one Asian under a groove

Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011): It’s not clear if the characters discussing what “meta” means has any value beyond fueling TV Tropers’ arguments. The movie within the movie within the zzzzzz is admittedly shocking, but desensitises us to surprises in the main story. Still, the movie is enjoyable because Neve Campbell and David Arquette know this is exactly what they should be doing with their careers. May they continue to reprise their roles long after the franchise has settled into straight-to-video stasis.

Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011): Things you shouldn’t put in a movie about a genius, even a pharmaceutically-created one: CGI letters falling from the ceiling as he types. Retroactive photographic memory. An algorithm to get 400% a day from the stockmarket. Sped-up film to show he thinks fast. Geniusness switching on and off for dramatic purposes. A fucking lightbulb to signal the onset of hyper-awareness. Bradley Cooper doing voiceover narration. Actually Hollywood, just stop making movies about geniuses.

Take Me Home Tonight (Michael Dowse, 2011): This 1988-set comedy is funnier than four average episodes of its writers’ best-known project That ’70s Show, though more painful — a wacky car theft is followed by the leads lip-synching “Straight Outta Compton”. Topher Grace plays a moderately smart-assed asshole; Dan Fogler plays an asshole. Why are we supposed to root for them and not meathead Chris Pratt? Because they’re aware that they’re assholes? Doesn’t that make them worse? Anna Faris does a great job of showing up everyone else except when she’s forced to pay attention to her terribly-written character. Demetri Martin saves a couple of scenes.

*liturgy: Aesthetica (2011): Hipster metal isn’t an informative label; conservatory metal tells you this is for people who get more out of classical than metal. Still, when metal disappears in “Helix Skull”, it’s insufferable.

Aaron Neville: I Know I’ve Been Changed (2010): My stereotype of gospel music is of mass choir overkill. This is an accurate depiction of pop uses of gospel, but the few gospel albums I’ve heard aren’t anything of the sort. Selection bias?

Hilary Hahn & Valentina Lisitsa: Ives: Violin Sonatas (2011): Getting the fourth right is useful. Making the first three sonatas interesting is more impressive. Classical music could do with more attention to slight works; perhaps slighter versions of major works, too. (See also A Charles Ives playlist.)

Bon Iver (2011): I heard that after Pazz & Jop came out, Justin Vernon headed back upstate muttering “I knew I was not magnificent”. He’s not, but I can’t hate a guy with an ear for pretty and a touch of modesty, even if we’ll never be pals. 

Tony Malaby: Novela (2011): Can’t say I’m excited by the compositions, but Malaby has put together a solid band, and Kris Davis’s arrangements contain enough change-ups to make them sound varied.

Tightrope walker. World Trade Center. Manhattan in the Seventies. Priest shooting up. Tom Waits on a jukebox. Grieving mother. Artists being artists. Rapid-fire sentences. Your victim’s funeral. Hooker with an 124 IQ. Reading Rumi in prison. What a coincidence! Like having sex with the wind. You’re still reading? Judge named Solomon. Wife of the star of the Negro debating team. Will she finish her crossword? Some things will be better in thirty years. Some things won’t. In the city of laughter. City of tears. City of hopes. City of fears. Small world after all.

Black Flag: The primary reason they spawned a scene was their guitar sound: dense, aggressive, dissonant. Then Greg Ginn discovered that free jazz could be dense, aggressive, and dissonant, so why not adopt free jazz technique. Which was a mistake only as much as hiring Henry Rollins was a mistake. Great songs: “TV Party”, “Six Pack”, “Louie Louie”, “Annihilate This Week”.

Dead Kennedys: Jello Biafra is full of shit, which arguably sharpened his satire of others who are full of shit, like yuppies and Jerry Brown. Unfortunately he soon convinced his band to be full of it as well. Great songs: “California Uber Alles”, “Holiday in Cambodia”.

Minor Threat: Ian MacKaye is certainly not full of shit, which his band could only put up with for so long. Eventually he formed a better, shit-free band, so happy ending. Great songs: “Think Again”, “In My Eyes”.

Bad Brains: The only one of the bands considered here whose palette expansion paid off. not a coincidence that they had the soundest rhythm section. The trick is to start from jazz, not finish there. Great songs: “Pay to Cum”, “Joshua’s Song”, “I Against I”.

Flipper: Generic enough for a whole bunch of punks (e.g. one Cobain, K.) to follow them toward metal. That metallers didn’t flock to punk in turn is regretted by no one. Great songs: “Sex Bomb”, “Ha Ha Ha”, “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”, “Life”, “Way of the World”.

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011): Frank talk about the act of sex, attraction and some repulsion, desire and some disgust. The value of speech is driven home by contrasts with the censoring, heteronormative exterior world. Haigh shoots intimately or clinically as required — or both in a late scene at a train station (of course there’s a late scene at a train station). His ability to get close without intruding lets Tom Cullen and Chris New become the physically and emotionally tenderest of weekend lovers.

Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010): (i) Apparently the economics of integrity used to be different: it was possible for a photojournalist in the Eighties to turn down money? (ii) Cunningham’s obsession with his work at the expense of all else is presently without judgement, yet the very fact they made this movie makes it attractive. (iii) Much is made of his attention to different social strata, yet the egalitarian among us might wonder if the socialites are dressed well enough to deserve the attention. (iv) Cunningham’s documentation of Manhattan street fashion is an exceptional life project, though trend-spotting is ultimately a blow against his stated appreciation of individualism.

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011): Doesn’t begin to dig into the metaphysical implications of its branching-universe premise, but sometimes cleverness is enough. Inevitable video game analogy: It doesn’t matter how many times you die, as long as you beat the game once (though that still requires beating the game). Jake Gyllenhaal is good at being confused.

The Eagle (Kevin Macdonald, 2011): Even though this is based on a novel and all, the plot still feels like filler between fights. There must be more efficiently ways of conveying story essentials in action movies than, you know, scenes. Maybe text balloons saying “Roman with father issues”, “British but good”, or “Donald Sutherland, that’s Kiefer’s dad, kids”.

The Golden Child (Michael Ritchie, 1986): Respectful and moving account of a man coming to terms with his holy status. Wait, I fell asleep and dreamed I was watching Kundun. Well, that’s one way of escaping the pain of the objective world.

The Beaver (Jodie Foster, 2011): Foster directs using the American festival syntax. Mel Gibson walks aways from a dumpster (turn around), keeps walking (turn around already), keeps walking (TURN AROUND), then turns around and plucks out a beaver puppet. After some comic suicide attempts, the beaver takes over and turns the movie into look-at-me oddball mawk. Foster generously makes Gibson a real actor again, but nobody else comes off well.

lareviewofbooks:

Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Inauguration 2009)

JEFF CHANG

The Future Belongs To Crowds

But it’s not quite so simple. The Occupy protesters, whose encampments numbered over 900 at their peak this fall, now embody the desire for change. At Berkeley High — where the first urban slang dictionary was compiled, and whose students joined the militant Occupy Oakland, Occupy Cal, and Occupy Berkeley protestors this past winter — there is a new term of derision: “1%.” Working definition: “Someone whose actions or thoughts are socially unacceptable, usually involving deception and/or theft.” Usage: “I called shotgun but Isaac took the seat anyway. He’s so 1%.”

[…]

Then — surprise! — identity politics helped elect the first black president. And almost prevented it: whites were the only group that did not give a majority to Obama, giving the lie to the idea that identity was only the fixation of the Other. Whiteness was not invisible and universal, it was simply another identity. Meanwhile, young whites were going ham for hip-hop, writing ironic blogs about the stuff they liked, even orchestrating high-profile same-sex kisses and doing songs about them. And — surprise! — the aesthetics of a new generation of “post-black” and “post-identity” artists became the hot topic. Representation really had meant something after all — a point that ex-haters like Joe Klein (who had once denounced Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing), and Arthur Danto (who had shredded the 1993 Biennial) eventually conceded.

[…]

In December, our dining table was occupied by a group of Berkeley High sophomores, a precocious Babel of pre-, post-, and in-between identities, fiercely arguing over Obama and their future. A group of young women angrily and with impressive detail denounced Obama’s spinelessness before the banks. A young man countered that even Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves out of the goodness of his heart. Presidents and politicians, he said, are so 1%. These young hearts burn to create new worlds. 

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Wide-ranging Jeff Chang essay pegged to Catherine Opie’s photo book Inauguration.

*James Carter: Caribbean Rhapsody (2011): There are multi-minute chunks you wish Martin Williams and a pair of scissors were around to excise, but Carter blows in top form even on the concerto, making Roberto Sierra swing as least as much as Miles made Gershwin.

*Gorillaz: The Singles Collection (2011): Didn’t transform my understanding of the band. If that sounds like it’s asking too much, the precedent is The Best of Blur, which changed my view of Albarn’s old group from “good band, some excellent songs, kind of annoying” to “hey, these guys could rock and roll when they felt like it”. With Gorillaz I’m still stuck at good band, some excellent songs, kind of annoying.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica (2011): Compared to Rifts, Replica is a less drony, more unified single disc that leaves you searching for adjectives to prefix with “post”, yet it’s distanced: holding up an old TV and calling it a mirror misleads.

Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx: We’re New Here (2011): Viewing GSK as the ur-rapper doesn’t demand much of him: where’s the competition? Giving the progenitor his due requires emphasising his continuity: to soul, to the xx.

Craig Taborn: Avenging Angel (2011): I’m not a fan of post-post-bop solo jazz piano, and all the ECM records in the genre sound the same to me: modernist tropes that ain’t got that swing.

Lee Perry: Rise Again (2011): Perry meets Bill Laswell and, for better or worse, it’s no trainwreck. It chugs along pleasantly, but who thought either of the two would ever be too respectful?

Since 2004, one Daniel King has been the sole voter for Boat of Confidence by Pathways, over and over. Hall of Fame level Stanning.

Cedar Sigo: Stranger in Town: It might seem the line “I write what is interesting for me to read” (in “Music for Torching”) may be interesting for us but trite to him. But the interestingness of a line can exceed that of its words: combined with context, there’s its visual appearance. In this case interest leaks upwards from the names tabbed right-of-centre and below: Anselm Hollo, Ed Dorn, both fixtures in Boulder when Sigo studied at “Buddhist-inspired” liberal arts school Naropa. Rather than overt spirituality, his inheritance is post-beat post-Black Mountain openness anchored in perception, and, more practically, attention to detail. Compare the journal version of “Showboat” to the book version (excerpted here). There are a couple of word edits, but the major changes are double-spacing and re-punctuation, with new enjambments allowing the poem to “stand a chance against the unfinished work in my desk drawer” (“The Sun”). The quote from the book version of “Showboat” has one error: the final call to “Let loose our new books and prints” has no period.

Richard Marschall: America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists: When I was a freshman this introduced me to the old newspaper comics. Not surprising that I grokked Flash Gordon immediately — its qualities are adolescent — while it might be surprising that I got Krazy Kat immediately (or maybe not, it is that great). On the other hand, I didn’t feel Polly and Her Pals until this re-read, I think because I couldn’t accept the pretty-art girl mixed in with the stylised, cartoony art. Now it seems effective in putting Polly in a different world from her folks without necessitating a value judgement. Meanwhile, I still don’t get Opper.

Federico Garcia Lorca: Odes (in Collected Poems):