February 2012
17 posts
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Poetry: Guest/Notley
1960s and 1970s poems from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
You recall I was telling you how genius “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” was. The rest of her early work is typically less fanciful, concerning itself with scenes of New York and elsewhere. As the title The Location of Things hints, she’s interested in the meanings that objects acquire from their...
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Jambalaya
*Batsumi (1974/2011): Wide-armed Soweto fusion: “Lishonile” transitions from sax-led jazz to drums and drone to flute soul, while “Itumeleng” interpolates “Fur Elise”. Holding the album together is a groove, propelled by both African and Western percussion as well as agile acoustic bassist Zulu Bidi, you could build a culture around. Contending with Cohen for my...
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Netflixed: Same as the old gaze
The Saga of Gosta Berling (Mauritz Stiller, 1924): This adaptation of a Romantic-throwback novel of love-polygons is thematically regressive (like just about every other movie ever made), but it’s notable as Garbo’s first major vehicle. In her first scene, she eats salumi, advancing the radical notion that women can feel, like, pleasure. Garbo would become the champ of using naturalism...
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Having not watched TV drama since Veronica Mars...
The first half of the first episode of Mad Men: The initial minutes get over Draper’s slick douchiness while demonstrating the fact of sexism and racism in 1960. The next bunch of minutes do this over and over. All that’s missing is a Family Guy-style wink at the fourth wall. It gets better, I take it.
The first three episodes of Breaking Bad: Now that’s in media res. This leans...
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Woolf/Miller/Herriman/King
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927): For the first hundred pages I was worried that this would be a high-achieving precursor to the relations-between-the-sexes novels that litter bourgie lit. It wouldn’t be horrible to read that way — Woolf is the rare author who can write convincingly from both female and male perspectives. Soon, though, the modernism steps up a gear with one of...
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Early 20th century project: Some composers
Stravinsky: The Great Ballets: Firebird, Petroshka, Rite of Spring (Haitink/London Philharmonic), Apollo (Markevitch/London Symphony)
The riot was Nijinsky’s fault. Stravinsky’s work is continuous with the classical tradition — no less a populist than Disney knew this. What’s worth celebrating about Stravinsky is the way he uses rhythm. We populists are down with the beat...
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Free game of the moment: Viriax
Chris Sims on Skyrim: “I just don’t understand why they made the vastness of it the selling point when it a smaller, but deeper game would’ve been better.” Shallowness can be effective too. Viriax is a climbing game: you press up to make your germ jump, expending a little energy; it floats back down until you find a ledge to rest on. Meanwhile you have to dodge white blood cells and...
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Netflixed: Just like it was on Talok
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996): Don’t know whether it’s better or worse than the Olivier or Almereyda adaptations. It’s less efficient, but it wasn’t my millions Branagh was burning through. Half the play is shouted, which reflects the tone of the filmmaking. This is occasionally hilarious, as when Branagh and the score turn the “my thoughts be bloody” soliloquy...
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Ashez of Thyme
*Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas: You know how in The Princess Bride Humperdink is unafraid to fight to the death, but balks at fighting to the pain? Me, I get more neurotic about getting old than dying. Fear of dementia, mainly, which can be rational but not the way I do it. I worried about Cohen after Dear Heather, but in retrospect, that wasn’t a sign of irreversible decline, just a weak album....
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Netflixed: Funny ha ha
The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924): Murnau makes this about the sets and the lighting, to the point that the best actor in this is Emil Jannings’s shadow, which stays a step ahead. But the uneven social critique is vital; the gynophobic gossip sequence shows something is rotten in the state of Weimar even if Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer don’t know what it is. And the coda, dissed or...
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Political songs
Himanshu: Nehru Jackets: More diversity in the music writing biz would help it better deal with the role of politics in music, the criticism of which has become superficial. At Pitchfork, Zach Kelly wrote “Nehru Jackets is not an overtly political record.” That “overtly” leaves wiggle room, but not enough to stop Jawnita from asking: “How you gonna call a record that...
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Bangs/Williams/Shakespeare
Lester Bangs: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987): Really seems like he was the best pure writer music criticism has ever known. I’m just old enough to remember a time when every wannabe tried to write like him, but none had both his intolerance for bullshit and (this is related) his humanitarianism. Or his sense of structure: everything in his 10,000 word Fun House review is in...
Letter from a freed man.
therelapsednerd:
Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865 To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before...
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January 2012
25 posts
1 tag
Netflixed: Learning to love the dichotomy paradox
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...
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Having fun in the conservatory
*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...
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Let the Great World Spin
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...
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Five (hardcore) bands that before last week I only...
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”,...
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Netflixed: Express yourself, but where?
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...
Anticipation and Absorption
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,...
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Composition in the age of digital proliferation
*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...
Favourite Pazz & Jop tradition
Since 2004, one Daniel King has been the sole voter for Boat of Confidence by Pathways, over and over. Hall of Fame level Stanning.
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Cedar Sigo/comics/eternity with limits
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:...
A Charles Ives playlist
Sp-t-fy playlist here. This is a broad (2+ hours) overview rather than a holistic (shorter) introduction; for the latter, there’s An American Journey by Michael Tilson Thomas and the SF Symphony. This playlist includes excerpts from all his major instrumental works, punctuated by songs. If you particularly like something then check out the source album obv.
Leonard Bernstein discusses...
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NO @ SF, or, the first time I've been excited...
The variation in offensive quality dwarfs the variation in defensive quality these QB-dependent days, so the Saints deserve favouritism. The Niners should be able to get yards against the weak Saints pass defense if they keep extra blockers around to check-release against the blitz threat. That leaves the not-insignificant task of reducing Drew Brees’s completion percentage. Defending Darren...
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Netflixed: Ebonyless
Maurice (James Ivory, 1987): Brian Ackland-Snow’s lavish design and Pierre Lhomme’s generous camera make this consistently worth looking at, though it’s is a half-hour too long. Every good idea, even those that aren’t good enough, makes the final cut — a drawn-out translation scene is notably painful. James Wilby gives a felt performance, giving way to his...
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Music for a time of cancellation
Carlos Kalmar/Oregon Symphony: Music for a Time of War (2011): Opens with a version of Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” that achieves grandeur without sacrificing drama. Sticks to themes with Adams’s “The Wound-Dresser”, an adaptation of Whitman’s Civil War poem; Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, a pacificist message to Imperial Japan; and Vaughan...
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Orwell/Lorca
George Orwell: 1984: Not a plausible future but a cartoon of the status quo in Orwell’s time. The plot and characters aren’t entirely worthless, though mundanely dysfunctional Winston is more revealing than heroically-fucking Winston. Most of the value is in the systematisation, best realised in the Goldstein excerpts and the fascinated Newspeak primer. It could never be a lingua...
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Artist of the week: Todd Rundgren
While Something/Anything?, Rundgren’s one album with a hit rate high enough to accumulate goodwill, towers over everything else he ever did, that doesn’t mean it has most of his good songs. His major problem during his peak was quality control: the gems were outnumbered by the generic, and he wasn’t an original enough lyricist or singer to get away with generic.
Twenty...
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Game of the week: Dig-N-Rig
(DigiPen, free for Windows)
While “gamification” has become a buzzword, thoughtful designers have reduced the importance of imposed goals. It’s easy to get your digging bot to the centre of the earth and see the perfunctory win screen (you wrecked a civilisation for that?). The fun is in constructing a complex (though unfortunately near-linear) system to get deep minerals to...
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Netflixed
The Great Outdoors (Howard Deutch, 1988): The set-up of this John Hughes-written comedy (the grown-ups come off better than the kids) is programmatic. John Candy drives to the cabin leading a partially successful Coasters sing-a-long; Dan Ackroyd zooms up with lobster in his vanity-plated Mercedes. Not quite a pussy and asshole, instead of going Team America on each other they learn to yada yada....
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Music after the Dictatingest Dictator who ever...
Gonna scratch Tumblnotes about newish music weekly this year. Sentences may have previously appeared in other people’s comment sections. An asterisk denotes a record in my top quartile.
*Bachata Roja: Amor y Amargue (2011): Here’s a Ned Sublette piece pegged to iASO’s first Bachata Roja comp that describes how the genre evolved after the assassination of merengue fan Trujillo...
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Stevens/Shakespeare
Harmonium (1923/1931): Some like Stevens’s sensual poems, like “Sunday Morning”, which begins by invoking the “Complacencies of the peignoir”. Others prefer Stevens the theorist who enumerates six or thirteen ways of looking at a concept. But as befits the greatest English-language poetry book of its era, the physical poems are metaphysical and the metaphysical poems...
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99 Lives 2011
Lots of 2010 and 2009 tracks because thank heaven I have no professional obligation to listen to shit ten minutes before it comes out. 92% complete everyone-hates-Spotify playlist here.
Jens Lekman, “Waiting for Kirsten”
Withered Hand, “Religious Songs”
Nicki Minaj ft. Lil Wayne, “Roman’s Revenge 2.0”
Tune-Yards, “Gangsta”
Paul Simon,...
Favourite albums of 2011
Year in parentheses if it’s not 2011. Number of plays in square brackets.
1. Tune-Yards: Whokill [9]
2. Miles Davis: Live in Europe 1967 [6]
3. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What [7]
4. Pistol Annies: Hell on Heels [6]
5. William Parker: I Plan to Stay a Believer (2010) [6]
6. Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself EP [6]
7. Das Racist: Relax [5]
8. Tabu Ley Rochereau: The Voice of...
December 2011
18 posts
2 tags
Top ten movies (mostly from 2010)
The Social Network (David Fincher): Jesse Eisenberg and bros warn both nerds and wearers of “I love nerds” paraphernalia to take care, lest you end up billionaires.
White Material (Claire Denis): As violence nears, a plantation owner is determined to continue business-as-usual, as if her family’s whiteness made them invulnerable.
Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga): All a lead needs to...
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Favourite books of the year
My real favourite book of the year was George R. Stewart’s great East Bay novel Earth Abides: it’s the end of civilisation and he feels, well, not fine, but he could be worse. As for books published in the last few years:
1. Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: She was ahead ahead of all the other rock critics through the early Seventies. Then she moved on.
2. Aimee Bender, The...
“Twin Sister
Top Chinatowns
1. Flushing, Queens, NY
2. San Francisco, CA
...”
– If Flushing counts then the San Gabriel Valley kills all the US competition in this category.
(via the ‘Fork)
"Had I the choice again, I'd enter whole climates...
Favourite poems of 2011:
Anne Carson, Catullus 101, in NOX, which I wrote a bit about a few days ago.
Lisa Robertson, “Face”, in R’s Boat, which is my poetry book of the year.
Alli Warren, “Throwing a Rod on the Benz”, in Lana Turner, which is my favourite journal these days.
Christopher Middleton, “From the Grotto”, in Shearsman, which celebrated its...
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Five thinkers that helped me keep worrying and...
Paul Krugman: Though he’s been right so long he’s neglecting to check whether he could be more correct.
Mike Konczal: Explaining the battle of ideas through Venn diagrams is a surprisingly effective way of getting to its heart.
Joshua Clover: Still tops at producing radical critique with which I can locate my points of departure and recognise them as judgement calls.
Boots Riley:...
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OK I'm board with "fuck the cloud" now
200+ song best of 2011 Spotify playlist + Gracenote update = one song best of 2011 Spotify playlist
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Processing
William Parker, I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield: Avant-jazzbos, the New Tabernacle Generation of Praise, Parisian schoolkids, and Fuck Yeah Amiri Baraka party like it’s no longer 1953. Mayfield is dead, but he will survive in America.
Das Racist, Relax: Primarily a triumph of tone: the best lines (alleging the unholiness of Rap Genius and Urban Dictionary) and...