grifters. I think I have heard about 1 Grifters e.p.; I have maybe met 1 person who cares about them. I remember, though, when I was a kid and just getting into "indie rock" via zines or this one e-zine (I was already at the end of this era) I used to read that reviewed EVERYTHING that people sent it, or whatever, that you'd get really excited about the most random shit, and I'd try and get my friends amped on it and it'd be a big thing for about three people. Whether or not the Grifters really were mid-90s indie rock stars (which they may have been; this whole scene has really receded into near-oblivion), I feel like that kind of very local excitement no longer exists in whatever "indie rock" is nowadays. There's no abstract, internet-dictated "cool" in the world of Half-Cocked, and in fact, the movie thinks cool is lame, as seen in the buffoonish character played by Mister Sassy Svenonious. What your friends think, play, or wear (check out how everyone in this movie has the WORST post-grunge fashion, as seen above) is what goes. I guess that's the "idealization" the caption author quoted above had in mind.

[Another thing about this movie: music like this, and the stuff on the standout soundtrack (which, as far as I know, is beloved primarily by my excellent roomie Ned, myself, and this girl Sam who used to dj on WBAR) does not exist anymore. Loud, discordant, crunchy but musically interesting, sort of post-Sonic Youth but entirely rocking shit--people don't do this, they just want to be "infectiously poppy" or play "sick heavy riffs" that are none of the above thx. The only band I've heard that captures the sound I mean from recent years is this band Reactionary 3 from Gainesville who play like Unwound meets the Minutemen meets a hint of uh, "hardcore" (iykwis).]

So, the vibe is wistful, both within the movie's world and on viewing it over a decade after its time as a document of a way of making music, being friends, and being a kid that doesn't really exist anymore. And the jams are great. I have the VHS (and soundtrack 2xlp, featuring the best Slant 6 song, "Time Expired") if you wanna pregame.

Postscript: It occurs to me that another movie captures the sort of troubled-yet-joyful aimlessness indie rock and documents thereof should, ideally, have: Friends Forever, a documentary about the eponymous band that played shows inside a van parked outside venues, as incredibly stoked as they are catastrophically awful.

I wanna know what love is

2007-01-06T10:25:00.000-05:00

Today, I have two notes on consumer goods (it's been a while, right?).

Note 1: a paen to a certain drink

I grew up in a home that mail-orders premium tea; I vaguely remember trekking across a muddy field in free period of senior year of high school to the Dunkin' Donuts on Northfield Rd. in West Orange, NJ to drink some milky sweet styrofoam-contained business and feeling a little guilty about it. Then, sometime last year on my way home from the 146th St. post office at an unfortunate hour of the morning, I passed a Dunkin's, and said to myself, wait a sec. Since then, every month or two months--usually when I wake up woozy after a long night out or insufficient sleep and typically on my way to the 1 stop at Dyckman or JMZ at Myrtle--I do it up and get a MEDIUM SIZED HAZELNUT COFFEE BLACK WITH 2 SUGARS. Ideally, I would involve soymilk in this, but Dunkin' Donuts is for the working American, not the bouge, so forget that. This heavenly thing--categorizable more as consumable goods-food-cake than the drink I guzzle regularly that I call "coffee"--goes down in three stages. First: since it is boiled to a faretheewell, the initial third tastes only like hot while smelling like hazelnut flavoring. Then comes the warm phase, by which time you note the hazelnut chemicals taste kind of like sock, but we're cool, in anticipation of the glorious final stage, when you reach the sickeningly sweet, luke-ish bottom portion that hurts your teeth and warms your heart. There is really nothing like it for bringing yourself to some kind of clarity while people rattle open the security gates of their stores.

Part II: Or, can everyone do this with their things?

I thought about this the other day while talking to someone and then again while trying to remember what records I liked that came out this year (Dead Moon 2xcd best of, what!).

1) I remember all things (conversations, events, get-togethers, sightings, etc.) by recalling where they took place in precise detail (weather, building lobbies, nearby storefronts, pictures on walls of restaurants), almost to the point where I forget the action in favor of the uh, mise-en-scene.

2) In reading about animism in Totem and Taboo, I remembered how, when I was a kid, I believed firmly that everything possessed a spirit, or feeling, or something--not just dolls or stuffed animals or what have you; I sharpened my pencils evenly so one of them wouldn't feel hurt at being used less than the others. This vague, inexplicable, actually-crazy sense lasted for ages longer than it should have, probably encouraged by constantly being reminded to kiss my prayerbook and Bible when I dropped them, or else.

3)As, perhaps, some combination of these two things, I can tell you where I acquired everything I own. I thought at first this was unique to my records--I know which I got at Academy, which at Gimme Gimme, which at shows or from eBay stores in Maryland or from a message board kid who lives on the main road near where my best friend from elementary school lived in Finneytown in Cincinnati--but then I looked around me in my room, noting which eye doctor gave me my blue plastic glasses case, that it was winter when I got my polka-dot underwear, and that the cashier at Rite-Aid on the corner of 14th and 7th had mumbled something like "I need some of this" when I bought that bottle of nail polish remover there. What was it about things standing on their heads and evolving grotesque ideas from their wooden brains? The point is, I could not explain post-structuralism or FRBR or microfinancing or whatever to you, but I can recite a detailed history of the hoodie I'm wearing.

4) Corollary: if you ever say "where did you get THIS?" and I reply "oh, uh, I dunno...," I'm telling you a lie.

5) Can--or does--everyone do this with their possessions? Am I completely bananas? I guess this is why I "blog" about ignorant shit and not, like, what love is or is not, which is something I would in fact like to know.

Total movie overload, Holidays 06

2007-01-02T09:37:00.000-05:00

I have watched so many movies, drunk so much coffee, and spent so much time with so many and varied people--really, just about everyone I know in the world, how nice and strange!--that absolutely everything has taken on this weird but readable profundity, no more so than when I was standing on the escalator of the Lincoln Square movie theater clad in this weird earthtones hippie ensemble wondering, in a fundamental sort of way "WHAT am i DOING?" so my thoughts on these movies are all ecstatic and confusing and such. I think I'll talk about all the Woody Allen movies I've seen once I've finished seeing them, but for now, here's some stuff I saw, backwards chronological order:

And Then There Were None(d. Rene Clair)--Somewhere in the category of "inexplicably wonderful things that should be terribly embarrassing," alongside "bands with theme songs or at least songs in which they say their own name" falls the subcategory of "movies in which characters directly address the camera while pretending to speak to other characters." This movie instantly wins points for using that tactic in an attempt to create suspense for its "hyperlegible"(-Ben) plot (Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians"). A droll, typecast bunch of Brit misfits compose the unlucky ten, chewing scenery and speaking in goofy accents in ways that will instantly win over anyone raised on, uh, Masterpiece Theater.

7 Men From Now (d. Budd Boetticher)--More than decent B-Western involves the perpetually widowed Randolph Scott once again hot on the trail of his wife's killers. Boetticher's "psychological" inclinations come in a few well-done if over-the-top scenes of sexual tension, one in which Lee Marvin attempts to seduce someone's wife in front of about 5 other people inside a covered wagon. Nice to finally see a Boetticher movie on a legit DVD!

Pan's Labyrinth (d. Guillermo del Toro)
Between an Agatha Christie movie, this dark fantasy about a little girl who may be the princess of a magic kingdom and her evil step-parent, the treasure-trove of books I found in my basement, and the amount of french fries and Indian food I ate, this past week basically represented the fulfillment of every wish of 10-year-old Talya. Side-notes aside, I did not expect great things from this movie (ala Children of Men, to be discussed below), but it delivered in truckloads. As Ethan and I discussed afterwards, most kids/fantasy-worlds affairs end up plunging entirely into the other world, abandoning real-world troubles entirely; if I recall correctly, even Dorothy's aunt and uncle end up moving to Oz lock stock & barrel by book 5 or so. Pan's Labyrinth entirely resists this tendency, keeping the miraculously terrifying fantasy business to an effective minimum. Moreover, as soon as you see little Ofelia's stepdad pistol-whip an innocent man to death, you realize that unlike, say, every Harry Potter movie til now, this movie has the potential to end up not-ok, keeping you rapt throughout.

Walkabout(d. Nicolas Roeg)
Having heard the plot of this movie summarized a million times before, despite knowing that it's a Nic Roeg movie, I had NO CONCEPT of how WEIRD it would be, like barely narrative, and like all the other humans seem to have spilled out of a David Lynch or uh, Ken Russell movie. Ana and I concur that if you want to teach a bunch of teenagers how to analyze film, this might be the best tool to use--every instant serves some obvious but not uninteresting symbolic purpose, it's about sex. It definitely took us both a second to come back from it after we left the theater.

Children of Men (d. Alfonso Cuaron)
Speaking of movies that demand a minute of recovery, I had to hug Hannah after I saw Children of Men to remind myself that we were back now and it was ok. Normally, letsgetignorant's taste in mainstream cinema runs more to Invincible than to arty type efforts. But holy shit. With only a few false notes (the gratuitous scene involving "Guernica," for one), several instants of crap dialogue, and some hit-you-on-the-head symbolism, this was generally an amazing, stomach-turning movie. My favorite part came near the end, when you notice a few drops of red at the top corner of the screen, as though blood had been spilled on the camera, and you realize the movie has shifted seamlessly into the vernacular of Iraqumentaries or BBC News footage and you believe it completely, and know that if the world did end, this is how it would look. Everything from the future-cars to the way the camera finds moments of beauty in the midst of the worst of times seems convincing. Also, I'll grant the heavy-handedness of the Christ symbolism, but the movie is so persuasive in depicting the futility of belief in such things that it almost undermines itself, no matter its own intentions.

The Shooting (d. Monte Hellman)
Who are we and where are we going? Does it matter?

Taking Ignorance to Magnificent Heights, or, Apocalypto

2006-12-21T15:13:00.000-05:00

Seemingly sprung fully-formed from the mind of a 14-year-old boy who's fallen asleep face-first on his world history textbook, Apocalypto is the second-funniest movie of 2006 (I pronounced it the funniest until I remembered that Jackass Number Two came out this year). As it evokes everything from Home Alone to Italian cannibalsploitation to Ringu to 19th century American painting (the motif of the noble savage retreating to his fate off the side of the canvas), Apocalypto merits the adjective phrase "totally fucking bananas" like few other movies. It makes a point of showing an espcial amount of blood during a birth scene (mmhm, a BIRTH SCENE); it has few shots that last longer than an instant; it features the best facial tattoos of any movie in a while. As a former anthropologist, I found it so shatteringly offensive and retrograde that, after about ten minutes, I no longer paid attention (til the ridiculous end) to that aspect of the movie, which aside from not getting pre-Columbian cultures, does not know how THE SUN works. It would be like getting on your high horse about the wanton destruction of bison in your average round of "Oregon Trail." Really, this movie is all but a mid-90s P.C. quest-style game ("help Jaguar Paw make it home before it rains too hard--and destroy morally bankrupt civilization IF YOU CAN!").
In sum, the longest sequence in Apocalypto involves someone's face getting ripped off by a jaguar.
(finally, I know Mel Gibson has some bullshit answer to this, but honestly: why is this movie called APOCALYPTO?)

El Topo and Jules et Jim, or, Possibly Smart Movies

2006-12-19T13:28:00.000-05:00

A first viewing of El Topo relies on a viewer's gut reactions to the film's imagery and increasingly bizarre twists; although I did not really know what to expect before I saw it for the first time, on a grainy bootleg VHS on a sweltering afternoon in Texas, I almost wish I had not seen even a single image from the movie, so as to be fully open to the shock and amazement the movie can provoke. Unlike The Holy Mountain, El Topo has a geniuine narrative (though divided into about five chapters, it really has two parts: "I am God" and "I am not a God"--a hubristic gunman seeks glory, fails, seeks redemption, fails) that propels the film as a whole forwards, but does not necessarily matter in individual scenes, each of which depends, entirely and confidently, on the power and singularity of their images to leave an impression. Of course, it revels in psychedelic excess, but attains genuine profundity as well, both in moments of extreme sensory overload, and in instants when he cuts away quickly from a moment that matters a lot (the death of a child, the benignly executed suicide of a master gunman who has thrown away his gun). I mean, this movie is totally fucking ridiculous and self-indulgent, but I feel like discounting it as a massive acid trip, as some folks who have "grown out of it" tend to do, does it a disservice. Since you can finally see El Topo legally on a big screen, at IFC Center through the end of the week, you probably should.

Another movie people think they grow out of, Jules and Jim, is also playing this week (at Film Forum). I definitely saw it in the height of my "I am a junior in high school yet so sophisticated beyond my years I rent from the 'foreign' section of Blockbuster" phase, enjoyed it enough, and proceeded on with my life, remembering mainly how cute Jules is, how nice Catherine's stripey outfit is, and how charming their happy bike expeditions seem compared with the "dull" adult-y business of love and jealousy and death the fills the film's last half. Kids who watch it, though, miss the crushing, inexorable (<-this is my favorite word, have you noticed?) force of history, which makes this a film as much about people before/in/after a war as it is a film about people falling in and out of love.
Truffaut also makes Jeanne Moreau's character marvelously weird; you can't LIKE her, you can't HATE her, you can't sympathize with her, really, but you can't blame her for anything, either. Casting her really makes the movie because, as always, she doesn't bowl you over with her beauty but she does have the precise sphinx-like quality that the part demands.
Further of note: sick Georges Delerue score, killer theme song, lightness of tone and deliriousness of cinematography that mask the film's depth.
*******************************************************************
In other news, my parents presented me with a garlic press and I'm really, really bummed to say that the naysayers are right: way not as great as you might think.

All of them witches: some great traffic with evil forces

2006-12-14T11:17:00.000-05:00

I've just finished a fantastic book, Joris-Karl Huysmans's La-Bas (translated on my Penguin Classics edition as "The Damned," but I'm pretty sure the new crisp New York Review of Books edition goes by "Down There"). It's a fin de siecle novel about several different things: a man writing a biography of Gilles de Rais and his struggle, as an author, to understand the mind of a long-gone age while cobbling together archival sources; ideas about faith and evil and the fate of modern man; sketchy matters of the heart; delicious food; and, you know, Black Masses and all. Huysmans can write a stunning sentence, and his character de Hermies's monologue on dust may be the best thing ever written on the subject.

So then I was thinking about witches, and since about the most exciting thing doing at the library is a busted microfiche carrier, I thought I'd offer an annotated list great witch-y cultural moments, in no particular order.

1. Black Sabbath-Black Sabbath

DUH. There are songs about witches and witchcraft, but nothing seems as genuinely, terrifyingly ensorcelled as this (although I advise you all to seek out the EVEN SLOWER version of "Black Sabbath" from their Peel session).

2. Lolly Willowes-Sylvia Townsend Warner

A quaint, deft 1920s or 30s feminist novel about a spinster who escapes her awful family and massively boring lot in life to move out to the country and find herself in a village which (spoiler whatever), we come to learn, is peopled by folks who traffick with Satan. This books takes care of the "relatively cute herbal tea-type witch" entry for today.

3. Wide Sargasso Sea-Jean Rhys

In this literary classic, the amazing Ms. Rhys relocates her usual preoccupations (female sexuality and death, Britain and its relationship to the colonies, how those 2 relationships are sometimes similar, you know) to the Carribbean, where a vibrant young woman morphs into, well, the "madwoman in the attic." Voodoo is crucial. For more New World hijinks see the J-FIC novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond, a favorite of mine ca. 1994.

wait, why am I talking about books?

4. Day of Wrath (d. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

Everyone's favorite film textbook author David Bordwell has a nice essay about this film's ambiguities on his website , in which he points out the peculiarity of the film's narrative structure. One expects to sympathize with two women accused (unjustly, you think) of witchcraft--but then, one realizes that Dreyer has left open the question of whether, indeed, the two women possess otherwordly powers. More female sexuality/power-type themes prevail, alongside Dreyer's typically penetrating questions about faith and mind-blowing b&w cinematography.

5. The Devils (d. Ken Russell)

Abject insanity, based on the no-less insane true incident of the "possession" of an Ursuline convent at Loudon, France, with Oliver Reed playing a decent if all-too-human bishop and Vanessa Redgrave as the crippled nun whose lust for him, combined with medieval French political intrigue, naturally leads to a grand-scale scene of masturbating nuns, a lengthy burning at the stake sequence, and this crazed hippie-looking witch expert who is seriously one of the weirdest minor characters of cinema. A Czech move I've been aching to see, Mother Joan of the Angels tells the same story.

6.Witchfinder General aka The Conqueror Worm (d.Michael Reeves)

This movie--not a Hammer film, but very much in the Hammer Films mode, with gratuitous nudity, cut-rate Middle Ages costumes and sets, and Vincent Price--actually disappointed, but has an interesting, politicized take on witch hunts, and hey, Vincent Price stars as true-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins (read his 1647 treatise "The Discovery of Witches") and there's gratuitous nudity.

7.The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (d. Raoul Ruiz)

Not properly about witches but rather about sinister worship, this completely BEWITCHING, Borgesian film pieces together a puzzle concerning a ritual that may be depicted in the last in a series of several paintings--which is missing, stolen, or may never have existed. An supercilious intellectual and an unseen narrator attempt to untangle the story for you, via a series of tableaux vivantes portraying the extant paintings, which the camera explores and in which you're supposed to find clues. Its intellectual view of the darker side of things reminds one of the aforementioned La Bas. Totally great.

8. The Holy Mountain (d. Alejandro Jodorowsky)

Apparently Jodorowsky himself has legitimately mastered the tarot and has cred in the circles who deal with these things. In this movie, he plays a sorcerer-seer-drug addled film director,etc., flanked by naked babes with kabbalistic symbols tattooed on their bodies and leopards, who can quite literally turn shit into gold. More on Jodorowsky after I go to see El Topo tomorrow.

9.
Thinking about Endora from "Bewitched" reminded me of this bizarre, oft-overlooked Bible story in 1 Samuel 28, when a terrified, depressed, and crazed King Saul (who has banned the practice of magic) sneaks off to Endor to get a witch to summon the wrathful spirit of the late prophet Samuel. The part in the King James trans. when the witch says "I saw gods ascending out of the earth" is one of those terse, chilling moments that make the O.T. a pretty good read. I imagine a cinematic recreation of this would sort of resemble the brief, affecting scene with the medium in Rashomon.

10. Rosemary's Baby (d. Roman Polanski)

While there are plenty of witches I would love to talk about (how many nightmares did you have about Ursula from The Little Mermaid? How astonishing is that medieval mechanical hell in the beginning of Haxan? How many British folk-rock bands sang creepy ballads about witches? Will I ever find out what happens in the last 5 minutes of Black Sunday or will I be interrupted every time?) let's end at home in New York. A few thoughts: my mom is particularly fond of the part when Ruth Gordon gets angry at someone for spoiling her floor by throwing a knife at it; the poor man's muppet Satan is one of the least scary beasts ever to appear in a movie; the thought of witches living on the Upper West Side sort of redeems that neighborhood in my mind. I love this movie.

World's Greatest Lunch

2006-12-13T19:08:00.000-05:00

To be fair, although in real life I talk about food incessantly, this blog post is inspired by Dark Forces Swing, the excellently-written and totally intelligent blog about music, movies, and snax, written by this person Hank whose hand I think I shook once, and whose hand I would shake again, for his blog introduced me to taquitos , the greatest thing on the internet since Corey Cryer decided to produce a blog.

ANYWAY. The world's greatest lunch is the whole wheat bagel with tofu spread and tomato, what we in this parts sometimes refer to, modestly, as "the talya," since I have probably consumed at least 500 of these things.

I hope never to learn precisely how many calories this giant among lunches contains, although rest assured tofu spread cannot be good for you (as far as I can tell it mainly consists of severely mashed up tofu and oil). That's ok for two reasons, though: one, one deludes oneself that the whole wheat of the bagel provides a healthy counterbalance (I also don't care if that is really true). Two, part of the point of downing this shit is that it FILLS YOU UP, for no more than $2.75 or $3.25 usually. You can go for hours, sometimes a whole day, on a ww/ts/t sandwich without feeling the weird lethargy you sometimes feel after scarfing any other kind of bagel sandwich. The tomato contributes in that respect, I think, and also adds the necessary juice and flavor otherwise totally lacking from this sandwich. Somehow, the individual ingredients which might seem, honestly, kind of gross on their own (the tomatoes in bagel joints seldom excite), combine to create THE BEST LUNCH IN THE WORLD.

If you want to get excessive, Murray's Bagels on 6th Ave and 12th St. has WHOLE WHEAT EVERYTHING BAGELS, which I usually avoid just so I can make them a treat for bad days.

The Conformist/Consumption Stymied

2006-12-12T10:12:00.000-05:00

For some ridiculous reason, I have not seen a movie in an eon (thanks for nothing, school. Today, though, the New York Times DVD New Release column informs me that, at long last, Bertolucci's The Conformist has made it to DVD.
There are movies I describe as "the greatest thing ever," and there are movies I go to see twice in the theater in the span of less than a week, dragging a friend along the second time because I need someone to bear witness, with me, to something that reaffirms what cinema can do. The Conformist, for me, falls in the latter category.
Hopefully you saw it when it showed for a million years at Film Forum two summers ago, but in case you didn't, run out and rent it today. Few movies I've seen manage to capture the grotesque comedy of, well, human existence the way The Conformist does, blending surreal, dreamy scenes with moments of gut-wrenching, inexorable horror, portraying the stupidity of romance as well as it does the terrible idiocy of Fascism. I guess I should say, it's about a man, Jean-Louis Trintignant (who acts with this sort of laconic proto-Bill Murray demeanor that seems sort of scarily appropriate for the character he plays) so afraid of certain repressed tendencies and memories that he joins the secret police in Fascist Italy and gets sent to assassinate an old college professor in Paris. The film asks not just "what makes someone a Fascist?" but things like "what makes a person's character shallow or deep?" and does so with peculiar, unforgettable imagery (Trintignant's insane father looking like a Greek philosopher, swaddled in a blanket outside an asylum; Trintignant's seduction of his beautiful wife in a train car lit by a sunset as she describes her seduction by a dirty old uncle; I could sort of go on like this for a while).
Anyway, see it.
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As far as consumption goes, things have been bleak due to the onset of consumption season, its attendant soundtrack of indie-rockified Christmas songs, and this overwhelming dull sense I get sometimes, usually at the record store but lately everywhere, when I find myself perplexed and disappointed at my inability to find anything I want, that forces me to question if, in fact, I like ANYTHING at all; this naturally leads to a creeping malaise and I wonder, if everyone else can blithely find things they want and expend hard-earned cash on them, what's my damage?
I did get a few birthday records, and a sweater from that store UNIQLO whose tiers of impeccably-folded sweaters, any of which would be as good as another, all equally desirable and undesirable, probably precipitated this silly (ignorant?) state I'm in.

Fans of non-ignorant art forms, take note

2006-12-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

Although letsgetignorant attempts to focus heavily on me me me, I make an exception today, since I am near-gleeful about this bit of good news.
Imagine my utter delight to open nytimes.com this morning when I should have been finishing a bibliography due a month ago and see a photograph of the stretching form of my dear and talented friend and former roommate of a million years, Ms. Ana Keilson!

(Front row center.)

In addition to having her picture in the paper, Ms. Ana deserves congratulations for getting in with this amazingly prestigious Bill T. Jones company and for the rave review (I think? I don't know anything, not a thing, about dance) that accompanies this nice picture. So, if I have any readers who happen to be wealthy dance fans, probably you should go see this.

1980s American Movies: A List

2006-12-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

Nothing quite matches the sensation of looking away from your computer for a second and abruptly realizing you have been working for hours (and haven't realized it) and that, wow, suddenly your paper on the contentious issue of Library of Congress Subject Headings has filled 11 pages long and while you have not particularly made an argument yet have SO many more thoughts on the issue, you can perhaps wrap things up soon. I reward myself with a nice bowl of oatmeal (query: how do they make quick oats quicker than other oats?) and, you know, a blog post.
So, I forget when or why, but on the subway a while ago Ben and I decided to make TOP 10 (NORTH) AMERICAN MOVIES OF THE 1980s lists. Here's my "provisional" list, which I have a few questions about:
1. Do the Right Thing
(next in no real order)
Down by Law
The Empire Strikes Back
Raging Bull
Sherman's March
Videodrome (Canadian)
Paris, Texas (note: financed by foreigners but whatever)
Blue Velvet
Evil Dead
Hoosiers

So, the first problem goes as follows: is Evil Dead in fact superior to Evil Dead 2? I'm not sure!
Next, I have some trouble figuring out the story with world cinema in the 1980s. A quick scan of Palme d'Or winners reveals nothing spectacular; all I can think of, really, is the Hong Kong action scene, which I would like to investigate further, and Eric Rohmer, whom I would not. Maybe the whole Kiarostami/Makhmalbaf situation started in Iran? Or was that not til the early '90s?
Also, the '80s present a weird problem because so many all-time favorites that aren't necessarily, you know, "good," come from that decade (it pains me a little to omit O.C. and Stiggs and Repo Man). I know some dudes would go all out and say, ok, well a top 1980s movies list made by someone born in 1983 really demands the inclusion of Ferris Bueller or some such, but does it? What else am I forgetting?
Last, Woody Allen made some wonderful things in the 1980s, I think, and I have a hard time remembering which ones I prefer. JEWS: let's go see The Purple Rose of Cairo on Christmas (AND, shit, Walkabout) at Film Forum on Christmas, ok?

top shits

2006-11-28T22:19:00.000-05:00

So I planned to blog a lot while in the throes of this term paper I have to write, but on the subway home from class I became abruptly and unexpectedly stoked about my topic (don't even ask), so I am going to try to absent myself from the internet for a few days. Before I go, though, here's a hack-style list of a few "best" consumer goods I am enjoying these days.

Most coveted item: convertible gloves. Bummer about the leather button on these J. Crew (uh-huh) wool-cashmere beauties:

Top jam purchased from record store:
Fucked Up-Hidden World. Even before this record, I loved this band so much I named my blog after something one of them said prior playing a show, wasted, at like 3am on a bridge in Texas. But seriously, what could you want more than some burly dude shouting about Henry Darger, Masonic symbols, and the afterlife over what are apparently 1990's oi! riffs?!

Top jam arrived in the mail
Bastard-Wind of Pain lp boot. I don't know that much about Japanese hardcore, but some dudes in the know think this is its be-all and end-all and I'm not particularly inclined to argue. THE RIFFS.

Top jam purchased serendipitously:
New Order-Substance. This is pretty severe, since hatred New Order has long stood as an unshakable tenet of mine. But this cassette cost $1 at a street fair and my goodness, how wrong I once was and I'm having trouble listening to anything else (aforementioned records excluded). Since I'm unsure about how to post YouTubes on here, go to that site and search "new order perfect kiss" and watch the nine and a half minute-long video (d. Jonathan Demme, classy [kind of]) of them playing "A Perfect Kiss," while eating some unsalted Snyder's mini-pretzels, and you will have a precise understanding of my current state of being.

Top food product: Tribe (did they jettison the "of Two Sheikhs" for the war on Terror?) Horseradish Hummus.

Top book, fiction:

The idea behind this book is pretty strange: it attempts to piece together a chronological picture of the character of Nick Adams through short stories, bits of larger works and unpublished stories and sketches. But SHIT. Probably my three favorite short stories of all time (that aren't Borges's "The Library of Babel," naturally) all appear in this book.

Top book, non-fiction:
Eichmann in Jerusalem
This is cheating a little since I took it out of the library and presently have no plans to buy it, but this might be the best thing I have ever read that isn't a Hemingway short story.

Top thing I need to buy:
Brown flats, solid color not tweedy and not made out of leather please. Suggestions welcomed.

OH! also, Top idea of the week: My friend and fellow-would-be-librarian Cory R. says that when he writes research papers, he takes all the articles he's printed out or photocopied and takes them to the copy shop to have them bound, thus creating a mini-reference work on a very particular subject. All I could say when he explained this to me was, after a long pause: "THAT IS A GOOD IDEA."

"The 1992 Robert Smith of movies"

2006-11-26T11:52:00.000-05:00

*Ben, who also saw this movie last night, uttered that memorable pronouncement, let's be fair.

If descriptions of Casino Royale omitted two key proper nouns and explained the film as something like "conflicted, brutish spy spends three hours playing cards, engaging in tepid banter, scuffling," few--well, fewer--dudes would shell out $11 to witness it. And yet, Bond is Bond, and thus I found myself at a midnight showing of this crap.
I understand that this is supposed to be a "leaner, meaner" Bond, for the days when one might indeed see security camera footage of British agents executing seemingly unarmed civilians on BBC.com (note: I hope you are all following The Guardian's coverage of this Russian spy imbroglio, they've really stepped it up). Yet the movie still demands our apathy for the wanton destruction of construction sites and workers in developing countries, expects our suspicion of people with funny accents, and sets up--once again--an evil, multi-culti ring of international crime that assembles around a card table to decide the world's fate. So no, this movie is not less stupid than other Bond movies; it is, however, less fun. Spattering Daniel Craig with blood and having him profess true love to some fox (further note: You would, both Daniel Craig and Eva Green, although someone decided to assault Ms. Green with singularly unflattering makeup for almost the entire film) does not erase our memories of the charming, suave Bond, nor of Sean Connery's charming and suave yet heartless Bond. The character, in this film, demands the adjective "vulnerable"--whatever! We've seen "vulnerable" action heroes before; they have their place and James Bond has his. Do we really need to see him huddle up, fully clothed, next to a girl in a running shower to know that he feels something when he kills someone? [SPOILER: The film even denies you the payoff of seeing Bond kill the bad guy, which as far as I can tell, is structurally part of a movie in this subgenre]. Also, it's weird to pretend that you haven't seen a James Bond movie before, which is kind of the premise here. We know Judi Dench was Pierce Brosnan's boss in like 2002! WTF!
I wouldn't care about all this if the film had an engaging plot--not really, the epic terrorist-financing card game's about all it has--or killer set-pieces. Besides an excellent parkour-style sequence set in Madagascar, it drags pretty hard, and even a will-this-terrorist-blow-up-this-airplane scene doesn't bring it.
In sum, it is a wack Bond movie, and a wack regular action movie, and it is like two hours and forty minutes long. IGNORANT.

The Long Goodbye, indeed

2006-11-22T10:44:00.000-05:00

When I got a voice mail message offering me "condolences," I freaked out for one instant and then realized that it must have been Robert Altman who had gone on to the great movie palace in the sky. Sure enough, it was.
Notes on the passing of my favorite movie director of all time:

1)When I think about A Prairie Home Companion, I remember the lighting most of all. He used a soft--but not too soft--warm scheme, that set off the movie's wood-browns and golds and oranges in a way that gave the film the sort of glow you notice when you walk inside on a cold evening. That sounds absurdly hackneyed, but shit, the film's cheesy and familiar like that, and now it's an elegy, but I think everyone always knew it would be.

2)Often, you can say about a great individual who dies that his best work is either past or, what a shame, he was in his artistic prime. The quality of Robert Altman's films varied so consistently throughout his career, though, that we cannot know if he had a masterpiece left to make or another Cookie's Fortune.

3) Let's go back to Prairie Home for a sec: the happy regret of something finally reaching an inevitable end. In the movie, they make the final show of the fictitious radio show just like any other broadcast--no announcement is made, no tributes or retrospective, just competent, joyful business as usual. That's where the movie lies in Altman's filmography, I think.

4)I'm sad about this. It's a little weird to hail Altman as this titanic figure, though, when all his films are concerned with people who're precisely not anyone special--just regular dudes and ladies, who tend to mess up al the time, but even they find a few sparse instants of beauty or grace, even in this terrible, weird place that's America, in terrible and weird times.

5)A few of us (including Lev, who has a fine memorial post up, too) saw Thieves Like Us at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I think we were all blown away by a little part when Shelley Duvall shows up with her hair about 1/4 of the length it was in an earlier scene and a boy she likes says "Cut your hair?" and she smiles and shrugs and says "I dunno."

Pre-Thanksgiving Movie Overload

2006-11-21T12:01:00.000-05:00

Well, here I am in sunny South Orange New Jersey, full of leftover chard and rice pilaf or whatever (no tofurkey here, my mom and I celebrate the bounty of the fall harvest thankyou) and I will continue the post I wrote before I was rudely interrupted by library patrons and the passing of Robert Altman (see above).

As administrator, I have removed my O.J. post due to its obsolescence, since the American public decided to feign morality for a sec. Whatever, guys! At least I got to hear a truly next-level conversation at Generation Records about it (check back soon for a future post on mind-altering conversations/food delivery orders overheard at Generation Records).
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Despite working something like eleven days in a row, I saw a glut of movies this past week.

So, I never saw Back to the Future until Friday. Really. The verdict: it's good and funny and all with some key skating by Michael J. Fox's stunt double but, as with many '80s comedies, I noticed a lot of peculiarly dark moments that overshadowed some of the hilarious bits: the massively depressing scene of the family at the table in the movie's beginning, the constant threat of Lorraine getting assaulted, etc. Robert Altman's butchery of an '80s teen comedy, O.C. and Stiggs, consists almost entirely of these cruel, weird fragments, and I would probably rather watch that any day over something that cuts in saccharine "Professor! TAKE THE LETTER!" shit. Don't get me wrong, though, I enjoyed it.

I took my mom on a date to see Europa '51 aka The Greatest Love at the Rossellini retro at the MOMA. Having not seen a great deal of Rossellini, I could see the potential for his turning this sort of consciousness/morality-awakening plot into something powerful. This movie, however, loaded on the sentiment and melodrama a bit thickly in its account of Ingrid Bergman turning from a thoughtless rich lady into a saint-like figure upon her son's death. A few stunning sequences compensate for some of the movie's more ridiculous parts, such as a several-minutes-long scene in a factory that's a kind of futurist nightmare, and every shot of Ingrid Bergman's face. Further note that the only thing that makes me cry harder than sports dramas is the instant in a movie when a mother realizes her son has died. See: Carmen Maura screaming "Hijo mio" in Todo sobre mi madre.

The next day my buddy Spencer persuaded me to watch Criterion release Gate of Flesh with him, telling me that it was like, the best movie he's seen all year. Naturally, I disbelieved, but my goodness, it took me by surprise. Having seen two other Seijun Suzuki movies, Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy, I expected a twisted and near-incomprehensible plot, pretty insane mise en scene, and a killer theme song, but nothing great. This movie, however, is straight-up awesome, an undeniably powerful combination of exploitation cinema with politicized rage. Spencer made a good point when he said Gate of Flesh reminded him of West Side Story; the movie often acts like a musical, with its core group of tough-as-nails post-war Tokyo whores dressed in bright monochrome ensembles, trading off lines and wisecracks, and assembled in the frame like they're about to break out into song and dance. I guess it is some kind of allegory for the way the loss in the war emasculated Japanese men, and the complete breakdown of all social mores in the attempt to survive and comprehend the enormity of this loss? But mostly, what you get is girls hitting girls, hilarious grotesqueries (like when some kid pulls a condom out of a bowl of soup, oops!), and so much anger veiled by stunning Technicolor cinematography.

Sports Dramas: Rules of the Game, Major League

2006-11-16T10:28:00.000-05:00

You know what they say about fate and its ways, and so the combination of a sleepy me and a soapy carafe two days ago led to yesterday's purchase of an awfully nice 8-cup French press. Come by for a cup of coffee while the leaves here at the end of the world are still hanging on.
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A recent proliferation of jobs has left me with little time to watch movies, much less to write about them. But now that I've received a (I hate this phrase but, for lack of better term) shout-out on Mr. Atkinson's super and popular blog, I feel like I'd better step it up a notch. The last two things I've seen are 1) Rules of the Game and 2)Major League.
Roommate and all-around top dude Ned offered that Rules of the Game was "good but not the greatest movie EVER." I may disagree, with only the explanation that--as dull and cliched as this may sound--this movie rewards multiple viewings more richly than perhaps anything else I've seen.
I cried a couple times this last time, and the pal with whom I watched it this time around told me he thought that was "cute," to which I replied that I cry during lots of movies. While true, this statement requires some nuance: I cry during every sports movie. Rules of the Game not only uses sporting as a metaphor and a plot element, but also has a similar payoff. The brief, intense outpouring of high-stakes emotions that challenges the status quo (feelings elicited by the aviator, or by your run of the mill rag-tag bunch of misfits) but ultimately, proves inconsequential (society will return to normal; Odessa, Texas will not find redemption through its high school football team) holds a great deal of the tragedy in both this film and your average sports drama or sporting event.
[Side note: that's weird about sports, isn't it? That fandom relies on an individual attaining this state of pure emotional involvement with an event that can have no tangible consequence for his own life?]
While we were watching Major League for the 10,000th time, Ned made me stop folding my socks and rewound a few seconds of the movie to show a bizarre, purposeless, and inept tracking shot. "That's not filmmaking!" he said, with happy indignation. No, it's not. This movie's inexplicably weird in wonderful ways, as seen best in Charlie Sheen's strange performance, playing the "tough guy" as a laconic naif, albeit one with amazing comedic timing (oh man, the part in the restaurant when he subtly holds the menu upside down). Once my pal Patrick said, "This is why they invented the internet."

Kitchenware I hope to acquire

2006-11-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

During a marathon afternoon/evening/night of cooking, baking, drinking, and eating at 1988 Amst., I came up with this list of kitchenware that I would like to own someday.

-Garlic press: An inessential yet time-saving and absurdly fun tool, this would be nice to have since most things I make feature a shit-ton of garlic.
-French press coffeemaker: My present miniature coffeemaker hails from the late 1970s or early 1980s and makes just enough for 2 people. Coffee brewed in a French press generally tastes better, anyway.
-Tea spoon/strainer/brewing device: Despite the amount of coffee I consume, I also drink a great deal of tea, and we all know that loose tea makes a more delicious cup than teabags, unless you get those fancy pyramid-shaped teabags, which let's not go there.
-Pepper grinder: How can my rice and beans be appropriately piquant if I use old, mellowed-out black pepper? How?
-Heavy-duty plastic baking sheet: These make you seem tough and professional, and obviate standing in front of the sink for ages while trying to scrub crusty marinade gunk off of your roasting pan.

Buy this if you see another copy at the record fair

2006-11-04T12:17:00.000-05:00

Mason Proffit-Wanted! Mason Proffit

holyshitholyshitholyshit.
We all know I'll buy just about any record that has dudes in flannel shirts and fringed vests kickin' it under a tree or on a porch, and that most of it's pretty mediocre and, at its best, convincingly imitates the Byrds or CCR or whoever. I'm on my second listen to this, though, and I'll go ahead and say it's one of the best screen-door-core ("country-rock" or uh, "rural psych" to you uninitiates) records I've ever heard. Seriously, I almost never recommend this stupid music to others, but it also doesn't usually blow me away the way this record does. If you like Notorious Byrd Brothers, you'll probably like this; that's how good I think it is. Thank you, Dan from Gimme Gimme Records, for using its cover art on the "rural psych" mix cd you made, without which I might not have remembered to pick this up.

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In other news, I bought some other stuff at the record fair that I may listen to at some point when I can stop listening to Mason Proffit (actually, I'll probaby give The Saints Eternally Yours a spin now, since I'm so happy to own it at last)and I saw The Rules of the Game, which is yeah, what everyone else says it is. Reader, if you plan to go see it while it's still at Film Forum (through Nov. 16), let me know and I'll watch it again.

Groceries pt. 2

2006-11-02T23:07:00.000-05:00

Maybe in this age, post-that wack Allen Ginsburg poem, "Lost in the Supermarket," and endless, redundant analyses of aesthetics of consumption (as seen, to less wack effect, in that Andreas Gursky photo), it's a little silly to blather poetically about going to the grocery store. But then, if an enormous fiberglass cow and chicken sat atop your local supermarket, you would probably veer right a little every time you got off the subway, figuring that you either need something now or will tomorrow.
Where clothes shopping holds the possibility of total disappointment--you won't want anything, what you want won't fit or will cost too much, or the truth that you probably don't genuinely need whatever it is plagues you--grocery shopping is all about endless promise. If the flourescent lights in dressing rooms draw out all your blemishes, the ones at the grocery only make the bananas yellower and more endearing. It is warm in winter, cold in summer, and I have probably spent more time in my life shopping for food than I have engaged in any other single activity (save, maybe, sleeping or complaining) so really, the grocery store's just as good as home.

Today I got
Soymilk (most necessary food item)
Pita bread (to accompany leftover lentil curry. I sprang for the slightly more expensive pita bread, using the later expiry date as an excuse)
Frozen spinach (cheaper than real spinach and a-ok in most things)
Newman's Own Cabernet Marinara Sauce (tomato sauce has myriad uses, really!)
Butternut squash (theoretically, for use in bean/squash/tomato/peanut soup. post-colonial!)
Tofu (for which I always have grand plans but will probably crumble up in tomato sauce or dump into miso/noodle soup)

Grocery store bummer/2 things about words

2006-11-02T00:01:00.000-05:00

I planned to reward myself with a post-homework midnight trip to Fine Fare, but since I still have homework and already put on p.j. pants (fact: they have snowflakes on them), I can neither go to Fine Fare nor write about the pleasures of late night grocery store runs, because they are many and it'll just sadden me out to ponder what I'm missing.
Here are two things about words I should have figured out before today, though, which I only learned this afternoon while reading an article about spirit possession (note: unrelated to my homework) at the Mid-Manhattan Library:
1)The word "xenoglossia" exists, to describe the ability to spontaneously speak foreign languages, typical in spirit possession
2) The word dybbuk--the Jew type of malignant possessing spirit--comes from the Hebrew root which pertains to sticking, gluing, or attaching. I'm into that.

L'Argent

2006-10-31T00:39:00.000-05:00

Speaking of Max Ophuls, I feared for the first ten minutes or so of L'Argent that the film would unfold like La Ronde--that the counterfeit bill that sets the film's events in motion would pass from person to person and that the movie would simply follow the bill. The gimmick works just fine in La Ronde (which some, David Thomson maybe, have proposed as a demonstration of the transmission of venereal disease), but, as a Bresson movie, L'Argent turns instead to the implications this sequence of events has on the minds and souls of a few people. I don't know why I'm forcing this comparison but, where Ophuls uses giddily superficial trappings to expose the abject emptiness of people's interactions with each other, Bresson employs his typical bare-bones style to massive, punch-in-the-stomach effect.
Bresson's minimalism has a deliberateness and depth that few have paralleled: I think, especially, of a repeated sequence in which a paddy wagon parks, the driver opens the back door, some cops empty out a few pieces of luggage and then lead prisoners out by a kind of leash attached to each set of handcuffs, as each prisoner picks up a bag and is pulled out of the frame. It has an eerie ritualistic quality and, I don't know, it got me.
In my snoopings around the internet (my room is freezing, I have a library school paper to finish, and am losing my shit slowly and surely), I'm surprised that few critics seem to note how much this film is about work: its necessity, the body's motion and the seeming alienation of various body parts while engaged in labor, the relationship people have with their money and where it comes from, etc. So many scenes--whether in the camera store, in the prison, or in the countryside at the movie's end--involve both major and minor characters doing their jobs, from cops to mail censors to an old woman responsible for the upkeep of a household. What to make of this in a film about something like the need for purging "sins" through the ultimate acceptance of responsibility for one's actions? I'm sleepy and uncertain.

There is a good piece about this at the Masters of Cinema Bresson page, by the by.
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Current affordable snacks of choice: saltines, cuticles.

Top Hits of the 1990s

2006-10-29T16:29:00.000-05:00

Last spring a bunch of us decided at brunch (a BRUNCH of us? ha! ha!) that the '90s are next. I believe this referred mainly to an inexorable desire to jam Slant 6, and indeed, autumn 2k6 has heard a lot of Rodan, Unwound, Killdozer, and the Melvins (and, uh, Lifetime) chez moi. No surprise, thus, that in the past 24 hours alone, I have conversed about "Da Dip," heard a song by the Toadies, and received an e-mail from my friend and most frequent movie-watching buddy Ben, listing his Top 10 Movies of the 1990s. Naturally, I had to make a response list. It's nothing too special--and, for the record, overlaps with Ben's gangster-heavy list by only one movie--but here it is.
Top movie: Naked
Other 9 in no order:
Raise the Red Lantern
Happy Together
Dazed and Confused
All About My Mother
Unforgiven
Maborosi
La Promesse
Beau Travail
and I originally had The Celebration here and Hard Boiled as a runner up, but I might switch that around.
Notes: While I was scoping out other lists of top '90s movies to try and figure out what came out then, I realized that I'm not terribly familiar with many of the Great cinematic works of the 1990s (I've seen nothing by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and very little by Takeshi Kitano, for instance). Also, I forgot that the Voice picked Todd Haynes's Safe as the best film of the decade, a movie I do not even consider "good."

Letter from an Unknown Woman//An Eternal Question

2006-10-28T02:15:00.000-04:00

The other day I told some poor, perplexed individual that my favorite directors are Robert Altman and Max Ophuls. I realized at the time that it sounded a little peculiar, but look, here I am discussing a Max Ophuls movie, having quoted a different one of his movies in my last post and discussed Robert Altman earlier, so there you go.
Funnily enough, Letter From an Unknown Woman has a few bits that--to stretch slightly--foreshadow Altman; in one scene, for instance, the lovely young Joan Fontaine and her horrid mother and stepfather meet two men on the street. The camera pulls back and moves to reveal hustling and bustling and the boring how-do-you-do conversation recedes beneath a layer of street noise, horse carts, other chatter, and so on. How protoAltmanesque!
Anyway, as in other Ophuls movies, this film's fairly straightforward, weepy plot about a woman who falls in love with a pianist who keeps taking up with her and then forgetting about her is saved from approaching the conventional thanks to a slew of classy cinematic techniques and persistent psychosexual weirdness (at one point, the slimy Louis Jourdan moves next to Ms. Joan, puts his arm around her, and murmurs, "Tell me about your father."). I know at least a few people who've had to watch this in Film Studies classes, so I won't ramble ignorantly about the ingenuity of the letter as narrative frame or p.o.v. shots or whatever. As someone who spends a lot of time reading and watching movies about upscale old-time ladies who enmeshed in a certain kind of trouble, though, I would say this is about as good as that stuff gets.
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I didn't want to write about music in this blog but then I thought I should write about records I bought since they're things I bought, and then I thought, "but I haven't listened to THOSE yet, let's talk about what I am really&truly listening to now." And thus, the eternal question; brace yourselves.
HELLO BASTARDS or JERSEY'S BEST DANCERS
????????
One acceptable correct answer:
NEITHER, HOW CAN YOU LISTEN TO THAT SHIT?! but I'll ignore you for now.
Here's my two cents. Smarter minds than mine have pointed out that HELLO BASTARDS sounds tougher and reflects a more distinct influence of reputable bands (HUSKER DU, whom they cover, RITES OF SPRING, et.al.), and that its songwriting holds up better over time. Basically, it's a superior work of the "melodic hardcore punk" (thx Wikipedia) tradition.
But I like JERSEY'S BEST DANCERS better, although it is stupider and clearly foreshadows the abysmal poppy emo and pop-punk that would bear its influence, probably because I heard it first, and because it is perhaps the thing in the world that most represents what my life in high school was not. Anyway, thoughts? and if you're the kind of person who owns these records but is embarrassed about it, get in touch, because Ned might want his CDs back someday.

Movie Weekend: The Departed, Tenement, Decision at Sundown

2006-10-22T19:26:00.000-04:00

In one of my all-time favorite films, Max Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame De... one of the characters criticizes his friend's affection for a woman by saying something like "But she is so superficial!" to which the friend responds "Ah! She is only superficially superficial," which is one of the smartest things ever uttered in a motion picture. That, I guess, provides some kind of context for the three movies I saw this weekend, Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Roberta Findlay's Tenement, and Budd Boetticher's Decision at Sundown.

I think I will handle The Departed in note form.

I. This film will entertain you consistently for two and a half hours. Ultimately, one finds oneself thinking "that was too long," and yet, I can't think of a moment in which I was bored--although there definitely were bits that could've been omitted (the mortifying scene with the Black prostitute and snowfall of coke and Jack Nicholson saying "Don't move until you're numb" leaps to mind, holy shit).
II. Between this movie and Invincible, Mark Wahlberg is Actor of 2006. I felt emasculated after listening to him berate and fake-fart at Leo d.C. for ten minutes.
III. Excess--a glut of symbols, cinematic trickery, overly purposeful editing, and son on--has always been a Scorsese trademark, right? It works to stunning effect in Goodfellas--a superficially superficial movie--and mostly works in other efforts. In his past bunch of films, though, he has seemed abjectly lost in his own need for epic amounts of mise en scene and Meaningful Shit. A key aspect of Hong Kong action movies' greatness, in contrast, lies in their ability to go entirely over-the-top, but have that very over-the-top-ness seem part and parcel of the film. What would The Killer be without flocks of doves, Chow Yun-Fat's five weeping scenes, or the blind girlfriend? In The Departed, Scorsese manages to own his own tendency towards excess by taking cues from the Hong Kong movies upon which he based this film. For instance, the final shootout and creepy scene with the Asian gangsters do not really resemble scenes from American action or gangster movies. In their combination of absurdity, style, and effectiveness, they're total Hong Kong.
IV. Despite being handed some atrocious dialogue, Leonardo di Caprio does a good job.
V. Because Martin Scorsese is, you know, an auteur, one expects that this movie should make some kind of grand statement about America or masculinity or something. Does it? All the hokum about fathers and sons, identity and success is persuasive at an emotional level, but I'm not sure if it succeeds as a great statement.
VI. Don't let anyone tell you it's a great movie--it's very good, though.

Tenement

Spencer rented this exploitation-stravaganza (a.k.a. "Slaughter in the South Bronx" or "Tenement: Game of Survival") about a rundown Bronx apartment building beset by an inexplicably evil, drugged, crazed, and sartorially questionable gang who torment its inhabitants. Based on that sentence, one could probably write the plot of this movie. It's bad. In the vein of many truly bad films, though, Tenement has perplexing, oddly affecting moments, like when the woman who'd been prostituting herself to support her now-disemboweled junkie boyfriend's habit takes the hand of a man whose wife's neck has come to resemble Mt. Vesuvius-in-ketchup and tells him, "I know how hard it is."

Decision at Sundown

This movie (a '50s "psychological Western") relies so heavily on the audience's knowledge of the Western trope that it leaves out key plot elements that it knows you know. What exactly HAS John Carroll been doing to the town of Sundown ever since he arrived that has unleashed so many troubles? The movie doesn't say, but you understand. One might say "DUH, this is a B-movie that's but 77 minutes long," but since it's all about, you know, repression and emasculation, its ability to leave things unspoken--and when it speaks, to use some pretty worn cliches--makes a whole lot of sense. Moreover, the film takes place primarily inside a barn and a saloon, has no heroes, and Randolph Scott, its main character, rides off into the sunset in the company of a corpse, having discovered that the woman whose honor he was trying to avenge didn't have much honor anyway. WHAT? Yeah. Unfortunately, it seems like you can only watch it on bootlegged-off-TNT video, complete with commercial breaks, which is a legit bummer.
*The dudes at Senses of Cinema have written about this movie, probably in less ignorant a fashion than myself.
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In other news, I succeeded in acquiring a non-boring (read: cardinal color) coat. Little consumption can take place between now and WFMU record fair, though, so if anyone has important tips regarding cooking with expired canned goods, let me know.

"Celebrity" Sighting #1

2006-10-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

Malan from Project Runway spotted early yesterday evening on 14th St. between 5th and 6th Aves, looking fey as fuck and casting disdainful glances at garbage and passers-by.

California Split

2006-10-19T12:10:00.000-04:00

For no particular reason, I want to describe the very 1970's color scheme of Mr. Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT as "rueful browns and golds;" I don't think that's precisely the right adjective for the kind of it's-not-the-'60s-any more-bummer look I mean, but let's leave it at that. I once knew the technical reason why movies from this era have this particularly grainy, muted palette but presently forget.

In any case, CALIFORNIA SPLIT (which I saw--alone, pleasantly enough--at Film Forum yesterday) is a wonderful and rueful movie, with a vague narrative trajectory that brings Elliott Gould as a motormouthed huckster obsessed with "finding the action" together with George Segal, a taciturn journalist with gambling and attitude problems. They sort of seek the proverbial "big score," but mostly they drift from bar to casino to boxing match to racetrack, winning and losing big, getting beat up, and being and not being friends. Gould and Segal have a weird chemistry brought about by equally striking yet totally contrasting performances. Myself, I'm down with that-which-is-'70s-Gould, sarky and motormouthed and pathetic with a sketchy-Jew vibe that's fantastically reminiscent of the oral surgeon who took out my wisdom teeth with his scrubs unbuttoned to mid-chest to reveal his giant star of David medallion. Segal's performance is withdrawn and weird: he speaks few complete and totally sensible sentences in the film. Instead, he acts via this strange, overenthused smile that takes a little to long to stretch out on his face, an expression induced only by Gould, gambling, and this girl he wants for about five minutes. Early in their friendship, the pair does a drunken song-and-dance number in a dark parking lot (shortly before getting mugged and beat to shit) that has become one of my all-time favorite Altman scenes.

One review I read described CALIFORNIA SPLIT as a "love song to gambling," which seems completely off-base to me. Yes, the film certainly portrays the "action" as a great, dizzying swirl of sound and movement. The opening sequence--usually described as "bravado"--takes place in a great expanse of poker tables, with impeccable Altman sound-editing and camera movement capturing the games' jerky rhythm and picking out Gould and Segal while situating them within this world. We know movies can "do" gambling, though, (see one of my favorites, Demy's La baie des anges), so a great deal of its interest comes when it steps outside for a minute to show the strange lives of Gould's prostitute roommates, or Segal going to beg a friend (who reveals that Segal has been abandoned by his wife) for a loan. While most are funny, these scenes are also pretty stark, though not as stark as the film's final scene, when Gould cuts the crap for just a sec--even his voice changes--and you ask yourself "oh, fuck, was this about EMPTINESS?" and then the movie's over.
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Things I would like to purchase, Oct 19, 2006
-A winter coat, wool but sufficiently warm, which will last me for a while but isn't boring-looking.
-Face moisturizer
-The Susan Christie cd that is "on sale" at Kim's for $17.99
-Lunch (bagel?)
-Boots without holes, although I also totally want these dark orange and gold ballet flats the girl across from me on the subway yesterday was wearing.
-A discman. Craigslist?
-Personalized hoop earrings (TALYA or COOP). Actually, just one would do. This will only happen if I find $100 on the sidewalk, but maybe someone has a hookup.
-Kale
-A bottle of whiskey
-A bulletin board (tangible, not e-)